I've worked in agencies. I've hired agencies. I've competed against agencies. And I've watched clients leave agencies to work with independent consultants — increasingly, with relief.
This isn't an argument that agencies are bad. It's an observation that the model has structural weaknesses, and clients are noticing.
The Accountability Problem
When you hire an agency, you get a team. That sounds like a benefit — more people, more capacity, more expertise.
In practice, you get layers. Account managers who don't understand the technical details. Project managers who translate between you and developers. Developers who rotate between projects and never fully understand yours.
When something goes wrong, accountability diffuses. The account manager blames the brief. The project manager blames the timeline. The developer blames the requirements. Nobody owns the outcome.
When you hire one person, there's nowhere to hide. If it works, I did it. If it fails, I failed. That clarity changes everything.
The Handoff Tax
Every handoff in a project introduces friction. Information is lost. Context is simplified. Nuance disappears.
Agency projects are handoff factories. Sales hands off to account management. Account management hands off to project management. Project management hands off to development. Development hands off to QA. QA hands off back to project management. Project management hands off to account management for client communication.
At each step, something is lost. By the time feedback reaches the person who can act on it, it's been filtered through multiple interpretations.
When one person handles the work, the feedback loop is immediate. You tell me the problem. I understand the problem. I fix the problem. No translation required.
Cost vs Value
Agencies have overhead. Offices, account teams, project managers, HR, marketing, sales. That overhead gets billed to clients, directly or indirectly.
A £100/hour agency rate might mean £30/hour reaching the developer actually writing your code. The rest covers the infrastructure around them.
An independent consultant at the same rate is £100/hour of senior expertise, directly applied to your problem. No markup for middle management. No subsidy for the agency's new business pipeline.
This doesn't mean independents are always cheaper. Good ones charge well. But the value-to-cost ratio is typically higher because there's no extraction layer in between.
When Agencies Still Make Sense
I'm not arguing agencies have no place. They do:
- Large-scale projects requiring coordinated teams across disciplines
- Ongoing retainers where dedicated account management adds value
- Organisations that need vendor stability and can't risk individual availability
- Projects requiring capabilities beyond what one person can provide
For a complete rebrand with strategy, design, development, and content — an agency might be the right choice. The coordination overhead is justified by the scope.
But for focused technical work? A Nuxt build, a headless migration, a performance optimisation? The agency model often adds cost without adding value.
The Rise of Outcome-Based Consulting
Something I've noticed in the last few years: clients are less interested in buying time and more interested in buying outcomes.
They don't want 40 hours of development. They want a working authentication system. They don't want a monthly retainer. They want their site to load in under two seconds.
This shift favours consultants who can define and deliver outcomes. It's harder to do this with agency structures, where time tracking and resource allocation drive the business model.
Independent consultants can say: "Here's the outcome. Here's the price. I'll deliver it." That simplicity is increasingly attractive to clients who've been burned by scope creep and change orders.
Changing Client Expectations
The clients I work with have changed. They're more technical than they used to be. They've often been burned by agency relationships that promised expertise and delivered account management.
They want to talk to the person doing the work. They want decisions made quickly, without waiting for internal agency approvals. They want someone who will tell them when an idea is bad, not just execute whatever the brief says.
These clients don't want to manage a vendor relationship. They want a partner who understands their business and can translate that understanding into technical decisions.
That's a different skill set than agencies typically offer. And it's one that independent consultants, operating without the constraints of agency structures, are well-positioned to provide.
The Model I've Landed On
I work directly with clients. No account managers, no project managers, no handoffs. You talk to me. I do the work. I'm accountable for the result.
When projects require more capacity than I can provide alone, I bring in trusted collaborators — people I've worked with before, whose quality I can vouch for. But I remain the single point of accountability. The buck stops with me.
This isn't scalable in the way agencies are scalable. I can't take on unlimited clients. But it's sustainable, and it produces results that clients remember.
That's the trade-off I've chosen. And based on the clients who keep coming back, it seems to be working.