Should you work with a big agency?

I've worked with some very good large agencies over the years. They have talented people, specialists for almost everything and enough capacity to tackle projects that would make a smaller team quietly close the laptop and go home.

So this is not an article about why big agencies are bad. But size does come with side effects.

You hire 100 people. Sort of.

One of the great promises of a large agency is access to expertise: UX researchers, strategists, designers, developers, accessibility experts, SEO specialists, data people, AI people and probably someone who spends most of their working week thinking about checkout flows.

That can be incredibly useful, but the important question is which of those people will actually work on your project.

The senior team you meet during the pitch may be brilliant, so it is worth finding out who will still be in the room three months later and how much time those people will realistically spend on your project.

That is not because junior people are bad. Everyone starts somewhere. But if you are paying for senior expertise, it is reasonable to know how much senior expertise you are actually getting.

More people also means more coordination

Imagine a developer needs four hours to build something. Around those four hours there might be a briefing, an internal briefing, estimation, planning, a project-management meeting, implementation, review, QA, another review and a status meeting to explain what happened in the previous meetings.

Some of this is important and some of it probably is not.

Large organisations need coordination, so the interesting question is how much of that coordination improves your product and how much simply keeps the organisation itself running.

A bigger team can move much faster when many things need to happen in parallel. It can also occasionally take six people to change a button, and both of those things can be true at the same time.

Process is good. Until it isn't.

I like process because good processes prevent expensive mistakes, make responsibilities clear and stop projects from turning into improvisational theatre.

The problem starts when "we do this because it helps the project" quietly turns into "we do this because this is how we do projects."

The best agencies I have worked with know the difference. They have enough structure to keep complex work under control, but they are also willing to drop or adapt parts of the process when those parts stop being useful.

Sometimes the problem is you

This part is slightly less comfortable.

It is easy to complain that an agency is slow while your own organisation requires approval from marketing, IT, legal, procurement, management, a steering committee and someone called Thomas who joined the project six months ago but nobody is entirely sure why.

Clients create bureaucracy too, and a small agency cannot save a project where nobody on the client side is allowed to make a decision.

Good work usually depends on good people, clear responsibilities and a reasonable amount of trust on both sides of the table.

Big agencies make sense

There are plenty of projects where I would happily recommend a large agency.

If you are launching across 20 countries, have several workstreams running in parallel, need deep specialist expertise and require enterprise-level processes around security, compliance and support, scale can be extremely useful.

But not every website needs an army.

Sometimes five experienced people who understand the problem, talk directly to each other and can make decisions quickly will outperform a much larger setup. The number of people should follow the problem rather than the other way around.

Buy the team, not the logo

When evaluating an agency, I would worry less about whether it has 20, 200 or 2,000 employees and pay much more attention to the people who will actually work with you.

Who are they? How senior are they? Can you talk to them directly? Why does the project need this particular team structure? Who makes decisions when something changes? Which parts of the process are genuinely necessary?

And perhaps most importantly: do you trust these people to tell you when your idea is bad?

The best agency relationship is not one where everyone politely agrees with everything you say. It is one where the right people care enough about the outcome to challenge you, and occasionally themselves.

Need someone on your side of the table?

Choosing an agency can be surprisingly difficult, especially if you do not spend your everyday life evaluating digital projects, technical proposals and very confident pitch presentations.

I'm happy to help with that.

I can prepare the briefing, help define the requirements, evaluate agencies and proposals, join pitches, ask uncomfortable questions and give you an independent second opinion before you make a decision.

And if you already have an agency, I can stay involved on your side of the project as a sparring partner and help keep the important decisions focused on the outcome.

I promise not to add another steering committee.