Before Atarim, I ran a web agency in London. Before that I toured Europe in a band and built client sites from the back of a van, over stolen McDonald’s WiFi, way before 4G was a thing.
I turned the van into an agency. We built hundreds of websites and handled every 2am launch you can imagine.
So I have a fair idea of what your week looks like.
And I know something about the way we all describe ourselves, because I did it too. The agency in my proposal was always a bit bigger than the agency that actually existed.
The proposal said design, development, SEO, performance, accessibility, ongoing care. The reality was me, a few people, and a list of things we kept meaning to get properly good at.
The line items I paid for instead of hiring for
There were parts of the job I genuinely couldn’t do at the level a client deserved. So I bought them in.
I used to pay a specialist $800 for a proper speed pass. A couple of grand for the SEO groundwork on a decent build.
That was the honest version of “we do performance and SEO.” I outsourced it, marked it up a bit, and moved on.
And that was only the stuff clients could see. Underneath there was a whole second list. The pre-launch QA that never got done as thoroughly as it should have. The security scan I meant to schedule. The content that went stale on sites we’d built two years earlier and nobody had looked at since.
The monthly report is the one that still gets me. We used to send them. Then we stopped, because who reads them anyway, right?
That was the stupidest thing I ever cut. The report was never about being read. It was the one small thing that turned up before anyone asked for it. That’s most of the reason a retainer feels like value instead of a tax.
Calling it busywork is how you talk yourself out of the thing that keeps the client.
Everybody’s list is the same shape
I’ve spoken to a lot of agency owners since 2019, when I built WP Feedback to fix my own agency and thousands of other agencies ended up running on it. Which meant I suddenly had a lot of people I could just ask.
The list is remarkably consistent. Everyone has three or four things they’re genuinely great at, and then a much longer list of things they know matter, know they’re not doing well, and can’t justify hiring for.
Because the maths never works. A proper SEO person is a salary. A dedicated QA person is a salary. Someone whose whole job is watching your existing clients for things that need attention? Nobody hires that person. Not at our size.
So the list stays a list. And every year it gets a bit longer, because the industry keeps adding to it. Mobile. GDPR. Core Web Vitals. Accessibility. Now agents.
None of this is a skills problem. You could learn any of it. I learned a lot of it the slow, expensive way. It’s a capacity problem, and capacity problems don’t get solved by trying harder on a Sunday night.
What actually changed
Here’s the bit I find genuinely exciting, and I’ll be careful not to oversell it.
Every one of those jobs is something the best agencies were already doing by hand. The pre-launch QA checklist. The quarterly content refresh. The monthly report. The security scan. The upsell conversation that starts with “I noticed something on your site.”
None of it is new. None of it is clever. It’s the boring, repeatable work that separates an agency that keeps clients from one that keeps chasing them.
We’ve spent six years watching how our users actually do this work, and the whole of our AI implementation comes out of that. I’ve always thought about it as digitizing human experiences. We’re not inventing a new way to run an agency. We took the way good agencies already run and taught a machine to do it at a scale a small team could never staff for.
That’s what an AI agency is. Not a robot that writes copy. A set of the jobs you already know you should be doing, running without you having to be the one holding the broom.
It learns your services, your rates, your brand. It gets to know your clients the way you do. You give it work, or you let it bring you work you didn’t ask for.
The parts of the craft you love stay yours. Nothing ships without your say so.
Something to try this week
If you’ve got Atarim open, drag one client project into the chat and paste this in:
Suggest the best workflows (SOPs) for MY agency. I want a repeatable plan I can onboard new and existing clients to that will make me look like a rockstar.
Or, if you want the faster hit of seeing what it actually knows about your client:
Look at this client’s logo and tell me honestly whether it’s dated. If it is, show me what I should pitch them instead.
Only got one client in there so far? Start with that one. Then add a few more, because the interesting stuff starts when it can look across your whole book and tell you which client needs you before they email you.
That’s the part I’d have paid real money for in my agency days. Not another tool that helps me build faster. Something that noticed things while I was busy.
I’m curious about your list, actually. What’s the job you’ve been meaning to hire for and never have?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, and I answer them. 💜
