Episode 60: The Collective Model (and Why This Founder Stopped Hiring Full-Time)

Offer & Delivery

Jan 20

Written By David Hoos

Interview: How Chris LaFay Rebuilt His Agency With a Collective Model, Partnerships, and a Test-Drive Offer

Behind the Agency Podcast with Chris LaFay, Founder & CEO, Classic City

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Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

The core pain: Agency owners hire too early and too permanently… then panic when the “guaranteed overhead” kicks in.
The big mistake: Chris “hired on a hope” — hired full-time expecting he’d magically figure out sales/lead gen next.
The pivot: He rebuilt with a nimble collective model (trusted freelancers + a few key roles), instead of stacking full-time payroll.
The growth engine: He’s betting on agency partnerships + community-style events, not random referral luck.
A practical tactic: Host a “content day” (video crew + time slots). He filled 16 slots in ~24 hours and ran 14 sessions in a day.
A smart “foot-in-the-door” offer: A 2-week homepage prototype (test drive) that de-risks the big website project.
Transparent pricing as a filter: Put pricing right on the homepage so bad-fit budgets self-select out early.
Contrarian move: While other agencies ditch websites because they’re messy, he’s leaning in and trying to make weirder, more textured sites that stand out in an AI-search world.

Does This Sound Familiar?

You're stuck between two bad options. Hire now and hope the work shows up, or turn away a project because you don't have the hands. Both feel like a decision you'll regret in about four months.

Chris LaFay has a phrase for the first one. You don't hire on a hope. He did it himself, brought on full-time people expecting to figure out lead generation right after, and then met the overhead.

So he rebuilt Classic City as a collective. A few key roles on staff, trusted freelancers around them, and capacity that moves with demand instead of ahead of it. But the interesting part is what he noticed about where the work was already coming from.

An accidental network of 4 to 6 agency partners, with nobody being deliberate about it, drove 30 to 40% year-over-year growth for four years. So he made it intentional. He runs content days where a video crew books time slots for partners, and filled 16 slots in about 24 hours.

And he de-risks the big project with a small one. A two-week homepage prototype, with a $15K starting price published on his own homepage so the wrong budgets leave before the call.

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Meet the Guest

Chris LaFay is the Founder & CEO of Classic City, a web design and development studio focused on building websites (and making that process feel a lot less confusing and risky). He’s been doing web work since he was a kid, and after a painful “growth phase” where he scaled the wrong way, he rebuilt the business with a lighter team model, a partnership-first growth approach, and a test-drive offer that helps clients try before they buy.

Episode Summary

1. The “hire on hope” origin story

Chris walked through a few phases of his business. The one that matters most here is 2016–2019, when he finally had money in the bank and did what a lot of founders do:

He hired full-time people fast, delegated aggressively, and assumed he’d “figure out sales” once he had time.

Spoiler: it didn’t work. Over about three years, the money ran out.

2. The main trap: overhead raises your minimum survival number

Chris describes the moment where payroll turns from “exciting growth” into “holy crap, I have to feed other families now.”

“You don’t hire on a hope… once you go into that full-time and that guaranteed money… your minimum to survive is that much higher.”

This is one of those agency misconceptions I’ll push on a bit:
A lot of founders think hiring reduces stress because it removes work. In practice, it often moves the stress into a different place: you’re now carrying fixed costs that don’t care if leads dry up.

3. His unique approach: the collective model

Instead of trying to keep every seat filled with full-time staff, he prefers “drafting” the right team per project:

A small set of dependable designers (with different styles)
A small set of dependable developers (with different strengths: WordPress, Shopify, etc.)
A project manager
A couple strategic leads for discovery

The key detail: these aren’t flaky moonlighters. He wants people who do this professionally, so when a project comes in, the answer is “yes” most of the time.

4. The method: rebuild, then delegate the right things

In the 2019–2025 rebuild phase he:

Took more work back on himself
Added a project manager (promoted someone already close to the business)
Hired part-time contractors (dev + design) to handle overflow
Avoided massive overhead while regaining stability

It’s like upgrading a house one room at a time instead of taking out a massive loan and hoping the remodel pays for itself.

5. The partnership playbook (that doesn’t collect dust)

You called out a real agency-world failure mode: “let’s do a referral agreement” … then nobody does anything.

Chris’s answer is basically: stop making partnerships theoretical. Make them shared experiences.

Examples he’s actively running:

Content Day: video crew + coworking space + 16 time slots, founders show up and walk away with clips
Agency owner hangout day: small, intentional, in-person, “talk shop” without the conference vibe
Co-hosted events: one partner brings 70% of the room, the other brings 30% — split the cost, both meet new people

That’s way more real than “hey keep me in mind.”

6. Why he chose websites (when others are ditching them)

He noticed a trend: a lot of agencies were trying to get away from websites and go narrower into SEO/PPC/branding.

Chris basically said: “Cool. If nobody wants the messy job… maybe that’s the opportunity.”

Also: doing marketing retainers made it hard to tell a clean story. Websites let him simplify the offer, simplify pricing, and simplify delivery.

7. The test-drive offer: a homepage prototype in 2 weeks

He wanted a way to reduce risk for buyers who hate the “we won’t know until we start” problem.

So he created a prototype offer:

Design a homepage in 2 weeks for a smaller price
If they move forward, credit that cost toward the full project
If not, they still keep the work (Figma files + notes) as a launch pad

This is also a partnership tool: branding agencies with no web team can bridge from brand → site without committing their client to a full build immediately.