I get asked fairly often whether a client would be better off with a bigger agency. It is a fair question, and it deserves a better answer than the one small agencies usually give. So here is my take on where a small team like mine is the right call, where it is not, and what the difference actually costs you.
What we are good at
You talk to the person doing the work. There is no account manager passing your requirements to a developer you never meet. That takes out a whole layer where things get lost, and it means a decision takes a phone call rather than a fortnight.
Our overheads are lower. No offices to fill, no bench of staff to keep busy, no sales team taking a cut. That comes out either as a lower rate or as money we put back into the business. Either way, more of your budget goes into the build.
We can say no. A larger agency with a wage bill to cover every month often cannot. Being able to turn down a project we are not right for is good for the client we turn away, and better still for the ones we take on.
We move quickly. Picking up a new major version, changing tooling, reworking how we do something. For us that is a Tuesday afternoon. In a bigger shop it is a quarterly initiative with a steering group.
Specialism is believable at our size. A small team that only does Umbraco CMS makes sense. A hundred-person agency claiming deep expertise across six platforms usually does not, and the few people who do have that depth are spread across too many projects to help you much.
Relationships do the selling. Clients stay because they know us, not because of a framework agreement. That means we spend far less time chasing the next job and more time on the current one.
No internal politics to pay for. Nobody here is quietly protecting their own team's utilisation figures at your expense.
Where I have to be honest
All of that only counts if we use it. Small agencies that try to behave like scaled-down big ones end up with the drawbacks of both. And some things simply do not work at our size.
What larger agencies do better
Cover. If someone is ill, on holiday or hands in their notice, a big agency has people to step in. A small team has real single points of failure and no amount of documentation removes that completely.
Soaking up sudden growth. If your traffic triples or you buy three brands in a year, a larger agency can put more people on it next week. We would have to hire, and that takes months.
Everything under one roof. Brand, UX research, content strategy, paid media, accessibility audits, analytics. We either bring in partners or do not offer it. Sometimes you want one contract and one company to hold responsible.
Procurement and compliance. Public sector frameworks, enterprise security questionnaires, ISO certification, penetration testing schedules, contractual liability cover. Big agencies are set up for all of it. For a small team it is a serious cost, and plenty of us cannot clear the bar at all.
Process on large programmes. With forty stakeholders across five countries, the governance and reporting that feels like pure overhead on a small project is the thing holding the whole programme together.
They look like a safer bet. A larger agency is less likely to disappear. That matters to a procurement team, even when it does not always turn out to be true.
All of that costs more, and not because big agencies are greedy. Those capabilities have to be paid for somehow. The offices, the bench, the certifications, the account management layer, the people whose job is coordination rather than delivery. You are buying breadth and reassurance alongside the build itself.
So how do you choose?
I think it is less about size and more about which risk you are actually carrying.
If the thing that worries you is the work being done badly or slowly, a specialist small team is usually the better answer. You get senior people on the tools and a very short line to them.
If the thing that worries you is the work stopping, or your organisation not being able to buy from a small company in the first place, then what a larger agency charges is buying you something real.
Plenty of organisations end up with both, and there is nothing wrong with that. A larger partner for the broad programme, a specialist for the Umbraco work that needs proper depth.
The one bad reason to pick either is that somebody told you small agencies are more agile or big agencies are safer. Both are marketing lines. Work out what would hurt most if it went wrong, and choose on that.
Written by Justin Neville
Justin has worked in software development since 1998. He began writing C and C++ applications, moving to C# and .NET development in 2002. From 2002 to 2013 he built large-scale internal web applications for major companies in the finance and insurance sectors. In 2013, he founded Nevitech IT Solutions Ltd, and since then has focused exclusively on building and supporting websites using Umbraco CMS.
Justin is an Umbraco Certified Master and an Umbraco MVP for 2026. He won the Umbraco AI Package Award for his AI Log Analyser package, contributes to the Umbraco CMS core, and co-organises the Umbraco Kent Meetup. His particular strengths include system architecture, performance optimisation, complex troubleshooting, and writing clean, scalable code. He also mentors junior developers and works closely with agency partners on complex builds requiring specialist expertise.
