Why I Work Direct, Not Through an Agency

When a small business gets in touch and asks who else is on my team, the honest answer is nobody. It is me. I write the code, I answer the emails, I pick up the phone. That puts some people off, and I understand why, because we are all told that a bigger team means a safer pair of hands. After fifteen years in this trade, a good chunk of it inside agencies, I have come to think the opposite is true for most small businesses. Here is why I work direct, and, just as honestly, where an agency is still the better call.

What you are actually paying for at an agency

An agency is layers. There is an account manager who talks to you, a project manager who talks to the developers, and then, somewhere at the bottom of the chain, the person who actually builds your website. Every one of those people needs paying, plus the office, the sales team, and the margin that keeps it all running. None of that is dishonest. It is just how the model works. But it means the person writing your code is often three conversations away from you, and the brief they get is a game of telephone by the time it reaches them.

I spent years on the inside of that. I have been the developer at the bottom trying to work out what the client really wanted from a note that had been rewritten twice. I have also been higher up, closer to the client, watching good ideas get watered down on the way to the person who had to make them real. It works for some projects. For a lot of small businesses it adds cost and slows everything down.

What working direct actually looks like

When you work with me, you email me and I reply. The person who quotes the job is the person who does the job. There is no handover, no translation, no account manager guessing what you meant. If you want to change something, you tell me, and I am the one who changes it, so decisions happen in a single message instead of a week of forwarded threads. You also get someone who remembers your site a year later, because I built it and I am still the person looking after it.

It tends to be cheaper too, for the same work, because you are not funding an overhead. I would not lead with that though. Price is the wrong reason to hire anyone. The right reason is whether the person will still be around, and still know your site, when something breaks at an awkward moment.

The honest downsides of hiring one person

I am not going to pretend working direct is perfect, because it is not. One person is one person. I take holidays. I could get ill. I cannot put five developers on your job next Tuesday because a deadline moved. Those are real limits and you deserve to hear them before you sign anything, not after.

So here is how I handle it. I document what I build so nobody, including me, is the only one who can find their way around your site. I do not take on more work than I can properly look after, which means I sometimes say I am booked until a certain date rather than overpromise. And if a job genuinely needs a team, I tell you that honestly and point you towards people who can staff it. I would rather lose the work than take on something I cannot do justice.

Where an agency genuinely wins

There are jobs where an agency is the right choice, and I will say so to your face. If you are launching a brand and need design, video, a marketing campaign and a website all at once, on the same tight timeline, that is a multi discipline job and a team will serve you better than I can. If you need a signed service agreement with guaranteed cover and someone contactable every hour of every day, an agency can offer that in a way a single person cannot. Big, complex, many hands. That is agency territory, and I will happily point you there.

Where working direct wins

Most jobs I get asked about are not that. They are a small business near Hull that needs a proper website, or a WordPress build that is fast and does not fall over, or a web app, or steady help keeping an existing site healthy. For that kind of work you do not need a chain of people. You need one accountable person who knows your site inside out, answers when you call, and does not disappear behind a ticket queue. I have written more about what to look for when you are hiring for a web project, and the short version is that continuity beats headcount for most small businesses.

If ecommerce is where you are heading and the project is larger or platform heavy, I sometimes point clients to my other site, Headless Digital, which is where I keep the deeper Magento and headless commerce work. Keeping the two separate means you always get the right advice for the size of the job, rather than me trying to make everything fit one answer.

How to decide

Ask yourself how you like to work. If you want a single face who owns the outcome, replies quickly, and will still be there in a year, working direct will suit you. If you need a team, cover, and lots of disciplines at once, go to an agency and do not feel bad about it. Either way, hire on trust and track record, not on whichever quote is cheapest, because the cheap quote that vanishes after launch costs you far more than the slightly higher one that stays.

I work direct with businesses around Hull and East Yorkshire, and the fastest way to find out if we are a fit is a free thirty minute chat with no pitch attached. You can get in touch here, or have a look at how I work first. No account manager will call you back. It will just be me.