Why I Still Run Client Work While Advising Agencies

Most of my week goes to advising agencies on their ops and strategy. The rest of it I’m working directly with clients at Highrise, my own micro agency doing websites and marketing for B2B and real estate brands.

This week we launched a new site for Lazer Properties, a real estate management and advisory firm. Big shout out to my partner and co-conspirator on this one, Luke Balbirnie.

Lazer is one of a handful of clients I’m running right now, and I’m hands on across all of them. I write the strategy, build the messaging, run the client calls, and coordinate delivery end to end. That also makes me the one who untangles things when a project goes sideways.

And that’s how I stay dialed in as an operator.

Advice has a shelf life

So when an agency owner walks me through what they’re dealing with, I’ve usually handled the same thing myself recently. We solve it from experience instead of a dusty book of theoretical frameworks and best practices.

If you’ve ever gotten advice that clearly came out of a deck and not out of a Tuesday client fire, you know the difference.

The gap isn’t intelligence. It’s currency. Somebody who left the work five years ago is giving you advice calibrated to a market that priced differently, staffed differently, and had a completely different answer to what clients expected between calls. The framework still sounds right. The assumptions underneath it quietly expired.

You can hear it in what the advice doesn’t account for. It doesn’t account for what your team can actually absorb this quarter on top of the accounts they already carry. It doesn’t account for the client who says yes in the meeting and reopens the whole thing in Slack two days later. It doesn’t account for the fact that the person who’d have to run the new process is the same person already at capacity.

Those aren’t edge cases. They’re most of the job.

What being in it actually changes

Here’s the concrete version. When I tell an agency owner how I’d scope a website project, I’m not reasoning from a template. I priced one last month, watched where the hours actually went, and know which phase ran over and why.

When I say a discovery call should surface the buyer’s problem before you talk about capability, it’s because I ran one three weeks ago where I didn’t do that well enough and had to claw the conversation back.

When someone describes a client relationship that’s cooling off, I recognize the specific texture of it. The replies get shorter. The stakeholder who used to join stops joining. The scope questions start coming from someone in finance.

That’s not a case study. It’s a thing I felt recently, and it changes what I tell them to do on Monday.

What I give up to keep it

I should be honest about the tradeoff, because there is a real one.

Someone who advises full time sees more agencies than I do. They have breadth I don’t. They’ve watched twenty shops try the same fix and they know which version of it survives contact, and that pattern library is worth something I can’t fake by being busy.

Running client work also eats calendar that would otherwise go to advisory clients. Every hour I spend untangling a project is an hour I’m not spending inside someone else’s agency.

And there’s a trap in it I have to watch. What worked in my shop last quarter isn’t automatically the answer in a thirty-person agency with a different mix and a different market. Recent experience is easy to over-apply. Being current is not the same as being right.

I still take the trade, because the alternative is worse. An advisor who hasn’t run the work in years has to reason from what agencies were like when they left, and they usually don’t know which of their assumptions expired.

I’m not just an agency advisor. I’m in marketing strategy, delivery, client services, and agency ops every single day.

The reps keep my advice sharp, but the love of the craft is why I’d be doing it anyway.