Scaling Business Development Beyond the Founder

Sei-Wook Kim (00:04.79) On today's episode, we're talking about one of the hardest transitions in an agency, scaling business development beyond the founder. Most founders hit a ceiling not because demand isn't there, but because they try to replace themselves all at once. They hire a salesperson, expect magic, and it doesn't work. We're going to break down why that fails, how to deconstruct BD into its core functions, and how to rebuild it piece by piece so it actually scales. Peter Kang (00:31.222) All right, Sei-Wook. So this is a topic that we've dealt with in many situations, whether it's across our own Barrel Holdings portfolio or in talks with agency founders who are looking to sell their business. And one of the things that we find is that this bottleneck, this founder bottleneck, is really structural. What founders don't appreciate is that it's not about them just being good at sales. They're actually running five or six jobs all at once. They're juggling all these jobs at once under the label of business development. These are things like relationship building, brand credibility, the outbound work that they sometimes do, the sales conversations they're having, as well as the account growth that they're handling. In some respects, it's just scotch tape holding it all together and the founder's being super scrappy with all of it. But at the same time, it is a lot for one person to handle. That is the structural challenge. Sei-Wook Kim (01:35.76) Yeah. And what we see typically happen is a founder will hire a head of sales or some kind of BD lead to take over what they feel like they're doing. They expect immediate pipeline, immediate closing of deals, and then growth of the agency. What actually happens in reality is the pipeline may not be as strong as they expect. The close rate may not be as high as what they were doing. And what happens is the founder will get disappointed, they'll get pulled back into the process, and then that new person that they brought on will just turn because they're not getting the results that they expected. Peter Kang (02:24.028) Yeah, if we could have a nickel for every time an agency founder says, I tried hiring a salesperson and it didn't work out. We have many nickels, right? And the problem isn't necessarily the hire. It's the old adage that we say sometimes — they're set up to fail. The challenge here is really thinking through what business development in an agency actually is, and what you can do to, in many ways, de-hat, break down, and modularize the different components of business development so that it is more manageable for people you bring in to help you. And also to avoid the trap founders fall into all the time of mapping their own capacity to somebody else and, if someone isn't a mini-me in everything the founder can do, it's an auto-fail. Just getting away from that mindset. Sei-Wook Kim (03:26.775) Yeah, and just a quick call-out. We had a couple of episodes in the past. Episode 16, we talk about scaling your agency beyond $2 million — talks about this whole idea of a hero complex where a founder feels like they need to do everything. And then episode nine, even further back, how to design your org chart for growth — we talked about founders really needing to focus on what is their zone of genius and what they're really good at, and bringing in people to complement them versus just trying to clone themselves and do more. Peter Kang (03:59.244) Yeah. So let's actually dive into the five business development functions and this whole process of how do we de-hat the founder. If we're going to do that, we actually need to know what business development consists of. So let's dive in. Sei-Wook Kim (04:12.556) Okay, so the first is marketing and awareness. This could manifest through multiple different channels — things like content posted on LinkedIn, newsletters, webinars, conferences, going through the awards cycle, or getting PR for the agency. This is really to build up that top-of-funnel awareness for the company. When you think about where this falls into the journey, when a prospect thinks about having a need, does your agency come up as top of mind? Will they eventually reach out to you to work with you? These are activities that the founder has obviously done quite a bit through the journey of growth. Some of this may need to stay with the founder, but that is one of the main functions. Peter Kang (05:10.169) Yeah, a lot of times the founder might do this in flurries and spurts, right? When they have some time, they do a lot of the marketing, and then they get busy and forget to do marketing for a while. It becomes this inconsistent activity. But it's definitely a necessary one — you've got to continue to market in a proactive manner. Then the second function is partnerships. We talked about this in episode 12, where we discussed putting together a lightweight partnership program that can actually work for an agency. But really, what is partnerships? It's about cultivating referral relationships with other agencies. It's about having relationships with consultants, tech platforms. We talked about this in our ecosystem episode — who else is in the ecosystem that you could develop relationships with? It's having this disciplined motion of identifying the partners that are of quality, continuing to have this mutual referral relationship of give and take, and building upon that. A lot of times agency founders do this instinctively and they might hang out with some of these people and have good relationships. But sometimes you lack the discipline. Sometimes the follow-ups aren't as tight. And so this is another area where the function of partnerships is such an opportunity for agencies. Sei-Wook Kim (06:41.003) So the next function is outbound — proactive prospecting — and that can take the form of cold email, going through LinkedIn, direct mail if it makes sense for an agency. This is different than marketing in the sense that it's really about having a volume game and having the discipline to go through list building, iterate on the messages, and just keep going. It's that repetition that needs to happen over a long period of time where you may not see the results immediately. Peter Kang (07:17.396) Yeah, and we'll talk more about the opportunities there. Then the other part is this whole idea of closing and sales. Once an opportunity comes in through maybe your website contact form or through an intro referral, it's about the discovery calls, framing the problem, scoping, working with your team to make sure you're presenting the best solution, negotiating on the contract side, and then finally getting that signature and that first payment. This is where the founder is probably going to be very reluctant to give this up, and also where they spend a lot of time. There's a reason it's so important that the founder is involved here — a lot of this is about building trust with the prospect, making the right impression, saying the right things at the right time. The founder, with all the reps and experience and the stakes, is going to perform at a really high level. And so it's that much harder to delegate or trust someone else with it and expect similar results. This is definitely something that needs to be looked at more closely in terms of what the different sub-components within this function actually are. Sei-Wook Kim (08:39.592) Yeah, awesome. So the last function here is account growth and expansion. This is really on your existing accounts — how do you do upsells, cross-sells? We had a previous episode around thinking about expansion paths for accounts and really deepening that client relationship. Founders often do this through the relationships they've built through the full business development cycle and staying in touch and building that relationship with clients. This is an area where we see a lot of agencies underinvested or not having a really good system around it. Peter Kang (09:22.795) Yep, exactly. Okay, so those five — let's just recap it real quick. Marketing, partnerships, outbound, sales process, and then account growth and expansion. The founder is doing all five of these. It's probably not an even 20% split — in some stages maybe account growth gets a lot of it, in some stages the sales process dominates, and maybe when times are slow the marketing piece dominates more. But it's still five things they're juggling. This is an opportunity to bring in people who can go a hundred percent deep into one area. It might not even be one person — you might be building a team for each of these functions. And that's the real opportunity for scaling beyond the founder. Sei-Wook Kim (10:15.357) Yeah, sounds good. So let's talk about the sequencing. What should a founder do first, second, and how do they build this capacity over time? This is not easy. We've gone through this and we know this could take months if not years to really transfer the trust and goodwill that you've built over time. And it's not something that you can just hire someone and be like, all right, you've got marketing, I'm going to step back. You really have to train, try to transfer as much knowledge as possible, model behaviors, and then over time that person or those people can gain the experience that you as a founder had. So it's very much a hands-on activity. Peter Kang (11:03.967) Yeah, and I just want to call out — our podcast, we don't offer shortcuts ever. This is another case of, hey, nothing is easy. Everything requires patience, consistent work, and true to the name of Agency Habits, you need to develop these good habits for these things to compound and actually come to fruition. So with that, let's dig into the sequencing. What would you take first? Sei-Wook Kim (11:34.564) The first thing — you may be doing it already — we'll call it account growth. This is probably the easiest to delegate, though it's not easy. You probably have people in client relationships already: day-to-day project managers, people who are account managers. It's really about formalizing that function and designing the path for expansion of an account after an initial engagement. For account managers, account directors, people in these roles, think about whether you can incentivize them to grow accounts. Is there some kind of aerial comp component that affects the behavior of growing accounts beyond the initial engagement? This is high leverage because you've already won the account and the relationship. The hard part of getting them through the door is done and now it's about seizing on the opportunity. Peter Kang (12:39.094) Yeah, and part of it is the founder can't just delegate completely to the team. There definitely needs to be a discussion — the founder needs to check in and say, hey, these are some of the directions I'm going to take the company in terms of service expansion and all those things. And then for key accounts where the founder's relationship with the client is really deep, they're still going to have to play a role and check in and maybe be there for the quarterly business reviews, the annual reviews, or whatever. Yeah, this is not something you can just set and forget. It's still an important piece, even with all the infrastructure built out. Sei-Wook Kim (13:25.96) Yeah, and we've gone deep in a couple of past episodes — episode 21, we talked about going from projects to growing accounts, talking about the whole account management layer. And then episode 31, talking about what you actually sell versus what you think you sell, we talked a lot about the idea of the expansion path. Peter Kang (13:44.114) Yeah. Okay, so the second one is partnerships. As we mentioned, we have a previous episode about the lightweight founder-led motion. But if you want to evolve beyond maybe a couple of check-ins a week and you want a fully dedicated practice, bringing in somebody from the partnership side can be very valuable. We've seen this happen across a few of our Barrel Holdings agencies. At Barrel, for example, we brought on a partnership manager who used to work at Shopify, has relationships with folks there, and it's been great just having somebody with familiarity across the ecosystem really taking the reins from the CEO Lucas and being able to continue to grow those relationships, check in with them, explore co-marketing opportunities, bring back knowledge from those partners, and share it with the team that could be used in client conversations. There's so much room to really grow that partnerships motion. And as we can talk about, if you understand the ecosystem you're in, there are so many different layers you can hit in terms of that partnership. Sei-Wook Kim (15:01.479) Awesome. So the next is marketing. This could take the form of a marketing coordinator or somebody on the team to run the content calendar, thinking about how you're posting on different channels consistently. If you have a newsletter, how is that being coordinated and managed internally? Keeping the website updated, whether there are case studies or new services to be presented on the site. Having a person really own that function — because a founder probably dabbles and whenever they have time to think about these channels, they might focus and post and get the content going. But having someone really own that, developing that consistency — for a lot of these activities, it needs to happen on an ongoing basis. If someone can own that, getting the ideas and the content from various people on the team, it will happen a lot more consistently. Peter Kang (16:00.678) Yeah, there are small things to add to this too. Can someone own the creation of case studies on a quarterly basis? Every quarter somebody is checking with the team and coordinating to get a case study written, some assets created. All of a sudden you have fresh case studies in your sales and marketing materials, on your website, and you could do a post on it. It's really rich. It becomes an asset that helps you do better in other aspects of business development like your sales process. Sei-Wook Kim (16:33.476) Yeah, and there are time-consuming things where if you're going to host an event, there's a lot of coordination needed. If you want to do even a webinar, attending a conference and trying to get the most out of that experience — all the work that goes into developing that may be put on the back burner because of how time-consuming it is. But then after you attend these things, host these things, what happens after? Having someone own the follow-up, the marketing, the promotion of all the activities that happened there. Peter Kang (17:03.272) Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so the fourth one in the sequence. We talked about account growth, partnerships, marketing execution, and now the fourth one is outbound. This one we know too well — founders love to be like, pipeline is weak, or we're not getting enough leads, or I need some help on BD, let's get outbound going, let's hire an outbound shop and see what we can do. Part of the problem — and we're not anti-outbound, there are instances where outbound can really work — is that outbound oftentimes happens too early. This is before the agency has a clear positioning, proof points, an offer. The messaging is all generic and doesn't really work. So you need to build that infrastructure first before you launch the outbound. This is why it comes towards the bottom. Really, once you get the marketing and the partnerships motion going and generating some positive signals and the reputation flywheel is going for the agency, then cold outreach can be that supplemental thing to bring new folks into that engine of marketing and partnerships. It just works better in tandem. To do it in a vacuum is almost setting it up to fail. But once you get some of these other things going, outbound can work better. With outbound, like with anything else, you can build a very sophisticated internal team with a rev ops person, maybe a GTM engineer, get really fancy with something like Clay, and do all kinds of interesting things. Or you could hire an SDR specialist agency to do your bidding. But what matters here is you just can't do it on its own and expect miracles. Sei-Wook Kim (19:05.419) Awesome. So the last part of the process here is closing. Depending on what you're selling, closing could stay with the founder the longest. Throughout the process, from the initial connection through the actual close, there are many different touch points where the founder could be offering their expertise, their experience, layering on stories and anecdotes that help that process of close. When you step back from that, it's often either a senior person who has been with the organization for a while and knows all that context, or someone who has understood your market deeply and can verbalize and explain your expertise. That's why it can be hard to step away from that role. Not to say that the founder needs to step away 100% — there are many steps of the sales process where maybe the initial screening calls through the whole journey could be handled by other people, and then maybe the founder comes in at the end and has strategic conversations in the process. Really, that's where you're thinking about how you can bring on other people on your team to help with that closing process. And it doesn't have to be one person — many people can be involved in it. It could be many different stakeholders taking it from start to end. Peter Kang (20:39.878) Yeah, and there are subcomponents to this you can go really deep on. You could argue the qualification itself could be a role, where you just have somebody tasked with managing any kind of referral inbound, then going deep on the discovery call, gathering all the requirements on that call, doing the research on the prospect, and then making the determination of, all right, this is qualified, now we can activate the team. Then there's a whole scoping process where it could be the same person, or you could bring in a solutions expert — a solutions engineer or solutions consultant — to really scope it out or coordinate with subject matter experts across the agency. You might even bring in at a certain point an account manager or project manager who might be on the project to create the preliminary timelines and other things that might go into a proposal. You might have a full team working on the proposal. And then, of course, presenting that at the end — does it have to be the founder? Maybe it could be a leader on the team, or the person who's been leading the sales process end to end. There are so many combinations of this that could manifest. There's no right or wrong. It's more about capabilities and who you trust to lead the process. Once you build that muscle and those reps, you might be in a situation where for 80% of the opportunities that come in, you can trust somebody fully to run the process end to end with the team and bring in the necessary people. And then for some of the high-stakes accounts, maybe it's a brand where you really want to bring the full team in and the founder can be more involved. This can show up in so many different ways. It's just about mapping and knowing what goes into the process. And like with anything — whether it's your engagements or any aspect of your agency — take a step back and ask, what are the different workflows? What are the processes? Who can play what role right now? And where are the leverage points that can free the founder up to do the thing that's most important, most valuable, most in their zone of genius? Once you do that, it just unlocks so much more and gets rid of that bottleneck we talked about. Sei-Wook Kim (23:18.518) Yeah, and as you mentioned earlier, the function of the sales process doesn't have to be one person. Many people are involved in it. It could be many different stakeholders taking it from start to end. Peter Kang (23:35.041) Exactly. So one word of warning. We talked about sequencing these five, and remember this is all wrapped up in multiple hats on the founder. But there's a temptation for the founder to be like, I've got five hats on, maybe I'll give two or three hats to someone else. This bundling of roles is a dangerous temptation that should be avoided. For example, you might find a really good partnerships person, and then you go, hey, the partnerships motion is getting going, why don't you also help me with sales? Or, I brought you in for marketing, but you have a little bit of time, can you help me with some of this outbound stuff as well? It starts to mix their objectives. You might think, relative to yourself as the founder, oh, it's only two things instead of five, but it's still distracting. It muddies the waters. From our experience, it's better to be disciplined about giving people the lanes to succeed in. Everyone's mileage might vary, but this is just a word of warning for folks. Sei-Wook Kim (24:48.77) Awesome. So let's bring it all together. We've outlined the five different functions and the sequence to de-hat the founder. What does it look like on the other side after this is all done? I think the biggest thing is the founder maybe not being completely out of the system, but not being the single point of failure in this whole process, and really moving to a role where they're thinking about architecting how all of these elements work together. Peter Kang (25:32.224) Yeah, can I just illustrate this real quick? The single point of failure looks like this: a brilliant agency founder with amazing insights, the client loves them. They paint this amazing roadmap for the client, everyone's bought in. And then there's no follow-up — the founder gets busy with some other stuff, so there's nobody to follow up on the proposal, talk the client through the details, put the plan together. Imagine not having any of that set up. It doesn't matter how brilliant they are. It literally becomes a bottleneck and a point of failure. Sei-Wook Kim (26:15.903) Yeah, and we've seen that bottleneck. Let's say something blows up on the operations side of one of the accounts in flight — you just don't have time to work on that proposal or whatever it is. It just stalls in the process. Truly a bottleneck in that whole BD process. Yeah, another outcome — pipeline becoming more predictable. If each channel has its own focus, they can have goals. From outbound, you have goals and leads coming in from that direction. For account growth, you have goals. Partnership goals, marketing goals, etc. There's focus for each one. Hopefully it'll lead to a little more predictability with how leads are coming in. And along those lines, because there are people who own each of these functions, there's a depth you can go down that as a founder, when you're juggling all these different areas, you just don't have time for. A lot of times it's like, yeah, it would be great if we could do those webinars or go to those events or host those things or be on those panels — you just don't have time, you have limited capacity. But if different people are owning those different areas, you can actually execute on a lot of those initiatives. Peter Kang (27:37.294) Yeah, and for a few of our agencies, it's a beautiful thing to see when they start to have this business development team and they're able to work together, divide and conquer, and really do these activations that normally would have been just impossible for a single leader to shoulder. Sei-Wook Kim (27:55.872) Yeah, ultimately it's really about thinking about what is the highest leverage activity for a founder in this process. It doesn't mean completely removing themselves from the BD process, but what are those high-leverage strategic deals that need the founder's support to close? Maybe it is thought leadership — stepping back and thinking about things at a high level and creating the content that gets visibility. And then for relationships, it doesn't have to be all of the relationships. It could be a few key partnerships or key relationships that do drive a lot of opportunities for the agency. Really just thinking about what are the few things that drive the largest outcomes. Peter Kang (28:43.221) Yep, exactly. And this goes back to being a mindset thing where it's really hard to let go of the things that were working. You're like, stuff is getting done, we're doing some marketing, newsletters are going out, I'm posting on LinkedIn every now and then. So it feels like, should I really be spending extra dollars investing in these things? But it's all about that leverage, and the upside of having people truly dedicated and focused and being really good at some of these things that no founder can do when they're spread thin across all these functions. Yeah, okay, so we covered a lot today. Let's just wrap it up. Going back to our original message at the top of the pod — stop trying to hire one person to replace yourself. If anything you take away, just get rid of that fantasy. Think about the five BD functions, make sure you sequence it properly, and instead of going wide and trying to juggle everything, think about the depth and the opportunities that presents. The highest-leverage thing for the founder isn't to do all the BD, but to build that machine, to be the architect of that system. So with that, thanks for joining us. Until next time, thanks. Sei-Wook Kim (30:07.391) Thanks.