Isn't teaching everyone to run their own agency just producing a bunch of glorified, commoditized freelancers?
I understand the perspective, but I don't think most people here already have the business experience to launch and run an agency from scratch. Starting as a freelancer — doing the bulk of the work yourself early on — actually makes sense, because you need to learn how to deliver the service before you're capable of running a real business around it. Diving straight into hiring and infrastructure before you've learned to sell usually means losing the forest for the trees. The sequence that works: learn to sell first, then learn the service, then worry about business infrastructure once those are solid.
Yes, freelancers should start a one-person agency for branding and sellability reasons. A freelance outfit earning $200k can't be sold because the business relies entirely on you. Forming a company gives you the opportunity to sell it later, even if it's a one-person entity, because you can use the company as a branding vehicle and open the door to equity-building steps. While branding yourself as an individual (e.g., 'I'm Nick Zerbe') can lead to faster growth because clients prefer working with a human, creating an agency separates the corporate worker-bee job from freelance work and makes the transition to a full agency easier when you hire help. In short, the advantage is primarily equity-based: building an asset, investing time, energy, money, and risk, then selling it to capture capital gains and avoid high taxes.
I've owned a few profitable indoor mini golf businesses for three years and even attended some Los Vegas trainings with Horos's team to help grow them, but I'm a bit burnt out on brick and mortar and love the idea of running a one-man business, though I'm struggling to decide on an angle. Yeah, well said. So, if I had to start over with no agency knowledge, only my foundational business knowledge, what would I do? I'd definitely go back into agency work, even without any agency experience, because it's the quickest zero-to-one path for me. It's less important to get things perfect right away and more important to pick something quickly and then evolve alongside it. So I'd pick an agency model. My foundational business experience would help, but whether I had zero or a ton of experience, I'd still go into agencies. The only thing that might change that answer is distribution—if I had a large following and network, I might consider something else. But assuming I'm starting with no leverage, no distribution, no money, and just what's in my head, I'd absolutely start delivering services to clients, get a return on my time, use that to bootstrap my operations, grow them, and then be in a more financially privileged position with knowledge and experience in whatever niche I ended up picking. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah, I'd start there and work my way down.
It's much, much more scalable to run an info/teaching business than an agency. Agencies are actually a lot more fragile — but when you're at the start line with no business experience and no revenue, agencies are the straightest line path to materializing revenue: zero to one, nothing is faster. You're trading that speed for the downside that agencies are fragile and much less scalable, since you need a lot more people to make them grow, and margins tend to get worse as you scale. Even if you sell an agency later, a lot of the time and energy spent building its equity often only nets you something like a 3x multiple — pretty low compared to other vehicles. So the equation that worked for me: front-load services first, make a ton of money fast (a few hundred thousand dollars, more than most people make), then take that money and put it into a more scalable vehicle. In my case that was building a better business model — teaching. All roads really do lead to info eventually; it's just a more optimized model. Instead of giving a man a fish, you teach him to fish and charge a monthly subscription for the knowledge — the revenue ends up a lot more predictable.
An agency is just one of many scalable business models, but it’s generally harder to scale an agency to $250k a month compared to SaaS or e‑commerce. It’s relatively easy to hit $10k a month with an agency—one 10k client or a couple of 5k clients can be secured in 30 days, even by a complete beginner. Building a SaaS product that generates $10k recurring revenue in 30 days is far more difficult, as is scaling e‑commerce to the same level because of thin margins and higher workload. Agencies tend to cap out sooner, whereas SaaS and e‑commerce have longer growth curves. For total beginners, starting with a service‑based business is advisable because you lack the technical skill to create a SaaS product and need to learn how to identify and solve business problems first.