Building a product that automates the work my audience does for a living
The two hats, the uncomfortable geometry, and what I’m advising agency owners now.
I have two jobs that don’t fit together cleanly. Some weeks they actively conflict.
One job is advising agency owners. Mid-market firms mostly, ten to eighty people, some are ones who’ve found a way to do good work but haven’t solved the problem of scaling without losing quality. I help them figure out how to grow the business while keeping the work interesting and the margins real. That’s OMG Center. That’s where I spend a lot of oxygen.
The other job is selling them a tool that automates the work their account managers do for a living.
The geometry doesn’t work. I can feel it when I’m in advisory mode with a client, talking about headcount decisions and margins and what work actually moves the needle, and then I switch into sales mode and I’m showing them how Orca can do that work. The looks I get are complicated.
Let me describe what this actually looks like in practice.
The advisory conversation
The conversation with an agency owner usually starts with a specific pressure. They’ve got a team that’s growing. Revenue is growing. But they can’t seem to hire fast enough or good enough to keep up. The economics are getting tight. They’re spending too much time on client management. Their team is spending too much time on admin. Some of the junior people they hired are undershooting on output. They’re wondering whether they’ve hit their natural ceiling, or whether they’re just not managing the operation efficiently.
This is where I usually start asking questions about what’s actually taking time. Two to three days a week on meeting prep. Another day on follow-up emails and CRM management. Hours every week on inbox triage and making sure nothing falls through the cracks. Hours on research intelligence and competitive briefings. Account managers spending a fifth to a quarter of their time on social media and content updates.
That’s basically the role. Account management is orchestration work. Knowing what happened in the last meeting, what the client’s actually worried about, what they said they wanted versus what they actually need, what the competitive context is, and then bringing all of that together into a coherent strategy recommendation or a status update.
So I ask them: what do you think that orchestration work is actually worth to your business?
They usually say some version of: not as much as we’re paying for it. Or: most of it could be automated but we need someone there who knows the client. Or: they’re good at this part (pointing to strategy or relationship management) but we’re paying for them to do the other part too.
This is where I lean in and say something like: your business would get better if you had fewer people doing orchestration and more people doing the stuff that only they can do. Strategy. Real relationship management. Creative direction. The work that actually moves the needle. But you need different people for the orchestration part. You need tools.
And then they usually say: yeah, we know, we’ve tried some stuff, it’s messy, and also aren’t the tools going to put people out of work. Which is fair. That’s the real question.
What I’m advising now
Here’s what I tell them these days. And this is where the two jobs collide in a way that matters.
Build headcount for what can’t be automated. Let Orca do the orchestration. Measure the difference in what your account managers can actually produce when they’re not doing coordination work all day. Then restructure around that output.
That’s the honest advice. Not “keep your current structure and add a tool.” Not “add tools but keep the headcount.” But actually: the work that AI can do, let it do. Free up the humans for the work only they can do. Measure the result. Restructure accordingly.
Because if you don’t, your competitor will. And then you’re paying the same cost for orchestration work that they’ve automated away. You’re losing margin. You’re losing the ability to compete.
When I say this to a client, they usually nod. They know it’s true. They’ve probably already started running the numbers. And then they ask: so what do we do with the people who are only doing orchestration work? And I tell them the truth: that’s the hard part. That’s the part no advisory can solve for you. That’s the part you have to handle as a leader. But the answer isn’t to pretend the tools won’t work. It’s to manage the transition with eyes open.
The conflict visible
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Some of the people I’m advising are also in conversations with me about Orca. I show them the tool. They see what it does. I show them what it costs: two hundred and fifty pounds a month. I show them the math: if one of their account managers spends a quarter to a third of their time on orchestration, and a tool costs that little, then the economics are obvious.
And I can see them work through the reasoning. They came to me for advisory. I told them to automate orchestration. Now I’m selling them the thing that does it. The two roles have collapsed into the same transaction.
I don’t pretend this doesn’t matter. I lay it out. I tell them: I’m advising you to do this, and I also have a commercial interest in you buying this from me. You should price that into how you interpret what I’m saying. But I also think the advice is real. The automation is real. And the longer you wait to do this, the more margin you’re leaving on the table while your competitors figure it out.
Some of them buy. Some of them don’t. The ones who don’t usually go and build something internal or they use a different tool. That’s fine. The structure of my business doesn’t require every advisory client to buy Orca. What it does require is that I’m honest about the conflict.
What’s actually different about this
I could use the language most tech companies use: “amplifying your team”, “helping your people be more productive”. That language is comforting. It’s also dishonest.
Orca doesn’t amplify the orchestration work. It absorbs it. When a meeting brief that used to require someone half a day now takes a minute fully automated, the work isn’t being augmented. It’s being replaced.
The question is what you do about it as a leader. You acknowledge what’s happening, measure the impact, and structure your business around the new reality instead of pretending the old one still exists.
For agencies, that means: more headcount in strategic roles, less in coordination roles. Account managers doing account work, not AM admin. Planners planning, not planning then turning plans into decks then writing them down for the CRM.
The hard part isn’t the tool. The hard part is the conversation with the people whose jobs were mostly orchestration. That’s where the real work is. That’s where the leadership maturity shows up or doesn’t.
Why I can hold both roles
Someone asked me recently whether I felt conflicted about selling a tool that displaces people while advising the owners who might buy it. I said: only if I pretend the tool wouldn’t work, or the displacement isn’t real, or the maths are different than they are.
But I don’t pretend any of those things. I name the displacement. I explain the maths. I advise people to handle the transition with eyes open. Then I offer them a tool to do the work better and cheaper.
That’s not corruption of the advisory relationship. That’s completion of it. I’m advising them to do something that’s structurally necessary, and offering them a tool that makes it feasible.
Do I benefit when they buy Orca? Yes. Does that mean the advice is wrong? No. It means the advice happens to align with my commercial interests, which is worth disclosing, which I do.
I also stay visible. I don’t hide in the business model. I show up in demos. I’m in the advisory conversations. I’m subject to the feedback about what actually happens when these transitions occur. If the displacement is worse than I’m predicting, I see it. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.