He thought his UX agency was broken.

Two and a half years in, the business should have had momentum. Instead, selling and winning each project felt harder than the last.

His conclusion: UX, with all its nuances and complexity, is just a hard business to scale. Maybe it was time to try something else.

I had a different read.

We walked through an old project: UX improvements to a product demo for a SaaS company. After the work was done, the client raved about how much more their prospects loved the new demo. The agency owner took it as a great compliment and moved on.

We made some guesses and did some Googling and AI searches around how many average demos companies like this do, their typical close rate, and the kind of impact UX work can typically have. At their product price, we extrapolated that the work could have created an additional $720K of revenue for the client.

I asked how much he charged for the project.

$4K.

I typically recommend pricing your projects at around 10% of the value you create, so, if our guesses are right, I would have recommended that he charge around $70K for this project.

Even if we’re wrong about the value created by half, that would have put the project price at around $35K.

That’s almost 9× what he initially charged.

Most agencies aren’t broken. The market isn’t pricing you out. If you don't know what your work is actually worth, you can’t price it well, which means you can’t pitch it well, which means you can't convince anyone to buy something for more than a few thousand dollars, because that‘s “ the market rate for this work.”

If your agency feels broken, reply and tell me what the signals are. I’ve yet to meet one that actually was. I’ll do my best to prove you wrong.

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