For software and development firms stuck at good
For founders of $1M–$8M technical agencies who are still selling every deal, depending on referrals, and watching revenue plateau. We diagnose the bottleneck and build the system that gets you past it.
This is built for a specific kind of agency
Most growth advice is written for everyone, which is why it works for almost no one. The work I do is calibrated for one kind of operator. If you recognize yourself in this list, we should talk.
- 1 You run a software, web, mobile, or DevOps agency
- 2 You're beyond $1M in revenue
- 3 You're profitable, but growth has flattened
- 4 You close most of the deals yourself, and the team can't replicate it
- 5 Your pipeline runs on referrals, and when those slow down, so does everything else
- 6 You've read the books, hired the consultants, tried the frameworks, and you're still stuck
If three or more of those describe your last twelve months, you're in the right place.
What's actually holding you back is rarely what you think
Most founders walk in convinced they have a marketing problem. After enough engagements, the patterns repeat. The presenting symptom is almost never the root cause. These are the diagnostic patterns that show up most often in agencies your size.
The Referral Trap
Your pipeline works until it doesn't. Referrals built the business, but they're an unreliable system. When a key client churns or a referral source dries up, there's no machine underneath to catch you.
Founder-Led Sales
Every deal closes because of you. Your team supports the work but can't replicate the trust that wins it. The day you can't take a sales call is the day revenue stops growing.
Revenue Concentration Debt
One or two clients represent more than 30% of revenue. You know it's a risk. Breaking the dependency means saying no to easy money, and that's harder than it sounds when payroll is real.
The Allocation Inversion
You're spending the most time on the work that requires you most, and the least time on the work that grows the business. Delivery eats strategy. The agency runs you.
Cosmetic Positioning
You've worked on your messaging. Updated the website. Refined the pitch. But buyers still think of you as a generalist, the rates haven't moved, and conversations still feel like price negotiations.
The Opinion Deficit
You can describe your services but not your point of view. Buyers can't tell what you stand for, which means they can't tell why they'd hire you over the next agency in the deck.
If two or three of those land, the bottleneck isn't lead generation. It's the system underneath.
Relevance Engineering
Relevance Engineering is the framework I use to take an agency from referral-dependent and founder-led to predictable, repeatable, and resilient. It's built on five pillars, applied in sequence. Each pillar exists because I've watched the same patterns fail in the same order. Start with positioning, or the rest doesn't stick.
Positioning
Stop being a generalist. Own a specific category in your buyer's mind so you stop competing on price and start being chosen on fit.
Productization
Translate your service into something buyers can evaluate, compare, and say yes to without a custom proposal cycle every time.
Publishing
Build the authority asset that does the selling for you when you're not in the room. Content as a system, not a content marketing campaign.
Partnerships
Move beyond random referrals into a deliberate referral system that produces qualified pipeline on a repeatable cadence.
Persistence
Install the operating cadence that compounds the first four into durable growth. Without persistence, the rest decays in a quarter.
The five pillars are sequenced. The order matters more than the components.
Three phases, one path
I work with two to three founders at a time. The engagement runs in three phases. You can stop after any of them.
The Bottleneck
A diagnostic engagement. We assess your agency across the five pillars of Relevance Engineering, identify the single bottleneck holding everything else back, and produce a 90-day prescription. You leave with a clear plan, whether or not we work together after this.
- Maturity scorecard across the five pillars
- Bottleneck diagnosis
- 90-day prescription
- Executive presentation
The Breakthrough
Execution against the prescription. I work alongside you and the team to build the positioning, productization, publishing, partnership, or persistence systems your diagnosis calls for. Hands-on advisory plus deliverables, not a coaching call series.
- Positioning system installed
- Productized offer architecture
- Publishing or partnership system built
- Operating cadence to sustain it
The Next Move
Strategic advisory after the breakthrough is built. Quarterly re-diagnosis, monthly working sessions, ongoing access. For founders who want a thinking partner with the full context of their business, not a new consultant every twelve months.
- Quarterly re-diagnosis
- Monthly working sessions
- Ongoing strategic access
- Continuity of context
Most clients move through all three phases. Some stop after the Bottleneck and execute internally. That's fine. The diagnostic alone is worth what you pay for it.
What this looks like in practice
The Good
UX and conversion optimization agency
- 153% Increase in qualified lead volume
- 55% Year-over-year revenue growth
- 16:1 ROI on the engagement
Stuck under $1M, serving three different markets, and diluting their messaging across all of them. We repositioned the agency around ecommerce, productized their services into clear deliverables buyers could evaluate, and built a partnership system to support the new focus. They broke through the $2M revenue mark within the engagement.
David has my highest recommendation.
Jon MacDonald, CEO, The Good
Read the full case studyCommand C
Ecommerce development agency
- 20 yrs In business before solving the "why us" question
- 3 wks From fumbling the narrative to confident messaging
- ↑ Increase in good-fit leads after repositioning
20 years in business with a strong reputation, but sales depended entirely on founder relationships. Prospects didn't grasp the depth of the work, and they were occasionally losing deals to agencies that looked more polished on the surface. Three weeks of focused positioning work fixed the "why us" question they'd been fumbling for two decades.
We'd been fumbling the 'why us' question, and it was costing us. This sprint gave us the clarity and confidence to finally answer it.
Sara Bacon, Founder, Command C
Read the full case studyWho you'd actually be working with
David Hoos, Founder
I built Haus Advisors after a decade of fractional CMO and advisory work, almost all of it inside technical service businesses. The methodology I use is built from patterns I've watched repeat in dozens of agencies, not from theory pulled out of a book.
I host Behind the Agency, a podcast with 60+ episodes of conversations with technical agency founders about the real mechanics of building these businesses. I write regularly about agency growth, positioning, and the specific bottlenecks that show up at $1M and beyond. The work I do with clients is the same thinking applied directly to their business.
I'm based in Spokane, Washington. I take on a small number of clients at a time, by design, so the work gets the attention it deserves.
What founders ask before booking
Most agency consultants serve everyone from creative shops to PR firms to media buyers. I work specifically with software, web, mobile, and DevOps agencies. The patterns are different. The buyers are different. The playbooks that work in technical services don't transfer cleanly from creative services or marketing agencies.
That specificity is the entire point. You're not paying for a generalist who'll figure out your industry. You're hiring someone who already knows the patterns at agencies like yours.
The methodology is calibrated for $1M and up. Below $1M, the bottleneck is usually still product-market fit, which is a different kind of work and not what I do best.
If you're close to that line, let's talk and I'll tell you honestly whether this is the right fit. The Bottleneck diagnostic itself is a useful filter — if your real problem is upstream of positioning, we'll figure that out in week one and you won't waste the engagement.
That's exactly what the Bottleneck is for. The whole point of the diagnostic is to find out where the real constraint is, before you spend the next year executing against the wrong root cause.
Most founders walk in convinced of one diagnosis and walk out with a different one. The diagnostic doesn't assume positioning is the answer. It assumes there's a single bottleneck somewhere in your business and the work is to identify which one.
The Bottleneck takes about a month and gives you immediate clarity on where to focus. Movement on the diagnosis usually starts within the first 30 to 60 days of the Breakthrough. Compounding results take six to twelve months.
Anyone promising faster than that is selling you something else. Positioning, pipeline, and operating systems compound — they don't snap into place overnight.
Then we stop after the Bottleneck. You leave with the scorecard, the diagnosis, and the 90-day prescription. You can execute internally, hire someone else, or come back later.
The diagnostic stands on its own. You're not signing up for the full program when you book it.
Software development firms, web development agencies, mobile and product shops, DevOps and platform engineering teams, and adjacent technical services. Most are founder-led, between $1M and $10M, and serving B2B clients.
If you're an agency that builds or maintains software for clients, this is calibrated for you. If you're a creative shop, brand agency, or paid media firm, the patterns I work on probably don't map cleanly to your business.
If you've recognized your agency in any of this, the next step isn't more tactics. It's finding out which bottleneck is actually holding you back. That's what The Bottleneck does.