We start with how the work gets done.
20eighty is a delivery margin practice for $3-5M digital agencies, run by Gary Magnone.
20eighty is a delivery margin practice for $3-5M digital agencies, run by Gary Magnone.
That’s 40 hours a week, 52 weeks, for one person. Every service an agency sells is made of those hours. How they get spent decides the quality of the work, how the team feels at the end of the week, and what the agency keeps from every dollar it bills.
And yes, it also reads like 80/20. We don’t mind. Finding the few changes that make the biggest difference is most of the job.
Before we build anything, we find out what the agency is trying to become and what has to happen first. The request that comes in is rarely the whole problem. It’s why the first call is mostly questions about where you’re headed.
We ask more than we tell, and we watch the work before we judge it. The best answer usually comes from the person who makes the work every day. The Assessment includes time with the people who make the work, not only the owner.
We don’t recommend a fix until we know how the work gets done today: the steps, the people, the numbers, and the client on the other end. Every engagement starts with a month of time data, before anyone touches a process or a price.
The way an agency works should change as fast as the work does. That goes for your services, your tools, and ours. Nothing we build is finished, and we’d be worried if it were. When a fix is done, someone on your team owns it, with a routine to keep it current.
AI is for better work. If the work gets faster and worse, it doesn’t count. We measure quality before and after, right alongside hours and margin.
That usually means a $3-5M digital agency where SEO and content are core services and the team makes the same kinds of deliverables every month. The owner wants to get to $10M, step back from the day-to-day, or sell when the time is right, and knows the way the work gets done has to change first.
It’s probably not a fit if you plan to stay small on purpose, or if every project is a one-off with nothing repeatable to rebuild.
Gary Magnone ran his own agency and has spent 15+ years agency-side, from intern to managing director. Delivery has been the throughline. He started in SEO when Panda and Penguin forced agencies built around an algorithm to change overnight, later built an agency’s Facebook ads offering with more than a dozen people running it, and today rebuilds content services and launches new AEO offerings with the agencies he works with. Somehow he still likes agencies.
The 5-minute quiz runs the math on your own revenue and shows the three areas most likely leaking.