I spent years building a software agency with a backbone of developers from India. Looking back, the whole thing was a years-long lesson in high agency, and how rare it is. I have spent real time there and I would go back tomorrow. One of the strongest sales lines I had on a call was, "I've had dinner with these people's families, I know them personally." That line stuck with prospects more than any other. Because, let's be real, how many people do you know who have been to India to meet their team, or even to learn the culture? For me, that's one other person out of the thousands in my network. And the appreciation is real. The food, the colour, the warmth of people who will feed you before they feed themselves. I liked them. I liked working with them.
The one thing I could never get out of that arrangement was a decision. What I wanted, though I had no name for it then, was high agency.
The work came back as a question. Every time. "We found three issues with the checkout page. How would you like us to proceed?" "The logo on the homepage is low resolution. Shall we wait for a better file or use this one?" Good questions, all of them. But a hundred good questions a week is not progress. It is a second inbox, and I already had one.
For a long time I blamed the wrong thing. It was not the people. I have worked with sharp, inventive engineers from that part of the world, people who would run rings around half the contractors I have hired since. It was how the shop was built. Billed by the hour. Measured on tickets closed. Trained from the first day to check with the client before moving an inch, because moving an inch and being wrong was the only thing that got you in trouble. When the whole system rewards asking permission, you get people who ask permission. You would too. I would too.
I did not have a clean way to describe it until last week.
The chart that named it
Steph Smith has a chart she calls the five levels of work. I saw it again last week and it described the exact thing I had spent twenty years hiring against without being able to say it out loud.
It runs from least helpful to most helpful:
- Level one: "There is a problem." Then you walk away and leave someone else to deal with it.
- Level two: "There is a problem, and I have found some causes."
- Level three: "Here is the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions."
- Level four: "Here is the problem, here is what I think caused it, here are the options, and here is the one I think we should pick."
- Level five: "I found a problem, worked out what caused it, researched the fix, and fixed it. Just keeping you in the loop."
This is what I couldn't get from the previous teams I had been working with, and it drove me crazy. Most times they would reach level three, but more for the possible upsell than to be helpful.
Now, I look for someone that can start at level four from day one, and as we build trust you move to five.
I read that and thought about two decades of agencies, freelancers and contractors, and realised I had been paying for level two and three the whole time and wondering why the work felt so heavy, or that they would always be coming to me to clarify or get further instructions. This is the same trait I wrote about when I hired a CTO and chose high agency over a logo CV. It is the same muscle behind why I stopped waiting on the wrong permission. It just took someone else's chart to make me see it. It is the same reason I think the whole agency model is broken, and why we price one task at a time, prepaid and worked until it is done.
My version, for the thing I actually buy
So I drew my own, for agencies and the people they put on my account.
Nobody tells you this when you sign with an agency. You are not hiring the logo, or the case studies, or the founder who ran the pitch. You are hiring whoever they sit on your account for that day. The agency is only ever as good as that one person. So this is the scale I now run every contractor against, top to bottom, most helpful to least. That part is easy now, since it's just Jan and me, but it is also the reason I work with Jan as my part time CTO.
| Level | What the person on your account does | Who owns the next step |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | "Found it, fixed it. Here is what I did and why. Just keeping you in the loop." | Them |
| 4 | "Here is the problem, the cause, the options, and the one I would pick. Say go and I run with it." | Them, on your nod |
| 3 | "Here is the problem, a few possible causes, and a few options. What would you like to do?" | You |
| 2 | "There is a problem, and here is what I think is causing it." | You |
| 1 | "There is a problem." Then silence. | You, entirely |
Everything from level three down hands the work back to you. It looks like service. It reads like diligence. But every one of those emails does the same thing: it adds a task to your list and waits. The agency has technically done something, and you are now doing the rest, which makes you the bottleneck and adds to your plate. That's not acceptable.
Level four and five take work off your desk instead of putting it back. That is the only kind I pay a retainer for now.
The second edge
This cuts both ways, and the second edge is the one that built my business.
I never send a client a list of problems with a menu of options. Ever. "We found these issues with your network and your software, what would you like us to do with them?" I know exactly what that email does, because I have been on the receiving end of a thousand of them. It sits in an inbox that is already drowning, gets read once, gets flagged "later," and the problem it describes is still live three months on while everyone has forgotten the email exists.
What goes out instead is level five. We found this. Here is what it was quietly costing you. We fixed it. Here is the before and the after. On the rare genuine fork, where the call really is the client's to make, it goes out as level four: here is what I would do, say the word. That is not a nice-to-have on top of the fractional AI ops we sell. That is the product. The whole thing is just high agency, billed monthly.
Founders do not get a level
You do not get to choose, by the way. Not if you want to build anything.
Founders are born into level five or they never get off the ground. Nobody is coming to diagnose your business, hand you three tidy options and wait for your decision. You find the problem yourself, usually at a bad hour. You work out the cause. You choose, often with half the information you would like. You fix it. And the only person you keep in the loop is you. Every entrepreneur I know who made it, the ones who are still scrapping and the ones who are not, runs at five by default. The ones who stalled were waiting for a brief that was never coming.
These days I barely read CVs. I read the first three problems someone brings me. If the third one turns up with the fix already done, I stop reading and make the offer.
Monthly Revenues $11,000 | Clients 2 | Prospects (AI outbound agent now live) | Team: Me + part time Jan (CTO)
Day 93 of 365.