Why We Built Five Companies Instead of One Agency

The easiest move available to any agency that succeeds at one service is to add a second. The client is already there, the budget exists, and the logic is hard to argue with: why let a competitor take it? That is how a content agency becomes a "full-service" agency within a year, and how it discovers two years later that the service which built its reputation has quietly become its weakest.

We took the other road. Instead of one agency offering five services, Heracleon operates separate companies, each doing one thing: Naaktob for content and SEO, Nsweq for paid media, Noprmg for websites and stores, Nosmm for brand and design, and Montashr for integrated management. This is the reasoning behind that, including what it cost us.

The real problem with the full-service model

The problem is not offering several services. It is the economics of delivering them under one roof and one invoice.

When an agency sells a monthly package covering content, ads and design at a single price, what it is really selling is an average. The client cannot tell how much of the fee bought the content, and frequently neither can the agency. The predictable consequence is that whichever service consumes more time than it was priced for gets quietly trimmed: articles shift from research to fast drafting, design shifts from a system to recycled templates, and nobody notices, because the invoice is one number and the reported metric is general.

We call this cross-subsidising mediocrity: the margin from the strong service covers the loss on the weak one, so the weak one survives with no pressure to improve.

The second problem runs deeper. The five disciplines do not share a rhythm or a unit of measurement. Paid media is judged weekly and needs daily decisions. SEO is judged quarterly and needs patience and restraint. Development is a project with a beginning and an end. Brand identity is built once and handed over as a system. Running all four through the same weekly meeting with the same account manager means three of them are being run at the wrong tempo.

What changed after the split

Each company defends its own number. Every venture has its own accounts, its own profitability and its own lead. When a retainer underperforms at Nsweq, it cannot be buried under Noprmg's margin in a combined report. The loss is visible and attributable, and that alone changes behaviour more than any internal pep talk.

Clients buy only what they need. A company that needs content is not pushed into a package that includes design it never asked for. That looks like forfeited revenue in the short term, and it is — but it raises retention, because a client paying for exactly what they use does not go shopping for a cheaper alternative every six months.

Specialists attract specialists. A good designer does not want to be the designer at a marketing agency; they want to work among designers. Separation turned each company into an environment where the discipline is the product rather than a supporting function, and that changed who accepted our offers and who stayed.

Standards travel, people don't have to. Separation is not isolation. All five companies share one operating system: the same way of writing scope, the same definition of an acceptable deliverable, the same monthly report structure, and the same rule that work is priced by output rather than by hours. When a practice works in one company it reaches the other four within weeks — a benefit five independently owned agencies never get.

What it cost

This account would not be honest if it listed only the gains.

Administration is heavier. Five entities means five sets of filings, accounts and obligations. That is a real cost that never appears in a pitch deck.

Cross-selling is harder. In a single agency the second service is sold in a meeting. Here it requires a genuine handover between companies with its own context — which is precisely why Montashr exists: a single point of entry for clients who need several disciplines without managing four suppliers themselves.

Visual fragmentation is a permanent risk. Five brands can easily read as five unrelated companies. That is why the design system is shared across the group's sites: the same type family and the same layout logic, with colour as the only differentiator.

When this model is the wrong answer

We would not claim it is universally correct. If your total volume is smaller than one full team, separation is administrative luxury that consumes the hours you should be spending on the work. And if your services overlap so heavily that one is meaningless without the others, separation introduces friction with nothing to show for it.

The model earns its keep when the services genuinely stand alone — each one can be sold and can succeed by itself — and when one of them going soft would damage the reputation of the rest.

What this means if you are buying

If you are choosing between a full-service agency and a group of specialists, do not count the services on offer. Ask two questions instead: who, by name, is responsible for each service? and what single number is that service judged on? If either answer is vague for one of the five, you are probably funding its mediocrity out of your own budget.

The same test applies inside your own company. Our ventures are organised this way for exactly this reason, and if you are unsure which discipline your situation calls for, describe it to us — including the possibility that the answer is none of them yet.