Most agencies delegate work down a hierarchy, but thin margins mean employees still bear client risk despite fixed salaries. The speaker argues for a partnership model where account teams and technical staff share risk and collaborate as equals instead.
Pick collaboration over delegation. The traditional agency model is you have your account executive or your salesperson who's going to go sell an engagement, and then they're going to hire people who are going to be able to do that work, and they're going to be your technical people, your designers, what have you, and you have a more traditional employer-employee relationship. The employees think they've got risk off, right? Because they think that they have a job and are being paid their salary, and the employer thinks that they're going to make money on high margins that they're getting from the clients and only have to pay the employees what they need to pay them. The trick is this only works in the happy path. If you have any hiccups with the client, the employees are actually completely risk-on because if the agency, which is usually pretty small, doesn't have a great ability to pay and usually doesn't have that much working capital, they all get into some trouble. So alternative: collaboration. Work with, act as partners to each other.
