63% of you are losing sleep over new business.

For our agency founders, new business is always top of the agenda. When your business is growing, you’re right at the heart of it. But when you're writing proposals, chasing decisions and closing deals by yourself, alongside running the day to day of the business, it's almost impossible to maintain a healthy and consistent pipeline.

Personal referrals, previous clients, your wider network; it all relies entirely on you.

So how do you break the cycle without burning out yourself or your team and maintain and grow client relationships and winning new projects?

Productisation is the process of taking the bespoke services or expertise your agency delivers best and wrapping them into a clearly defined, repeatable package. Instead of starting every new client engagement with a blank page and building scopes, pricing, and processes from scratch, which is often referred to as "selling snowflakes", you offer a clear, measurable outcome for a set investment.

For many agencies, services are highly bespoke, leading to complex processes and a lack of efficiency. This creates a "founder trap" where only the founder has the necessary knowledge to scope, price, and pitch the work. Productisation solves this by moving your agency away from selling raw ingredients (like your team's time and raw materials) and instead focusing on selling the final output.

The Benefits

• Improved Margins: When you sell a productised outcome rather than tracking and billing by the hour, you can command a premium. Agencies that successfully productise their offerings can often charge twice as much as they would if they costed the work on a pure time-and-materials basis.
• Empowered Sales Teams: Productisation makes your services incredibly easy to buy and sell. It removes the need for the founder to be in the room to explain complex bespoke scopes. Your team can confidently say, "You have this problem, here is our product that solves it, and here is what it costs".
• Operational Efficiency: Standardising your offerings creates a stable workflow that can be driven by processes and supported by AI. It also allows you to push contract renewals away from the new business team and into the operational side of the business.
• Higher Valuation at Exit: buyers love productised agencies. It signals that your business is efficient, uses tried-and-tested methodologies, generates repeatable revenue, and carries significantly lower risk because it isn't wholly dependent on the founder.

37% of £1m+ agencies are actively pursuing productisation as a primary growth strategy.

The data consistently shows that agencies operating in a "sweet spot" of just 2 to 5 core, productised services are significantly more likely to achieve fast growth and high gross profits.

If I asked you how many times in the past year you’ve sold an identical service more than once, what would your answer be? Sure, you can argue every client has a different need, and while that may be true, the final outcome doesn’t need to be.

Custom work has its place, but it’s much harder to repeat, maintain and commercialise.

And rebuilding pricing, scope and delivery from scratch for every time a prospect comes along, drains your margin, burns you and your team out and isn’t a long term growth strategy for scale.

Before you write your next proposal, ask yourself:

• Are you selling something repeatable, or reinventing the offer every time?
• Are you sitting in the 2-5 offer range, or is your service list so long even you'd struggle to explain it clearly?
• Could someone in your team price a deal tomorrow, without you in the equation?
• Is the delivery process streamlined to deliver the project within a fixed timeline?

If you struggled with any of these questions, dedicate Q3 to addressing them.

This is what we do at Unusual Group. We help agency founders get out of the custom-scope trap and build commercial models that scale without them sitting in every deal.

When your value is clear and packaged properly, sales cycles shorten and you stop building every proposal from scratch.

Join the Collective

Here’s just a glimpse of what we offer

• A real founder community: A place to spend time with founders and owners like you, work together, and share what's going on. Money can't buy this.
• A collective mindset: Everyone in the room wants the same thing: scale, growth, and the freedom to choose what happens next.
• A safe place to learn, grow, and raise the bar: Monthly masterminds walking through the conversations that matter, with insights, data, and hands-on workshops. From public speaking to employment law, we've got you covered.
• A team of agency lovers: Fully embedded in the agency world, with years of experience and practical evidence to help you build.

And the infrastructure behind it all:

• Unified back office support. Finance, Ops, Legal, HR, Tech, you get access to the institutional set-up of a business 10 times your size, plugged into yours from day one.
• Real-time benchmarking. Live data on how your agency stacks up against the market and the rest of the collective, so you know where to focus.
• A consulting division running The Unusual Method. Helping you with positioning, pricing, systems, exit readiness, applied inside your business, hands-on, week by week.
• Investment and M&A support. Growth capital through Partnership and eventually M&A brokerage when it's time to sell. All under one roof.

The impact, in 12 months:

• 13 members hitting double-digit growth
• 12 members hiring
• 6 members have doubled in size since joining

We're solving the problems that stop most agencies scaling. Founder dependency. Fragmented ops. Weak commercial models. And the exit route most founders never quite reach.

But all of this is exclusive, and for our members' eyes only.

So if you want to get involved, let’s have a conversation here.

We’ll help you get ready for the next stage in your journey - whether that’s growth, scaling, merging, acquiring, selling or an exit.

Introducing the The Unusual Autumn Retreat

In November, we’re heading over to Portugal, and we’ve reserved a few select tickets for agency founders who are seriously considering joining the Unusual Collective this year.

Who it's for:

Founders who are done solving the same problems on their own. If you're weighing up the collective, this is the closest you'll get to seeing it from the inside before you commit to anything.

Keynote Speakers:

Daniel Priestley

Daniel Priestley co-founded Dent Global and ScoreApp, and wrote Key Person of Influence and Oversubscribed. He's spent years teaching founders how to build businesses that stand out and scale.

Luke Tobin

Luke Tobin built and exited his own agency before founding Unusual Group. Now he works with founders doing exactly what he once needed help with himself.

Why come:

Three days with people who've built and sold agencies themselves. Real sessions on what's holding you up right now, alongside founders a few steps ahead of where you are.

• When: 16th-19th November
• Where: A luxury, private 18-hectare estate, just outside of Lisbon
• What: World-class strategic speakers, founder-led operational workshops, alongside dedicated time to decompress (Yoga, Flow, Spa sessions, private DJ sets, and more).

Interested?

Tickets are £2,495+VAT. Covers accommodation, food, soft drinks, speakers, activities, and airport transfers (flights not included).

Want to claim one of the final spots and see what the collective is all about?

Enquire now

Until next time,

Luke
​CEO & Founder of Unusual Group

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Only 4% of agencies achieve a successful exit. Until now.