How to Build & Sell an Agency in South Africa

If you’ve been building, or are looking to build, a service-based startup to sell or take public – like we said recently: sell your idea as a service first – then this week’s podcast is for you. We spoke with software engineer turned-founder Andrew McElroy, who built the agency Responsive Digital over 10 years, and sold it to Capital Appreciation in early 2022.

He gives some awesome insights into what it takes to build a startup to exit stage…

A few interesting bits…

1. Go deep before you go wide

Andrew is quick to say that there wasn’t really a big master plan at the start, it’s really all about assembling the right skills, landing your first client, and then growing it organically from there – get the insights here.

What is key though is to niche down a bit. Focus on packaging what you have to offer well, as a start (go deep), before adding additional services etc (wide).

2. Get your positioning right

To get attraction from any niche, you need to keep the momentum going. Andrew says that they were lucky to be riding a trend when they started, but like anything, it comes to an end. And that’s when your marketing and sales need to shine.

You need to be building a pipeline of clients, generating leads, keeping a CRM and maintaining it and consistently doing sales development. You can’t take any clients for granted. And, importantly, Andrew’s the first to say that he’s not a marketer, but he partnered with people who know marketing to make it work – which often comes down to getting your positioning spot-on so that your messaging always hits the mark.

3. Learn to showcase value

Just as you would when building a product, an agency/consultancy business is there to solve a problem, address a need and deliver value. And being able to showcase that upfront with every interaction is vital, and subject to what you’re offering and to whom.

As Andrew says, they dealt in a visually creative space, so having great design even from your first presentation was vital. And that extends to whatever you’re building. If it’s technical, you need your team’s dev or CTO in that meeting with the client. In the product space, you want your product manager in there to speak the right unit economics language – it all helps give a potential client a clear picture of what it’ll be like working with you.

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