Cover by Erik Guarisco.
How to build a service business without sacrificing your margins, your team, or your standards.
By Maxx Burman | October 2026
I spent the first decade of my career working for agencies, from visual effects studios to production companies and design agencies.
The work changed, but the business model was largely the same: a client hired us to make something, we assembled a team to deliver it, and we got paid for the service we provided.
Over those years, I worked at 35 different studios and saw nearly every version of this model. Some were small teams of a dozen people, others had hundreds of employees, and many were doing extraordinary work for the biggest films, games, and brands in the world. Nearly a third of those studios are no longer in business.
I eventually started a visual effects studio of my own, and within a year we were working on projects for Game of Thrones, League of Legends, and Far Cry. We had talented artists, exciting clients, and work I was incredibly proud of, but underneath all of it was a business model I could not make work. After a year, I shut the studio down.
The experience reinforced many of the problems I had watched other agencies struggle with throughout my career. Margins were thin, projects were difficult to predict, and the incentives between the agency and the client were often misaligned. When a project took longer than expected, a deadline moved up, or another round of revisions appeared, the agency was usually the one left absorbing the cost.
I wanted to build the opposite kind of company. Instead of projects, I wanted to make products. Instead of clients, I wanted to have customers. And instead of rebuilding revenue from scratch with every engagement, I wanted to create something once and sell it thousands of times.
After spending so much of my career inside service businesses, I had become convinced that owning the product and the customer relationship was the only way to build the kind of scalable, highly profitable creative company I wanted to own.
So when I started KitBash, I made one rule very clear: We don’t do client work.
The Rule I Broke
For the first few years of KitBash, that rule was easy to follow. Studios would regularly reach out asking if we could build something custom for a film or a game, and I would turn the work down. We had built the kind of business I wanted: we created products we owned, sold them directly to customers, and could continue generating revenue from the same work long after it was finished.
Then, in 2023, Epic Games approached us about collaborating with Paramount on a custom Kit for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For years, I had looked at LEGO as a reference for what KitBash could eventually become, not just because of the products they made, but because of the worlds they helped people create. Their partnerships with franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter gave fans the pieces to build something of their own inside a universe they already loved.
That was a direction I had wanted to explore with KitBash for a long time. A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Kit could give creators the same kind of opportunity: the tools to build their own environments, tell their own stories, and create experiences inside a world that already meant something to them. It felt less like a doorway into a category of products I had always hoped we could make.
But the economics were still fundamentally different from our core business. We would not own the intellectual property, we would not own the customer relationship, and we would not have a product we could continue selling indefinitely. No matter how exciting the opportunity was, we would still be the vendor.
I did not want to make an exception simply because the project was appealing. If we were going to build a team, create a production pipeline, and open the company to this kind of work, I wanted to know that we were building something we would still want if the opportunity repeated itself. Saying yes to one project was easy; deciding whether we wanted this to become part of the business was a much bigger question.
So I went back through everything I had learned from working at dozens of studios, running one myself, and then spending years building a product company from the other side of the equation. I wanted to understand what had made so many agency models fragile, which parts were actually fixable, and what we would need to do differently.
The question was no longer whether we should take this one project. It was: What would an agency have to look like for me to actually want to own it?
Before agreeing to this kind of work, we asked ourselves a different question: what would have to be true for us to want to do it repeatedly? We were going to build a team around these projects, develop a production pipeline to support them, and invest in systems that could become a meaningful part of the company. If we were going to make that investment, I wanted to design the model around doing the work ten times, not surviving it once.
That distinction changed the way I evaluated almost every decision. On a single project, it is easy to convince yourself to be flexible: absorb an extra revision, accept an aggressive deadline, or make an exception on price because the opportunity feels worth it. But when you ask whether you would willingly make the same concession on every project, the risks become much easier to see.
Looking at agency work this way helped me understand why so many service businesses struggle with profitability. Creative projects will always contain uncertainty: the scope may evolve, feedback may take longer than expected, and an idea may require more iteration than anyone anticipated. The problem is not that these risks exist; it is how consistently the traditional agency model asks one side of the relationship to absorb them.
A fixed bid gives the client certainty around cost by making the agency responsible when the work takes longer than expected. A client-defined deadline gives them certainty around timing by pushing the consequences of delays and bad assumptions onto the production team. Discounts, scope changes, and one-off requests create the same imbalance in different forms, moving more financial and operational risk toward the agency.
That movement of risk is one of the biggest reasons agency margins disappear. Every unexpected revision, production delay, or additional request has to be paid for somewhere, and when the client is protected from the cost, the agency is left with only a few options: accept a lower margin, compromise the quality of the work, or ask the team to make up the difference with more time and effort.
Any one of those compromises can be justified once. Repeated across ten projects, they become the economics of the company.
So the goal was not to eliminate uncertainty from creative work or somehow become perfect at predicting every project. We needed to design a model where risk was visible, where the economics could withstand the inevitable unknowns, and where the same decisions would still make sense when repeated again and again.
From that exercise, we developed five pillars for how we would approach agency work.
5 Pillars of a Profitable Agency
The pillars we created were not designed to make every project easier to win. In many cases, they did the opposite. They helped us identify the projects we should not take, the clients we were not aligned with, and the compromises that would eventually make the business less profitable.
Charge For Time.
The appeal of a flat bid is obvious: if an agency finishes a project early, the extra efficiency becomes additional profit. In my experience, that almost never happens. Work consistently expands to fill the time available, and while a flat bid gives the client certainty around cost, it creates uncertainty for the agency’s margin. Every estimate becomes a gamble, and every note or revision starts to feel like a threat to profitability.
Instead, we charge per person, per week on every project. Our production team estimates how many people and how many weeks the work will require, and that schedule creates the projected budget. If the project moves smoothly with minimal iteration, the client spends less than their maximum budget; if they want additional notes, exploration, or revisions, there is a clear and transparent cost associated with that time.
First Projects Are Full Price.
A common trap in agency work is discounting the first project to get in the door. The logic is that if you can make the first engagement cheaper, faster, or easier for the client, you can prove your value and make up the difference on larger projects later. The problem is that the first project establishes the baseline for the entire relationship.
Whatever you agree to the first time becomes what the client believes is normal. If you discount the price, compress the timeline, or make exceptions to your process, raising the price or resetting those expectations later becomes significantly harder. Instead of earning a great long-term client, you may simply be creating a relationship you don't want to repeat.
We charge full price on the first project and protect the timeline, resources, and process we believe the work requires. Once we have successfully worked together, we can look for efficiencies and ways to make future projects better for both sides, but we never compromise the first engagement just to get in the door.
Own The Timeline.
Clients often come to an agency with an arbitrary deadline or a timeline built without a nuanced understanding of production realities, iteration needs, or internal constraints. When an agency accepts that schedule, it also inherits all of the assumptions behind it. Even small shifts can cascade into missed milestones, crunch, and eventually burnout, compromising both the health of the team and the quality of the work.
We build timelines in the opposite direction. We start with the client’s needs, then work forward from the start date with our production team to estimate how much time, iteration, and buffer the project realistically requires based on our experience with similar work. If that timeline works for the client, great. If it does not, we revise the scope or resources until the schedule works for everyone.
Prioritize Compounding Work.
One-off work can be profitable and still be bad for the business. If every project requires a new pipeline, unfamiliar capabilities, or a custom process that will never be used again, the agency is forced to solve a new set of problems every time it grows. Revenue may increase, but so does complexity.
We prioritize work that builds on capabilities we already have or want to strengthen. Every project should leverage our expertise, improve our existing systems, or create processes we can use again, so the investment we make today makes the next project easier and more profitable.
Say No Often.
A common trap in agency work is believing that always saying yes makes clients happier and more likely to return. In practice, too much accommodation usually makes the work worse. It bypasses the expertise the client hired you for and leads to compromised quality, unclear expectations, and broken processes.
Clients will often make requests that seem reasonable in isolation but create problems when combined. Part of the agency’s job is to guide the work, protect the process, and be willing to say no when a request will hurt the outcome. Clear expectations and consistently excellent delivery build more trust than constant accommodation.
Great service is not compliance. It is leading a client to a winning outcome.
Closing Thoughts
I don’t know what my next mountain is yet, but I know I’m not looking for something I can do for the rest of my life. I don’t believe a successful pursuit needs to last forever. It should last long enough to take us where we set out to go.
When I look back at my first two careers, I’m incredibly proud of how far I climbed. But in both cases, my desire ran out before I reached the summit I had imagined. I spent years improving my skills, learning how to overcome more difficult challenges, and chasing goals with all of my energy, without ever considering that desire itself was something I needed to manage along the way.
I want to approach the next climb differently. I don’t want a smaller mountain, and I don’t want to climb it with less intensity. I want to choose something big enough to generate enormous desire, give myself to the journey fully, and protect the parts of the pursuit that make me want to keep going.
If you’re climbing your own mountain, I hope something here helps you get closer to the summit you’re chasing. And if you’ve reached the point where you no longer want to continue, I hope you can look back with pride at how far you came, find peace with where you landed, and choose another mountain worth climbing.