How Service Design Enabled an Agency to Scale without Hiring

Miles Kailburn on Scaling, Service Design, and Embracing the Founder's Strengths

Growth brings inevitable challenges for professional service firms, including resource constraints and team misalignment. Addressing these requires prioritizing resources, aligning teams, and streamlining processes. Miles Kailburn, co-founder of OTM, a marketing and sales consultancy, embodies a methodical approach to navigating these complexities. His journey offers valuable insights for founders transitioning from growth to scale, particularly in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Key Insights from the Conversation

1. Reframing Challenges: ADHD as a Superpower Kailburn shares his late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, reframing it not as a limitation but as a source of strength. He identifies pattern recognition and second-order thinking as key gifts associated with his neurotype, allowing him to anticipate future trends and connect disparate dots—a high-value skill in leadership. This perspective challenges founders to embrace their unique wiring and leverage perceived weaknesses as potential strengths, turning past "scars" into "armor."

2. The Transition from Growth to Scale: A Shifting Landscape OTM's journey from an "accidental" startup 18 years ago through a long growth phase involved stabilizing product-market fit, service design, and productization. Entering the scale stage coincided with significant industry volatility, particularly the rise of AI and automation in marketing.

This shift necessitated a focus on reskilling and upskilling the team, moving creatives towards leveraging technology to augment their work. Kailburn notes that his background as a web developer became increasingly relevant, highlighting the growing importance of technical acumen in marketing leadership.

3. The Power of Internal Service Design A key turning point for OTM was applying customer journey mapping and service design principles internally. Kailburn realized the methods used to improve client outcomes could also enhance OTM's own service delivery.

He appointed a team member, Jordan, with a product design background to lead this internal service design initiative. Despite initial uncertainty ("I have no idea [what it looks like], but we'll figure it out"), this role proved transformative.

• Initial Challenges: Cultural shifts were needed to help the team embrace internal process refinement led by someone without deep subject matter expertise in every area. Psychological safety was crucial.

• Tangible Results: After a 9-12 month cycle of design, implementation, and feedback, OTM saw significant ROI:

  • Efficiency: Project timelines were cut down, leading to faster delivery.

  • Team Experience: Processes were redesigned to reduce "death by a thousand tasks," creating a better day-to-day experience for the team.

  • Profitability: Net profit stabilized and increased by 60-85%.

  • Scalability: The firm could grow past previous capacity without adding headcount.

  • Compensation: Increased revenue per headcount allowed for greater upward mobility in salaries.

4. Leveraging Technology: Efficiency and Evolution Kailburn views technology, particularly AI and automation, as fundamental to the future of marketing. He draws parallels to software development, where frameworks and tools eliminate redundant work (like coding calendars), freeing developers for higher-level creation. Marketing is undergoing a similar, albeit faster, evolution. Technology allows firms to move beyond bespoke, manual processes towards data-driven, scalable systems, fundamentally shifting the required skillsets within the industry.

5. Overcoming the Founder Bottleneck: Systematization and Delegation Addressing the founder bottleneck requires self-awareness and intentional action:

• Know Thyself: Founders must identify their unique strengths and weaknesses, doubling down on strengths while delegating weaknesses.

• Systematize for Replication: Instead of trying to replicate yourself (which often fails), change how things are done so the process is replicable. This involves systematizing and productizing services so that 80% is consistent, allowing for reliable delegation and training. This creates best practices that can be adopted and evolved by the team.

• Delegate Consistently: True growth comes from the ability to delegate work reliably, which requires established systems and processes.

6. Maintaining Alignment and Focus During Scale Staying aligned while scaling requires structure and a dedicated "bulldog":

• Team Buy-In: The operations team must be aligned on priorities and understand resource constraints.

• The "Bulldog of Scope": Appointing someone (like Jordan in OTM's case) to rigorously defend priorities and manage scope against new ideas or perceived urgencies is crucial. This role helps the team stay focused on quarterly objectives.

• Founder Awareness: Founders need self-awareness regarding their tendency to underestimate time and overestimate immediate capacity. Embracing a long-term perspective ("I want this done right... for the long haul") helps temper the urge to constantly add new initiatives.

7. Final Advice: Embrace Your Identity Kailburn's concluding advice to his younger self encapsulates a core theme: Embrace your own identity. Know who you are, don't try to be someone else, and build the business you want. Trust your gut instincts—they're often correct. This foundation of self-acceptance is key to navigating the pressures of scaling with authenticity and resilience.