You can also find a page focused on the fuller picture of how I actually work with agencies.
Who is Harry Bailey?
There’s a point most agencies reach where the core problem stops being new business. The team’s capable, the pipeline’s healthy, delivery has been running fine for a while. Then a second workstream gets added, or a key leader steps back from running delivery personally, and the coordination that used to happen instinctively stops happening at all.
I’ve seen that moment from more than one side of it. I started as a developer, building the software myself, which is where I first learned how much of a project’s success gets decided long before anyone writes a line of code. From there I founded and led a digital agency, which meant learning a different set of lessons: how client relationships actually hold together under pressure, and how to move a project from a one-off build into an ongoing, value-focused relationship without the quality of delivery slipping in the process.
Running that agency is where the pattern I still see in other people’s businesses first became obvious in my own. Growth doesn’t expose bad delivery so much as it exposes delivery that was only ever good because one or two people were holding it together by instinct. Once I’d worked that out for myself, I spent the next stretch of my career as a strategist and agile coach, helping other agency leaders find the same thing in theirs, before it costs them client relationships the way it nearly cost me mine.
That’s still the work now. I look at what’s actually happening in your delivery, not a generic framework, and work out with you what’s worth tackling first. If you want the longer version of what that involves day to day, there’s a more detailed look at how I work.
If your delivery has started to feel harder to hold than it used to, get in touch or drop me a note on LinkedIn (Harry Bailey).