AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Joe Davies (FatJoe) on Why Productized Services Are the Only Way to Scale With a Lean Team
Guest: Joe Davies
Guest: Joe Davies
Joe Davies, founder of FatJoe, has run a lean, mostly-outsourced agency for over a decade by refusing to do two things most agencies do by default: take on bespoke work, and build a big in-house team.
On this episode of the Agency Growth Club, he breaks down the one-day-per-department system that keeps him out of the weeds, why FatJoe’s content orders crashed 50% early in the AI content backlash before bouncing back 30% above previous levels, and why he’s turned down acquisition offers because running FatJoe still doesn’t feel like something he wants to hand off.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Joe is upfront that he hasn’t gone deep into AI automation or complex agentic workflows. His actual daily use is closer to a personal assistant: talking through business numbers, uploading CSVs and asking for pattern analysis, and running pricing scenarios that would otherwise take far longer in spreadsheets. He gives a concrete example, running a proposed 20% price increase with an assumed 10% drop-off through ChatGPT to model the outcome before making the call.
“It’s just way quicker than me using Google Sheets and loads of formulas.”
His other regular use case is summarizing YouTube videos, both to decide whether a video is worth watching in full, and to extract actionable steps from ones that are.
Joe and his team use NotebookLM’s podcast-style summary feature to stay current on SEO and AI developments, deliberately framing the source material with context (“we’re SEO recruiters, this is what we’re doing”) so the two AI hosts discuss it from the right angle rather than a generic one. He also flags a beta feature that lets him interrupt the AI hosts mid-conversation to ask a direct question, which the hosts then address in real time.
“For me, for learning, it’s been insane.”
Joe structures his week by assigning each day to a single department: Monday for product (the app, admin, client-facing side), Tuesday for marketing, Wednesday for services (pricing and CRO improvements), Thursday for operations (hiring, staffing issues, outsourcing), and Friday off, reserved for ideation and catching up on content. Each day gets one 2–4 hour focus task tied to that department, with the rest of the day spent talking to team members and removing whatever constraints they’re facing.
He’s clear this isn’t a rigid rule, someone from another department will still occasionally need him mid-week, but the intention behind each day keeps him from being pulled department to department without ever going deep on any of them.
Actionable advice:
Asked what most agencies get wrong when trying to scale, Joe’s answer is direct: without productizing your services, you can’t scale with a lean team, full stop. Taking on bespoke, one-off projects forces a choice between adding significant headcount (his example: a 300-person agency like Neil Patel Digital can absorb bespoke work) or staying stuck. For a 15–20 person agency, productization, repeatable back-end systems that can execute a campaign from a defined set of inputs, isn’t optional.
“If you’re just taking on any job and you’re quoting work and you’re doing bespoke projects, it’s going to be very, very hard to do with a lean team.”
Joe argues the fear most agency owners have about removing the sales call from their funnel is a limiting belief, if a website can intake the information a call would normally cover, the call itself becomes unnecessary. He compares it directly to buying a $100K Tesla with no test drive or phone call, just clear information on the platform.
Once a service is productized, the trust-building elements become straightforward: clear pricing, clear delivery timelines, examples of the work, testimonials, and basic credibility signals like an about page and a visible team. FatJoe has taken orders this way since very early on, after briefly experimenting with bespoke work and quickly moving away from it, and Joe says larger and larger orders now come through with zero sales conversation at all.
“We are more convinced of it now than we ever was.”
Actionable advice:
Joe says anything under 6 months of runway would keep him up at night, FatJoe currently sits well beyond that. He’s direct that most agency cash flow problems trace back to two specific habits, not taking payment upfront, and billing by the hour, both covered below.
Joe doesn’t buy the argument that clients require 30-day invoicing terms, he says agencies can simply state payment-upfront terms on their website and decline work that won’t accept them. Once payment is collected upfront, scope creep and unpredictable margins effectively disappear, the agency delivers exactly what was scoped and agreed, with no chasing invoices afterward.
This section is Josh’s own experience, not Joe’s or FatJoe’s. Josh described taking Joe’s upfront-payment advice directly into Search for Hire’s own business, introducing an activation fee where competitors typically work on a no-placement-no-fee basis. Josh noted the fee has an unintended second benefit, functioning as a soft exclusivity signal, since clients paying a meaningful amount upfront are less likely to simultaneously engage several competing recruitment partners.
Joe’s second cash flow culprit is hourly billing, because the only way to grow hourly revenue is to add more billable hours, which means adding more people. That’s fine when business is strong, but when it slows, agencies are left carrying payroll they can’t easily shed without risking their ability to scale back up later. His alternative: bill by value or by deliverable instead, which allows agencies to lean on contractors and outsourcing rather than growing permanent headcount to match revenue swings.
Actionable advice:
Joe ties recession-proofing directly back to the hourly-billing problem: a lean core team supported by outsourced contractors can scale up when times are good and scale down when they’re not, without being stuck with payroll it can’t sustain. FatJoe itself outsources a significant share of its own delivery work to contractors, the same model it recommends to clients.
“Outsourcing has got a dirty word for some reason… I think it’s perfect.”
He also predicts that agency roles built purely around passing along recommendations from a bigger, more prestigious-sounding company (without deep specialist involvement) are increasingly at risk over the next few years, reinforcing his preference for lean teams built around specialists and contractors rather than headcount for its own sake.
When AI content tools first went mainstream, FatJoe’s content orders dropped 50% as SEOs over-adopted low-quality AI content and the market quickly turned against it. Orders recovered as buyers swung back toward human-only content, then recovered further, to roughly 30% above previous levels, once AI tools genuinely improved and FatJoe (and the market generally) settled into a blended model: AI-assisted content for lower-tier orders, human content for premium clients needing more thought.
Joe doesn’t see AI as a threat to agencies specifically because business owners, even if AI could technically run an entire campaign, generally don’t want to operate the tools themselves. “A small business owner is never going to want to do it anyway… they want to hire an agency who can do it 10 times as good.”
Joe has had conversations with serious acquirers but has stayed independent, primarily because he still genuinely enjoys running FatJoe and isn’t convinced an exit would meaningfully change his lifestyle. He’d consider selling for a strategic reason, a larger merger or partnership that lets FatJoe “take a bigger swing” (his example: a hypothetical Fiverr partnership), or if his own priorities shifted and he wanted to step back from day-to-day involvement.
“I think you need to consider those things before selling… but I think setting your business up to sell anyway is just good business, so I think always be ready to sell even if you don’t want to sell.”
Joe attended an event at Acquisition.com’s Las Vegas headquarters, where attendees ran their own businesses through the actual valuation framework Acquisition.com uses to evaluate acquisitions, honestly assessing numbers, staff, risk, and market position as an outside investor would. The exercise surfaced real gaps for Joe, including his own over-involvement in product development and a need to build more recurring revenue.
He also notes the event had a clear upsell structure, a further $30,000 tier for ongoing access to Alex Hormozi directly, which Joe passed on.
Actionable advice:
FatJoe has run the same simple, two-month email sequence for 5–6 years, deliberately not segmented by customer type (agencies, heads of marketing, small businesses, affiliates). Joe’s reasoning is about data concentration: a single funnel lets the team A/B test subject lines, copy, and offers and get conclusive results quickly, while splitting the list into smaller segments would take far longer, likely never, to produce a clear answer. He draws a clear line for when segmentation does make sense, distinctly different buyer types with fundamentally different messages (his example: Uber Eats restaurants vs. customers), which isn’t the case for FatJoe’s audience.
Actionable advice:
FatJoe built a single customer avatar, “Agency Adam,” to keep every piece of marketing focused on one specific persona rather than a broad audience. Adam runs a seven-figure agency with a lean team, understands the value of outsourcing, doesn’t want to grow a bloated internal team, and wants his clients to get results without personally managing tactics like link building or digital PR. Roughly 90% of FatJoe’s customers, and about 80% of its revenue, come from agencies matching that profile.
The persona also reflects FatJoe’s core positioning: the company deliberately stays out of strategy and consulting, positioning itself purely as a deliverables partner that fulfills campaigns agency clients have already designed, rather than competing with their expertise.
Google Ads has been FatJoe’s top-performing channel for roughly 12 years, Joe describes it as the most direct path to a customer, since people are actively searching for the exact service being offered. He’s candid that Google Ads alone eventually exhausts a market’s active searchers, which is why FatJoe is now investing in awareness-stage channels, Meta, LinkedIn ads, lead magnets, and podcast appearances, to reach potential customers before they’re actively in-market. FatJoe has also brought on a dedicated brand manager focused on more disruptive, attention-driving LinkedIn content.
“Even the stuff that you’re doing this podcast, this is an awareness channel… six months’ time when they need to recruit someone, they’ll remember your name.”
Joe’s advice for agency owners plateaued around $50K a month is direct: it’s almost always a lead generation problem, not something fixable on the back end. Productizing services, changing operations, or making hires won’t move revenue if there aren’t enough leads coming in. His recommendation is to put meaningful budget (he suggests roughly 10% of revenue) into targeted Google Ads against active searchers for the specific service being offered, and focus entirely on the offer and the traffic reaching it rather than backend polish like website design.
“I wouldn’t even work on anything on the back end at 50k a month.”
Actionable advice:
For FatJoe specifically, Joe tracks new customers per day as something close to a vanity metric he’s simply obsessed with keeping high. For a more traditional agency with a longer, call-involved sales cycle, he recommends tracking leads per day instead, a number that should trend upward consistently as marketing and outreach get more efficient, whether that’s through ads, cold email, or other channels.
Joe rejects the recurring “SEO is dead” narrative outright, arguing SEO is evolving rather than dying, as more search behavior shifts to AI assistants that still ultimately rely on search engines, live data, and the same underlying signals (brand mentions, link building) to generate their answers. His broader point echoes his earlier AI-and-agencies argument: business owners, whether the disruption is AI or manual tooling, generally don’t want to do the marketing work themselves, they’ll always need an agency or specialist to do it for them.
“It’s not dead, it’s evolving.”
Mainly as a personal assistant rather than deep automation, chatting through business numbers, analyzing uploaded CSVs for patterns, summarizing YouTube videos, and using NotebookLM’s contextualized podcast feature to learn AI and SEO developments faster.
Joe assigns each weekday to a single department, Monday for product, Tuesday for marketing, Wednesday for services, Thursday for operations, and Friday off for ideation, with one 2–4 hour focus task per day tied to that department, to maintain agency-wide breadth without going too deep into any single area day to day.
He argues that without productized, repeatable back-end systems, a lean team physically can’t take on bespoke work at scale, agencies either need significant headcount to absorb custom projects or need a defined, repeatable offer to grow without constantly adding staff.
He says he still genuinely enjoys running it and doesn’t believe an exit would meaningfully change his lifestyle. He’d consider selling for a strategic partnership that lets FatJoe scale further, or if his own priorities shifted toward stepping back.
Content orders dropped 50% early in the AI content backlash as quality concerns spread, then recovered to roughly 30% above previous levels once the market settled into a blended approach, AI-assisted content for lower-tier work, human content for premium clients.
Joe argues segmentation fragments the data needed to reach fast, conclusive A/B test results, FatJoe’s single funnel lets the team test subject lines, copy, and offers quickly, and he reserves segmentation for cases with genuinely distinct buyer types and messages.
He says it’s almost always a lead generation problem rather than a backend one, and recommends focusing spend and attention entirely on generating and converting leads (he suggests targeted Google Ads) before touching productization, operations, or hiring.
With 95% of roles filled within 25 days, our approach is built for pace and backed by a 1 year guarantee. Get access to the systems and frameworks that power elite SFH teams.
