Big Growth Group

At Big Growth Group we fix ops and delivery inefficiencies for $1-10M agencies so they can increase profit and create founder leverage. 

Install the infrastructure to scale delivery, remove founder-dependency, and run a financially healthy agency.

What’s the outcome? Profit recovery, higher EBITA, and an agency that’s finally scalable, valuable, and sellable.

Co-Founder, CEO

Big Growth Show

Big Growth is the no-BS podcast for digital service founders who want real strategies for scaling without the fluff. Hosted by industry insiders, we challenge conventional wisdom on agency growth, operations and mindset. No cookie-cutter advice, no hype... Just bold, polarising insights to help agency, consultancy and b2b service owners break through the $1M mark and beyond. Get ready for raw, unfiltered conversations that question everything from work-life balance to the obsession with scalability. If you're tired of the usual advice, Big Growth is the podcast that speaks your language.

Co Host

Riu Media

Unlike most agencies or consultants, we focus on a holistic approach to scaling startups.

Think of it as having a full-stack growth team in your business. You get a healthy combination of growth marketing, paid media and data analytics injected into your company DNA.

We specialise in:

- a data-driven approach to customer acquisition 
- customer acquisition strategy development and implementation
- paid media campaigns development and management (Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Google Ads)
- ad creatives production (Ad optimised content, creatives assets, UGCs and influencer content)

The growth agency is led by Romans Ivanovs and supported by a team located in Europe and with our base located in Cambridge, UK.

Founder, Head of Growth

Romans Ivanovs Consulting

At 24, while working as a barista at Imperial College, my manager paid me to coach her.

As a result, she was offered a senior position at another company. And I left to pursue coaching full-time.

One year later, some of my clients included:

* A serial FinTech entrepreneur
* CTO of A-series startup
* A serial 8-fig eCommerce entrepreneur
* A school teacher turned standup comedian
* HNWI (25 years older than me)
* Award-winning web-design agency owner

Most people didn't understand what I was doing. Others questioned how can someone be a personal coach at that age.

I did what I believed in. And it worked. I've successfully overcome my fears and insecurities, spoken at 70+ events, and worked with incredible individuals from all over the world.

This led me to launch other ventures in the coaching and agency industries.

Founder Coach

The Leadership Network®

Identified and liaised with senior executives of Fortune 500 companies that could add value to premium level masterclasses conducted around the world in the areas of Lean Manufacturing, Innovation Management, Supply Chain Management and Creative Leadership – eg: Tesla, Nestle, Roche, Lego, Toyota

• Without previous experience in direct sales, I brought £100,000 in revenue over the period of eleven months

• In my seventh month, I negotiated and closed a new deal worth £20,000 with a C-level executive

• Established new relationships with global clients like UTC Aerospace Systems, Novartis, Camso

Lead Consultant | Liaised with Fortune 500

The Institute of Directors

Member

Co-Founder @ Big Growth Group | Helping B2B leaders build content-led Growth Engines.

You’ve built a strong $1-10M digital agency (most likely in eCom).


The team is in place and revenue is growing. But under the surface, things are starting to feel, let's say somewhat heavier.

Delivery is getting bloated, margins are tighter than they should be and projects take too many people, too many steps, and too much time.

“The big problem”

The problem isn’t bad people or even bad processes. It’s an agency business that was never re-architected after $1M.

The business was built for growth, not efficient scale. Ops grew reactively, not strategically. The business has grown but leadership hasn’t levelled up to match it.

How we fix it:

We fix ops and delivery inefficiencies to unlock $1M+/year in profit and turn your agency into a scalable asset.

Real results our clients see:

- $250k-1M+/year in recovered margin over 12+ months
- 20–40% reduction in over-servicing
- Teams that deliver without founder input
- Increased EBITA
- A delivery model that’s scalable, repeatable, and exit-ready

Who we work with

Agency founders doing $1–10M in revenue who want to:
- Scale cleanly
- Fix profit leaks
- Step out of ops
- Or prep for a future exit

If that’s you, we should talk.

Book a diagnostic call

We’ll show you where you’re leaking time and margin—and how to get it back:
https://calendar.app.google/cB9XPCeTfr1zyydH6

He's responsible for 200% growth YoY inside multiple agencies. Currently a Chief Commercial Officer and Board Director at Embryo.

James Guérin is on the Big Growth Show. 

This is THE FIRST time we’ve properly gone deep on the commercial side of agency leadership.

And trust me, James delivers the blueprint.

🎙️We unpack:

- A must-do shift moving from founder-led to team-led sales
- Weekly non-negotiables for outbound & relationship building
- The 80/20 psychology rule of commercial success
- What it really takes to win large clients
- Red flags in pitch decks and sales process

If you’re an agency founder, revenue leader, or thinking “how to grow?” - this episode is a must.

THE FULL EPISODE is in the comments.

Romans Ivanovs

You built a £500k-£5M/y agency business. We make it run without you.

Whoever is saying that removing yourself from operations makes you a mediocre agency… please 🤦‍♂️ 

I keep seeing these half-baked “marketing angles” floating around social.

“Bezos still reads customer complaints.”
“Elon Musk slept on the production floor.”

Cool. And?

These were context-specific behaviours during extreme phases of the company. People now quote them like universal operating principles for every £1–£5M agency founder...

The point isn’t to disappear from your business. The point is to stop being the only adult in the room who knows what’s going on.

Yes, as a founder you need to care, you need standards... and you need your finger on the pulse. But that’s very different from being the pulse!!

Pretty sure Jobs wasn’t colour-coding delivery calendars.

So...

Be obsessive about

standards
taste

but not the operational babysitting.

This shouldn't work... 158 ad accounts. 2-person team. High multi-six figures a month. 90% margins.

No PMs, no media buyers, no office, a couple of VAs.

We sat down with Erwin Keijzer, co-founder of Digiceptual to talk about:

1/ how he achieved these numbers with almost no team

2/ what "ingredients" made this setup succesfull 

3/ ruthless focus, deep client integration and zero tolerance for operational bloat

4/ trade-offs

This might be the most "efficient" agency setup we’ve seen.


P.S. If you want to see what’s holding your agency back from running lean and scalable operations - take our Scale Readiness Assessment.

(Link in the comments)👇

It’s already the 2nd time we’ve had to do a clean-up after an “ops consultant.” The pattern is almost comical now...🙄 

They come in, charge a decent retainer, build a graveyard of dashboards nobody opens and/or drops a few "how to" Looms.

6 months later when the founder finally realises nothing actually improved, the consultant’s already off preaching about “building scalable delivery engines” to their next client.

Ladies and gentleman... real ops is Change Management. You are..., we are in a business of change!

Second, you're in business of people and processes. Former creates the later. Not vice versa. (The same message is for in-house ops people and leadership teams).

You better sweat your bottom to understand how your people think, decide, and behave when things break.

No one needs another SOP for SOPs, it's absolute garbage!!


Rant over.

eCom and B2B agency owners crossing £1M–£2M keep telling us the same thing... the next "growth jump" is nowhere near as linear as they expected.

From the outside, it looks fairly simple:

more clients → more people → more revenue → more scale.

In practice everything that worked up to £1M starts breaking after that point.

- Senior hires don’t “own” anything the way you hoped
- Capacity planning becomes a guessing game
- If you don't track time (which you have to) you're likely second-guessing your team's utilisation
- Finance is still a lagging indicator instead of a steering tool
- You start being poached right and left

I can go on and on...

A real "operating system is NOT

“more effort”
“more dashboards"
“more sales for the sake of it"

It's the one that runs without reinventing itself every week. And the one that doesn’t need the founder as the emotional stabiliser (and team baby sitter).

At Big Growth Group, we've built an agency operational infrastructure that transforms a founder-dependent business into a company that performs on systems.

It's developed around "4 pillars"

- Founder Shift
- Ops & Delivery Engine
- Finance Core
- AI & Automations

If you want to see exactly where your agency is breaking and which pillar is holding you back  start with our Agency Scale Readiness Assessment. (Ling in comments). 👇

From founder-led agencies to scalable £5M+ operations

Getting out of ops and management is soo easy…

You just need:

 - A team that reads your mind
 - Clients who never change their mind
 - Systems that build themselves
 - Profit that magically appears despite inefficiency
 - And a week off in Bali to “think strategically”

Simple.

Daily I go through 20–40 new agency LinkedIn profiles. 

And what I see? 😳 

About half of the agencies with 11+ people have a Head of Ops who was promoted internally.

Usually from Head of PPC, Senior Paid Media, or some other delivery role. And honestly, that’s often the right move.

Someone who’s been deep in delivery for years usually knows:
how work actually flows...

where things break
how the team thinks
what clients expect
and where the founder gets stuck

They’ve already lived the pressure of deadlines, capacity issues, etc. That experience gives them the operational intuition you need to run the ops.

Does it mean that the internal promotion will always work out? 

Of course, no.

Some people stay too tactical. Some never make the identity shift from doer to operator.

But as a starting point, promoting someone who’s sat inside the machine often gives you a much stronger baseline than hiring an outsider who “knows frameworks” but has zero context for your actual business.

I’ve heard a few retention agency owners grumble that Common Thread Collective has been poaching their strategists.

Honestly? Of course they are.

CTC has figured out the same thing we all know but rarely say out loud... smaller agencies are the training ground. They wait for you to develop young talent, sharpen their thinking, and expose them to the real chaos of hands-on delivery… then they swoop.

[After 🧲 Wiehan Britz commented on this post that I was assuming CTC’s mindset a bit too literally, it made me clarify something: I’m not suggesting big agencies sit there thinking, “Smaller shops are our training grounds so let’s raid them.” It’s not that calculated. The pattern I’m pointing at is more so the industry reality.]

And yes, bigger salary is one lever but it’s not the only one, and it’s definitely not always the strongest.

So you shouldn't try to outbid a bigger shop. What you should do is to think strategically.

For example your advantage COULD BE everything they can’t offer:

a place where hungry people can actually move fast
a place where ideas get implemented, not presented to a board
a place where experimentation isn’t a quarterly “initiative”
a place where they can see their fingerprints on the growth of the agency
a place where they’re not drowned in two layers of management just to suggest a new workflow

Big agencies look glamorous from the outside… until you’re inside one.

So remind your team of the truth: they’re not “waiting” for an opportunity. They’re already in the environment where they can grow the fastest.
Keep giving them ownership. Keep giving them scary problems. Keep letting them innovate.

The game isn’t retention through fear.

The game is retention through agency.

Work with winners. They’ll win with you or without you... you’re just the accelerant.

You can’t create a winner out of someone who doesn’t want to win. 

You can give a "losing" founder all the frameworks, dashboards, systems, playbooks in the freaking world... they’ll still find a way to choke it. They’ll second-guess, drag their feet, overthink, get distracted, or look for someone to blame.

So

Work with winners.
They’ll win with you or without you.

With you, they just win sooner, bigger and with fewer scars.

"I know I should be delegating more, but it’s hard to let go. I’m worried things won’t get done right if I’m not involved, so I end up taking on too much myself. It’s exhausting, and I know it’s not sustainable, but I can’t seem to step back."

Quick reality check in numbers before we dive deeper:

💰
- Rev cap: £1.5M–£2M/year max (with brute force + short-term help)
- Lost upside: Not reaching £4M–£5M potential = £2M–£3M/year in missed revenue

⌛
- You likely work: 60–70 hours/week
- True strategic time: ~5–10 hours/week (if that)
- Hourly leverage: Sub-£500/hr (should be 2K+/hr)

📉 
Drag cost: probs ~£200-400K/year in profit leakage and  a massive drag on optionality (new ventures, exits, investments).

So your opportunity cost of “Not Designing Yourself Out” is...

a f**** BIG one.


Not to mention that trying to fix your team’s execution by inserting yourself everywhere will never scale. You essentially erode your leverage and guarantee burnout.

You need to ask yourself:

“Is this a skill issue or a system issue?”

If your team truly can’t deliver without you:

- Either you hired wrong,
- Or your systems are weak,
- Or you haven’t trained them to think in outcomes (only tasks).

But staying in the weeds is never a fix. Every month you delay, you burn ~£25K–£40K in compounding upside.

Also ask:

What would the £3 or £5M version of me never do again?

What system do I need so I never touch client delivery again?

What single hire or restructure would make me irrelevant to ops within 90 days?

You want to step into a £2K/hr founder zone? Start by getting crystal clear on what’s actually blocking scale: team, delivery, or your own operating model.

Run your business through our Agency Scale Readiness Assessment.

It’ll show you exactly where your systems, profit, and leverage are leaking (and how to fix it). LINK in the comments 👇

The most hyper-clever founders I've in my life often produce the weakest teams and businesses.

It’s actually an interesting case because, on paper, they should be unstoppable. But I've spent enough time working with agency owners and their teams to see the pattern repeat itself almost perfectly.

A founder/CEO who prides themselves on their “brilliance” inevitably creates an organisation optimised for their validation, not for accurate feedback.

Teams (people) learn quickly that the safest route is to amplify the founder’s stories, not the system’s signals. And once a system stops correcting error, it doesn’t matter how clever the founder thinks they are… the whole business drifts into blindness.

Paradoxically, the smarter the founder thinks they are, the more reality (truth) must bend to protect that image… and the less reality (truth) gets through.

In a genuinely adaptive organisation, feedback flows freely and egos take the shape of the truth.

In a cleverness-centric one, the truth takes the shape of the ego.

Another “tragedy” is that many of these founders/CEOs genuinely believe they are being rigorous.

They are not at all. They are merely being consistent with their own biases.

If you’re in this scenario as a founder you’re likely over-protecting yourself from being wrong and therefore lose the only advantage a founder truly has:

the ability to be corrected by reality faster than anyone else.

You need to scale to $10M+, hire 80+ people, or chase a $1M EBIT target before anyone will ever buy your agency... 🙄 

Jonathan Smith, founder of Catch (acquired) and Managing Partner at Draft Partners says it's complete nonsense.

In this episode of Big Growth Show, we break down:

– Why the next 5 years belong to small, specialised agencies
– How founders trap themselves in the treadmill of delivery
– How AI is making 10-person teams more powerful
– How to design an agency you can eventually step out of (and sell)

If you’re an agency owner thinking about growth, scale, or a future exit... this conversation will save you years of pain!

LINK IN THE COMMENTS 👇

Why you need to literally obsess over your Ops and Delivery Engine as a $1-3M eCom performance marketing agency.

There's a lot to cover, as I can probably write a series of essays on this so let's stick to:

3 main points
and some "first principles"


1. CAPACITY IS FINATE. SCOPE IS NOT.

You only have so many skilled hours and so much high-quality attention per week. If you don’t define and protect it, clients will consume all of it.

What that looks like in a CreativePerformance/Meta/TikTok shop:

Every client wants:

new angles
new hooks
report breakdowns
extra calls when performance dips
support across landing pages, full-funnel strategy, etc “just this once”.

Creative production is treated as “included” instead of a clearly priced product. As a result at $1–3M: team is permanently/beyond 100% utilisation OR the complete opposite: some are >65% utilised but they say they're at full capacity.

So if you don’t define a unit of value (X creatives / Y campaigns / Z changes per month) and tie it to price, your capacity is always overdrawn.


2. VARIANCE EATS MARGIN FOR BREAKFAST.

Again, think from the first principle: High variability + low standardisation = chaos.

In paid media for DTC you get variance everywhere:

Client side with different:
MER/ROAS targets,
expectations of “communication”,
levels of decision speed

Tech side/supply chain:
dirty pixels/random events fired
awkward Shopify setups
3 warehouses and 2 markets

Market side:
CPM swings
platform changes
trend fatigue cycles

If your delivery system looks like “every Creative Strategist/Pod/AM Leader does things their own way”, this variance hits the team full force.

As a result:

Two “identical” $5k/mo clients cost wildly different amounts of time and stress. The system doesn’t absorb variance... so your people do. That’s where they, your and your agency gets a sizeable amount of operational drag.


3. INTERNAL COMMS COST.

As you add people, communication lines grow roughly with n². At £300–800k, the founder manages a CS, 2-3MBs, maybe a creative partner/freelancer. You can kinda wing it on WhatsApp, Slack and gut.

By £1–3M you now have: 

media buyers
creative strategists
editors
account managers/POD leads
maybe a “head of” something
plus the founder still in client threads.

This means that without redesigning the org the founder becomes the escalation point for almost everything.


FINAL THOUGHTS

As a business you get stuck because your operating system can’t carry the weight you keep piling on it. Every agency owner at this stage I talk to already feels it. They know the delivery and ops engine is dragging. This means that at this level, ops isn’t “nice to have”. Food for thought...

______

If you want clarity on what’s actually holding you back…

We built the Agency Scale Readiness Assessment to show founders exactly where their drag is coming from across delivery, ops, profit, and leadership.
(Link in the comments).

We’ve audited ≈30 agencies between £300k and £5M in 2025. Here’s what the patterns actually look like so far...

After sitting inside the guts of that many agencies, you lose the romantic idea that every founder is working with a unique set of challenges. They’re not.

What founders describe as "unique problem" is, in reality, the same recurring constraints wearing different clothes. Different niche, different client list, different team… same bottlenecks.

So at Big Growth Group we land on the same conclusion every single time: every agency problem traces back to one of four pillars –

1. the founder’s blindspots
2. structural growth bottlenecks
3. margin leaks
4. or missing leverage through AI

Fix these, and the business becomes scalable without you (the founder) being pulled back in delivery and ops.

This is why our methodology exists in the first place.

If you want to know which of the four pillars is holding you back, take the Agency Scale Readiness Assessment.

It’s the fastest way to see your real constraints without the story you’ve been telling yourself (Link in the comments).

Two identical scopes can have wildly different operational costs in an eCommerce agency.

Slack-heavy clients, needy founders, constant “just one thing” requests… that’s where agencies bleed.

So let’s just call it out:

Client behaviour is part of the scope.

(And eCom retention agencies know the pain very well: tech stack chaos, multi-store setups, legacy systems... all of this quietly inflates the real cost of delivery.)

That's your Internal Complexity Fee.

If you don’t price for it, you eat it.

But if f you see large swings even after applying ICF, it means:

the fee isn’t high enough,
or the team isn’t following a consistent delivery system,
or the client isn’t managed tightly enough.

Same deliverables ≠ same workload.

Complexity, behaviour, and tech debt create real variance... so bake it into your pricing model, or your margins will keep leaking.

I once worked with the CEO of one of Europe’s top 10 fastest-growing tech companies (valued at $1B+). One of the sharpest and most intense people I’ve ever engaged with. Sceptical of most coaches and consultants, quick to cut through surface-level thinking (as expected).


When we started he was under a lot of pressure delivering on the long-term growth strategy.

During one of the calls I asked what he ultimately wanted to achieve, he said:

“I want to become number one in our industry globally.”

That level of ambition demands precision i.e. you need absolute clarity about WHERE to direct your energy and what to ELIMINATE.

But in day-to-day he was stretched thin with too many commitments. Multiple report lines, overlapping projects, constant demands, etc. Over time, that edge he was known for started to dull.

So I introduced him to what we call at Big Growth Group "Personal Operating Modes".

It’s a concept I built around the philosophy in Essentialism (by Greg McKeown, a book I told him to read).

You operate in one of two states:

1/ Default Mode (driven by pressure, noise, and urgency)

2/ Clarity Mode (deliberate, selective, and built for scale.)

Three calls later, he said:

“Romans, I realised how many things I’m involved in keep me in Default Mode... I’ve taken your advice and the book seriously. I’ve cut half my projects, restructured the board, and narrowed our focus to one thing. I’ve already communicated the new priorities and non-negotiables to the team.”

I genuinely felt in awe because of how fast he snapped back into clarity once he saw the pattern


TL;DR
When an agency hits that £$1–3M range, "chaos" often looks like momentum. You keep saying yes to projects, hires, and ideas until everything feels urgent and nothing feels sharp. That’s Default Mode.

The real inflection point comes when you shift into Clarity Mode cutting what doesn’t compound or adds to your goals.

An award-winning agency owner and former client of ours is looking to invest in an emerging agency.

I’ve personally watched him build a web design and development agency from zero into a leading player in the UK.

He’s operated across sectors like Formula 1, TV, Hotel & Leisure, Ecommerce, Fitness, and national Franchise networks, so he understands how to win and grow clients in demanding environments.

He’s specifically looking for an early-stage agency

- Doing around £100k–£250k in annual revenue.
- Already proven it can win client
- But is still at the stage where the right strategy and the right capital can unlock real  scale

Feel free to comment/DM for an intro.

The more agency founders I ask, the more I realise this thing might need a waitlist. 👀

We met Growthub team early this year.

Their agency was growing fast, high-performing creative work, clients in the eCom SaaS space. 

But under the hood things felt more fragile than they looked. Not knowing what to do or how to analyse a situation… Bogdan asked to have a call with us.

We ended up working together.

Results (so far):

- On the way to hit €2M in ARR
- A team that runs without constant oversight 
- 3X faster onboarding
- 10+ hours a week freed for the founder
- 25–40% lift in output per head
- Higher performance across the agency

_______

If you want to know where your own bottlenecks, blind spots, and margin leaks actually sit (not where you think they sit) take our Agency Scale Readiness Assessment

Click “Visit my website” below my name.

Case Study: Growthub x Big Growth Group

End of the week. Perfect time to fix problems by… delegating them to you business partner...

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