Research
What actually slows an agency down
DL
Dana Lowe
7 min read · 12 Oct 2026
We interviewed 62 studio owners about where the hours actually go. Almost none of them named design or development. The time was lost to handovers, status chasing, and rebuilding the same components for every new client.
Handovers are the real bottleneck
On average a single project changed hands 4.6 times before launch. Each handover added two to five days of wait time, and 38% of the studios had no single place where a client could see current status.
The build was never the problem. Knowing whether the client had approved the hero was the problem.
Three fixes that moved the needle
- 1.
A shared component library, so no page starts from a blank canvas.
- 2.
One approval surface with comments pinned to the exact block.
- 3.
Automatic invoicing tied to milestones, not memory.