A framework for startups selling services or software: Agency measures how much decision-making you outsource, Brief measures how much influence that vendor has. Multiply them to find the trust you need. Start with either wide reach and limited power, or deep power and narrow scope, then expand both as you build trust.
All service businesses, and a lot of software businesses are now service businesses, should give themselves the A/B test. The A stands for agency and the B stands for brief. The A for agency is how much decision-making power is being outsourced into this vendor, this tool, this person, this group of people, whatever it is for that domain. And the second is the brief, which is how wide is that influence? How many different things or how much the organization is actually going to be run by that particular org? And what you're going to find is that as you increase in the product of those two things, you need that much more trust, right? So it's a lot easier to get started with a wide brief if you want to be able to have influence a lot of different parts of the organization. If you have relatively limited agency, you're only going to do a little bit for it. And it's a lot easier to have more agency, i.e., more discretion, if you only have a very limited brief, certainly to start. And then your success allows you to build trust from there and to build a more recurring, successful practice.
