About Haus Advisors
I help founder-led agencies grow without the founder in every deal.
I'm David Hoos. I run Haus Advisors, a growth consultancy for founder-led technical and custom software agencies.
Here's the pattern I keep finding. The work is excellent. The team is real. And the growth still runs through one or two people. Referrals come to the founder. The founder takes the first call, sets the price, and holds the biggest relationships. So the company grows exactly as fast as one calendar allows.
Most founders already know this. They say some version of "we're the bottleneck" inside the first ten minutes.
Knowing it doesn't fix it. Moving it out does. That's the work.
For the skimmer
The short version
| What I do | Move an agency's growth engine out of the founder's head and into the company. |
|---|---|
| Who for | Founder-led technical and custom software agencies, roughly $1M to $5M+, with a real team. |
| How | The Relevance Engineering Program. Six pillars scored, worst constraint first, every fix handed to a named person on your team. |
| Background | Marketing and selling professional services since 2012. Agencies specifically since 2016, including running growth inside one. Work that attracted leads from brands like Nike, Columbia Sportswear, The Economist, and Magic: The Gathering. |
| Track record | 30+ agencies advised. Over 75 episodes of the Behind the Agency podcast. Over 80 articles on how agencies actually grow. |
| Where | Spokane, Washington. |
The backstory
Why founder dependence, and why technical agencies
I've been marketing and selling professional services since 2012. Agencies specifically since 2016. I've worked inside them, alongside them, and now I advise them. Same pattern, over and over.
A dev shop does genuinely hard work. Custom software, complex integrations, platform migrations. Then a buyer asks why them instead of three other firms, and the real answer only exists in the founder's head.
For a long time I called that a positioning problem. Fix the message, fix the growth.
That was half right. The message was usually the first thing broken. But it wasn't why the agency stayed stuck.
Here's what I actually kept finding. The positioning lived in the founder's head. The proof lived in the founder's stories. The pipeline was the founder's network. The pricing call was the founder's judgment. Every one of those is an asset, and in a founder-led agency not one of them belongs to the company.
So the business can't grow past one person's calendar. Not because the strategy is wrong. Because the strategy never left the founder.
Now, I work with technical agencies because the pattern is sharpest there, and because the fix lands better. These founders are builders. They engineer everything inside their clients' businesses and leave their own growth to hope. Selling on personality feels wrong to them. It should. Growth can be engineered like anything else. Define the inputs, make it repeatable, measure the output, then hand it to someone.
That's the whole job.
Point of view
What I believe about agency growth
Founder involvement should be a choice, not a requirement.
You might be the best salesperson in your company. Fine, stay in sales. The problem was never that you sell. It's that nothing sells without you.
A strategy document is not a growth system.
Most founders I meet have bought strategy before. Someone ran a few workshops, handed over a good plan, and left. Six months later the plan is in a folder and growth still runs through the founder.
More leads is usually the wrong first move.
If the positioning is vague and you personally run every call, more leads makes the bottleneck worse. Fix what the leads run into before you turn up the volume.
The work has to end up with your people.
If I do everything, you've traded founder dependence for consultant dependence. That isn't progress. That's a subscription.
How I work
Four things that don't change
I stay neutral.
Nobody pays me to recommend them. No tools, no platforms, no partners.
You work with me.
No junior team, no account manager, no handoff after you sign.
I never take a cut.
If you need execution help, I'll introduce you to people I trust. No markup, no commission, no referral fee.
I try to make myself unnecessary.
The rule I run by: be unnecessary for yesterday's problem and useful for tomorrow's. When your team can run what we built without me, that's the job working, not the engagement failing.
The obvious objection
"You're one person. What happens when you're busy?"
Fair question, and I'd ask it too.
Two answers. First, I cap how much runs at once. The Program is priced by how many problems get worked on at the same time, not by hours, so I'm never selling you time I don't have.
Second, the work is built to leave my hands. Every piece ends with a named person on your team owning it and a written playbook they can follow. If I vanished tomorrow, the system we built would keep running.
That's the same test I'd want if I were hiring me.
Proof
What's actually been built
I'd rather show you than describe it.
Repositioned around one market. 153% more qualified leads, 55% year-over-year revenue growth, 16:1 return on marketing spend, and revenue past $2M.
Twenty years of technical depth and a story that didn't show it. We wrote a "why us" the whole team could say, not just the founder.
100% renewal and 91% of clients willing to refer, and still leading with price. Now the firm can name what makes the work different.
Near $2M for three years with world-class logos and no named offer. Now there's one position and two products the founder can hand off.
One thing I'll say plainly. The six-month Program is new, and I don't have a finished six-month case study for it yet. The pieces it's built from have results you can read above. The first Program clients become the case studies, and their before-and-after scores go on the Results page as they land.
Fit
When I'm not the right call
I turn down work that won't work. Here's what that looks like.
- You want a strategy document. Buy the Growth Maturity Audit on its own, or hire someone cheaper. A plan by itself doesn't change anything.
- You need results in 30 days. Agency deals close in three to nine months. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
- You won't hand anything to your team. If nobody inside the business can own the work, we'd just be building a nicer version of the same bottleneck.
- You're pre-revenue, or you don't have a team yet. Come back when you do. I mean that.
- You want me to run your marketing. I'm not an outsourced marketing department and I don't sell hours.
Off the clock
Outside of work
I live in Spokane, Washington. My wife is working on her MFA in creative writing and aiming to get published, so that's most of our conversation right now. The rest of my time goes to whatever game my kid invented that week.
I also host Behind the Agency. I've recorded over 75 episodes with agency founders about how they actually grew. Honestly, most of what I know started in those conversations.
What clients say
The relationship matters
We'd been fumbling the "why us" question, and it was costing us. This gave us the clarity and confidence to finally answer it. It wasn't just a messaging exercise, it was the foundation for a more confident sales process.
Sara Bacon, Founder, Command CDavid is the helping hand that I didn't know I needed for my digital agency. Our positioning and market strategy has strengthened and clarified. His approach is detail-oriented and personalized. He "gets" what we do and why we do it, dispensing succinct, actionable advice tailored to our needs.
Megan Leary-Crist, Founder, RudderWhere to go next
Two ways in, depending on where you are
Not ready to talk yet
Take the Bottleneck Score. Five minutes, and you get one number for how much of your growth still runs through you, plus the one pillar to start with.
Take the free Bottleneck ScoreReady to talk
Book a call. We'll spend it on where your growth actually breaks. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so on that call and point you somewhere better.
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