Serve the Work First

1.

When I was at BCG, a manager told me to lie to a client.

It was a classy lie, dressed up in obscure Excel formulas and fancy PowerPoint slides. But it was a lie. The client wanted a model showing they could hit a billion dollars in revenue, and I was in charge of building it. It couldn't happen. When I said so, they told me to torture the numbers until they told the right story.

I did it, and I did it well. But I told them one thing: I wouldn't defend the model in the board meeting. So when the client inevitably asked how we got there, I kept my mouth shut. There was a long silence. Then a senior partner made something up and moved on.

The client was thrilled. As far as the CEO was concerned, we'd nailed it, because we told her the lie she wanted to hear. The company still hasn't hit a billion. In fact, I think it's going downhill. We served the client before we served the work. We did what the client wanted, not what the client needed.

2.

That lie wasn't unusual. It's one of three things most high-achieving service firms have in common:

1. Bullshit. They tell clients what they want to hear.
2. Burnout. An up-or-out culture that demands you work all the time and burns people out by default.
3. Generalist. They say yes to any work they can win.

So I asked myself one question: could you build a great client-services business that does the opposite? One that serves the work before the client, takes amazing care of its people, and ruthlessly focuses on a single specialty instead of saying yes to anything?

Five years in, I think it's working. Consistent growth, consistent profitability, great customers, and zero employee turnover in five years.

I don't do it because I'm nice. I do it because I'm long-term greedy. We will never be a firm like BCG, and I don't want to be. I want to build a jewel: a business that delights its customers, cares for its employees, and richly rewards its shareholders. We've done it at OPTIO. We're doing it now at Secret Agency.

Here's how.

3. Serve the work, not the client

We have a simple rule: we serve the work before we serve the client. Our goal is to maximize our client's chances of success as we see it, not their satisfaction.

That means we annoy our clients on a fairly regular basis. About a third of our clients have PhDs, since we specialize in deep tech, and I tell every one of them that part of my job is to piss them off: to make their life's work simple enough that an intelligent outsider can follow it. They laugh. Then, sure enough, I make them uncomfortable down the road, because in pitch decks and websites, imprecise and understandable beats precise and turgid every time.

I blame my mother for this. Her mantra growing up was, "I'm not trying to make you happy, I'm trying to make you holy." Our version at OPTIO and Secret Agency: I'm not trying to make you happy, I'm trying to make you rich.

So we walk into every meeting as a thought partner, working with the client to find what great looks like. When a suggestion is genuinely good, we're thrilled to take it. When it's genuinely bad, we push back, and we push back hard. If we think it will ruin the product, we make them ask us twice, and then we'll probably never work with them again.

But in the end, we bow to their wishes, because they might be right. If I were a VC, I'd have passed on Airbnb, and they were on to something. Clients have context and insight I don't, so ultimately the call is theirs.

This makes the work more enjoyable, for us and for them. I feel less defensive about what I made, happy to be pushed, corrected, argued out of it, because we're on the same side of the table against the bad idea. I'm less interested in defending our work and more delighted when we land on something genuinely better. And clients trust the result more, because we didn't get there easily. We got there in a happy, furious scrum of argument, debate, and discovery.

4. Focus creates the surplus

The decision that makes all of this possible is focus.

I have two businesses that each do one simple thing for one simple audience:

• At OPTIO, we make pitch decks for startups raising venture capital.
• At Secret Agency, we make websites for startups, often venture-backed or deep tech.

Focus lets us do something most agencies can't: productize a service business. We do the same damn thing, over and over, the same damn way. Every OPTIO engagement has three meetings: a kickoff, a review, and a handoff. We make the same jokes to open every kickoff, take the same steps after every review, run the same final checks before every handoff. The system is repeatable, simple, and trainable.

That means saying no to a lot of work, and being the wrong fit for a lot of people. But it lets us win the fundamental game underneath every business: creating surplus. By doing the same thing the same way with the same amazing people, we can wildly delight our customers, pay our team generously, and still have plenty left over for our shareholders.

5. Protect the people

Now, protect your people, even over your clients.

Client services is usually hell.

At BCG, I remember trading slides with a partner late on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, working on something meaningless at an absurd hour. I do not want his life.

These firms call it up-or-out, but really it's a Darwinian process for finding the people most willing to sacrifice everything to become the better-paid bitch.

Which is strange, because experience is exactly what's valuable in a client-services business. The best people are the ones who've done it a thousand times. Yet up-or-out is designed to burn them out before they get there. So we did the opposite.

We publicly shame employees who answer email on vacation. We discourage Slack after 5pm. We celebrate when people take time off, and we kick people out of Zoom calls when they're sick so they'll go rest. And we tell the team plainly: if it ever comes down to making a client happy or burning one of you out, we'll happily piss off the client.

The result is absurdly high retention. We're about five years old with fifteen employees, and no one has ever voluntarily left. (We fire people, sure.) We're young, so the streak will break eventually, but so far it's zero. And it drives the bottom line directly.

Two examples. Hazel was one of my first hires, almost five years ago, and she has probably designed more pitch decks than any designer alive. Cons, an MBA who does the hardest analytical thinking on the team, has built more SaaS decks than some VCs have ever seen. By celebrating a few vacations, I end up with tenured craftsmen who are among the best in the world at a very specific thing, and it only compounds. I spend almost nothing on recruiting or training, because I already have one of the best teams in the world.

6. Word of mouth

This business started with me making slides from 10pm to 2am, alone, occasionally hiring an outside freelancer.

Since then we've grown almost exactly 35% a year, every year, for five years, for one simple reason: our clients love to recommend us to their friends. Every client we work with refers, on average, 1.2 new clients we close within twelve months. And they tend to come back and hire us again themselves.

That simple viral coefficient means we don't do marketing, and we barely do sales. As Naval Ravikant put it, you do sales because you're bad at marketing, and marketing because you're bad at product. The product is the marketing. We just serve the work first, and people keep showing up.

I ran OPTIO for almost a year without a website. I've now run Secret Agency, our website-as-a-service business, for close to eight months without a website of its own. If the work is good enough, you don't even need a website for your website business.

7. The flywheel

I've come to see the whole thing as a flywheel. Do excellent work. Delight customers. Earn referrals. Use them to hire and keep great people and to focus on even better work, which delights more customers still. It compounds on itself, and it's a hell of a good time.

Are we going to be massive? Never. We're building beautiful little boutiques. A jewel of a business that creates so much surplus we can serve clients better than anyone else, take better care of our people than anyone else, and still give plenty of cash to our investors.