Pay People Like Adults

Jan 21

Written By David Hoos

Interview: How Figmints Built “Slices” to Make Pay Fair, Performance-Based, and Predictable

Behind the Agency Podcast with James Kwan, CEO of Figmints

Watch

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

Core pain: Agencies want to pay great people more… but cash flow and “when is it safe?” makes founders freeze.
Unexpected insight: A lot of agencies track the wrong “health metric” (billable hours can look great while you’re actually bleeding profit).
Framework: Slices = split every dollar that comes in into clear percentages (lead source, sales, account mgmt/strategy, fulfillment, ops, profit).
Mistake to avoid: Celebrating “we hit our billable target” when the project is blown up and you’re basically paying for lunch with your profit.
Second mistake: Hiring sales when the agency isn’t packaged well (too broad, too many services, too hard to teach a salesperson what the founder knows).
Notable tactic: Make compensation a “winnable game” with a visible path: “If you want $150K, here’s exactly what you’d have to do.”
Real-world impact: A designer who thought $50K was the ceiling used Slices, took on more “slices,” learned new roles, and grew to $140K–$150K+.
Big bet: James is productizing this (cohorts now, book + app coming) because spreadsheets won’t carry the idea far enough.

Meet the Guest

James Kwan is the CEO of Figmints, a full-service digital marketing firm (15–20 people, fully virtual) originally based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He started in UI/UX, was employee #5 at CBS.com, and has worked on major brands like Mini Cooper, Virgin Mobile, and Puma. These days, James helps agency owners and service firms build compensation systems that are fair, transparent, and tied to real dollars, not vibes.

(Before Figmints, James was deep in UI/UX and large brand work. He’s always been “agency by day, product R&D by night.”)

Episode Summary

1. Backstory: a designer who fell in love with business

James didn’t start as a finance guy. He came up through UI/UX and brand work. But once Figmints got into HubSpot and marketing automation, he got hooked on the “levers” of business and started building systems (EOS mindset).

The big tension showed up fast: how do you retain top people when they want (and deserve) more money… but the agency doesn’t have predictable margin?

2. The main tension: hiring + growth turns into a stress cycle

If you’ve run an agency for any amount of time, you know this treadmill:

you sign work → you hire
you hire → work slows
work slows → you panic-sell
panic-sell → you take anything
then you’re back to “we’re not niched enough” and everything gets harder again

Slices was James trying to get off that treadmill.

“We were tracking… almost a vanity metric.”

3. Their unique way of solving it: tie pay to the dollar, not the hour

James basically calls out a common agency trap:

A lot of us treat billable hours like the truth. But you can “hit the hours” while being totally upside down on a project.

He had a moment where the team celebrated hitting a weekly billing target… and then realized they were triple over budget on a project.

That’s when the lightbulb went off: stop worshiping time. Track the dollars and allocate them on purpose.

4. Framework: how Slices works (in plain English)

Here’s the model James described:

Every dollar that comes in gets split into buckets as percentages:

Lead source / marketing (how the work got here)
Sales (who sold it)
Account management + strategy
Fulfillment / production
Operations
Profit

Why this matters: it creates a dynamic budget that scales with revenue and gives people clear upside.

If someone wants $100K, $150K, $200K, you can map the path:

what work they need to take on
what roles/slices they need to add
what “winning” looks like

It also forces reality: if someone can only handle 2 clients, either those clients need to be big enough… or the math doesn’t work.

5. The cringe moment: celebrating the wrong thing

The “Super Bowl” lunch story is the perfect example.

They’d buy lunch if they hit the weekly billables by Thursday. Everyone’s pumped. Founder feels like the business is healthy.

Then James realized: some of those billables were just them eating project overruns.

So they were rewarding performance using a scoreboard that could lie.

Slices was built to make the scoreboard harder to fake.

6. Where the founder still belongs: designing the game

One thing I liked here: this isn’t “set it and forget it.”

The founder’s job becomes:

define what “good” looks like
make the rules visible
make the game winnable
then let motivated people run

This is the opposite of the typical agency fog where comp is mysterious and raises feel like emotional negotiations.

7. Hiring + scaling lessons (especially sales)

James has hired 6–7 salespeople and called it: none were terrific successes.

His diagnosis was blunt and honest:

selling Figmints is hard when the agency is broad
the founder knows too much context to easily transfer it to a salesperson
consultative sales is harder to teach when the offer is basically “we can do a lot of stuff”

What he’s doing differently now:

a specific product
a specific target market
hire sales to sell that, not the whole “full-service agency”
use Slices to make comp predictable and performance-based for sales too

That’s the practical bridge out of founder-led sales: package the thing.

Notable Quotes

“Profit First… might help operationally, but doesn’t help people along the way.”

“We were tracking… almost a vanity metric.”

“Slices is designed to teach people how the game is played.”

“Surprise, you already have Slices whether you think you do or not.”

Learn More / Get in Touch

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamkwon/
Slices → Join the Slices cohort (James mentioned new cohorts launching soon)
Figmints → https://www.figmints.com/