I run an agency and I built the software that competes with agencies. People fin
By michael-erickson-facchin · September 4, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I run an agency and I built the software that competes with agencies. People find this confusing.
The question arrives most weeks, usually phrased more politely than this: why would an agency owner build a tool that lets sellers do it themselves?
Because I was in the room when we did the math on hiring.
Every agency scales the same way. More accounts means more people. More people means more training, more process, more managers managing managers, and a slow drift where the person doing your work is three years less experienced than the person who sold it to you. Nobody is being dishonest. It is simply what happens when you scale humans.
I did not want to build a company whose main product was headcount.
So I asked a different question. Of everything my team does inside an account, how much genuinely requires a person?
The answer was uncomfortable. About a fifth. Margins, launches, product strategy, telling a client something they do not want to hear. That work is human and always will be.
The other four fifths is arithmetic performed on a schedule. Daily micro bid adjustments. Search terms judged against six months of history rather than last week's noise. Converting terms harvested into campaigns of their own. Work a human does at 80% accuracy on a good day and 40% on a Friday afternoon.
Software does not get tired on Friday.
Both companies still exist because both answers are true. Some brands need a team, some need a tool, a few need both. The one thing I refuse to sell is a person doing a machine's job at a person's price.