Ask HN: Are web/marketing agencies inherently difficult to scale?
I saw their company in two different "stages" of its life when I've worked for them. First as a junior contract developer making about half of local median pay (the contract mentioned a shift to full-time with higher pay but never followed through on that). In my first time working there, the business was being run from another company's sublet rooms. Structure was "top heavy" over 50% being management that delegated tasks to off-shore teams. Being a local dev in the company was a rarity.
Two years have passed, at some point I was seeking work and decided to go back to my old company since the founder was interested in having me do consulting work for them. I was paid just slightly more than my time as a junior dev, and usually put projects that had clients that didn't interact with the other employees beside myself and the PM. It was very silo'd in. Pretty much, do the work that their regular employees don't have time for.
During this time they had already moved into their own dedicated office. There are still a lot of kinks in the armor but at least things feel more organized in the company. Local dev team is still barebones with the management largely directing off-shore workers. And then I started thinking, if this is 3 years of growth I wonder what is the next step to take this business to the next level.
Do agencies form some proprietary tech that make them attractive for large co's to pick it up and buy them? Is that a general case? I am not thinking of starting a business, but I don't see if there's, if any, way to properly scale up to a national level. Is the agency model just inherently restricted to scaling? Could they expand their vision and scale up?