I hit a wall about eight months ago. We had three clients requesting work that fell slightly outside what we could legitimately deliver well—one needed a scaled UGC operation we couldn’t staff up for fast enough, another wanted deep US market strategy that honestly required someone with more direct US experience, and a third needed simultaneous campaign coordination across Russian and English-language influencers, which was just logistically beyond our current capacity.
My old instinct was to refer them elsewhere and lose the revenue. But I ended up having a conversation with a partner agency that I respected, and they were dealing with a version of the same problem—they had a Russian-rooted brand client that wanted local market expertise they didn’t have.
What if instead of losing the work, we just co-managed it?
The first project was messy. We didn’t have clear structures for who was responsible for what, how we’d communicate with the client, or how we’d split the work and revenue. But we pushed through, and something clicked: we could actually handle projects at a much larger scale if we trusted another team to handle the parts we weren’t best at.
Since then, we’ve formalized this a bit. We have three trusted partners now where we have actual client-exchange arrangements. Not just “I’ll refer you clients when I’m overflowing,” but actual co-delivery on projects where the client doesn’t even know there are two agencies involved (or does, and it doesn’t matter because it’s seamless).
The game-changer was getting honest about our actual capacity constraints instead of trying to be everything to every client. It sounds counterintuitive, but saying “we’re not the right fit, but here’s who could help” and then actually delivering great work through that partnership has probably generated more revenue than if we’d overextended ourselves.
What’s your experience with this? Are you managing capacity constraints by referring work, or have you tried the co-delivery model? And how do you structure the financials so it doesn’t become a nightmare?
This is the move that actually scales without destroying your team’s quality. We’ve been doing something similar for about a year, and it’s completely changed how I think about growth.
The key thing that took us a while to figure out: you need explicit agreements about client ownership and communication flow before you take on the work. We had one early co-delivery where the client was talking to both of us separately, asking questions, and suddenly we were saying different things. That’s when you lose credibility fast.
Now our model is: one agency is the primary point of contact, the other is the “subcontractor” (even though we’re equals). It’s not ideal terminology, but it clarifies who the client is talking to and who is ultimately accountable for results. We rotate who plays which role depending on whose network the client came from.
The revenue split has to be fair but also sustainable. We usually do a 60/40 split where the primary agency keeps 60% for managing the relationship and doing their part of the work, and the partner gets 40%. Not generous, but it works because we’re thinking longer-term. Over six months, we rotate enough that it balances out.
Honestly, this model plus three trusted partners has probably doubled our addressable market without hiring a single person.
One thing I’d add—make sure you’re actually replacing the work with new capacity utilization, not just adding overhead. Some teams try this and end up with the same workload spread thinner because they’re now managing partnerships on top of client work.
For us, the partners we chose are ones where we can just send a brief and trust they’ll execute without constant back-and-forth. That took maybe three projects to get right, but once we found partners who had that capability, it was smooth.
Also worth thinking about: what happens if a partner stops working out? We have a 30-day exit clause in our agreements just in case there’s a fundamental problem with execution or communication. It’s not adversarial, but it means we’re not locked into a bad partnership.
I’m reading this as a creator, and I have a question: when you’re doing client exchanges like this, how transparent are you with the influencers and creators actually executing the work? Because I’ve been in situations where I’m working on a UGC brief and there are clearly multiple agencies involved, but nobody wants to tell me that upfront. It creates weird awkwardness on revisions and feedback.
I’m wondering if the creators and influencers on your end even notice this is happening, or is it totally invisible to them?
This makes sense from a capacity utilization perspective, but I’m curious about the financial forecasting. If you’re doing a 60/40 split on co-delivered work, how are you modeling that in terms of margins and profitability? Are you treating it as lower-margin work that makes up in volume, or are you pricing it differently when it’s co-delivery versus you doing it solo?
The reason I ask is that from a DTC brand perspective, when we outsource to multiple agencies, we typically demand a discount because we’re managing more complexity. So I’m wondering if your clients are pushing back on pricing when they realize multiple agencies are involved, or if you’re keeping that part of the operation invisible.
Quick question on measurement: when you’re co-delivering, how are you attributing campaign results? Is the partner responsible for their section and you for yours, or are you looking at overall campaign performance as a combined metric?
I ask because I’ve seen partnerships fall apart over attribution arguments. Partner does their part well, but overall campaign underperforms, and suddenly there’s debate about whose fault that is. If you’ve solved for that, I’d be interested in how.
This is exactly what I’m dealing with right now—we’re a Russian tech startup trying to expand into the US market, and we could use both local market expertise and capacity. Your co-delivery model sounds like it could actually work for us, but I’m nervous about the operational complexity of managing multiple partners across time zones.
How do you handle the daily coordination stuff? Are you using shared project management tools, or is it more about clear boundaries so each partner just owns their piece and checks in at milestones?