Why agencies sell packages, and why you learned to ask for one
A business owner asked me recently whether we had packages. It's the most reasonable question in the world and it's also the whole problem, so I want to answer it properly rather than just saying no.
She was paying three different companies at once. One for social ads, one for search, one for a listings service. Three monthly invoices, no work booked, and every enquiry coming through wanting the cheapest price. She'd done nothing wrong. She'd done exactly what the market taught her to do, which is find the companies that do the things, and buy the things.
What a package is actually for
Here's the bit nobody says out loud. A package isn't designed around what a business needs. It's designed around what can be sold repeatedly without a conversation.
Think about what that constraint does. If the same thing has to work for a retaining wall builder in a country town and a dentist in a capital city, then it can only contain what those two have in common. Which is almost nothing, once you get past "has a website" and "would like the phone to ring."
So the package fills up with the things that are the same everywhere. A set number of pages. A set number of keywords. A set number of posts a month. The per page version of this has a long history, and What a website costs in Australia takes the number apart properly. Those are countable, which means they can be priced, which means they can be put on a page and sold while everyone's asleep. That's the actual design brief, and it's a good one if you're the one selling.
The trouble is that none of those numbers is the thing that decides whether a business gets more of the work it wants. Not one. You can hit every number in the package perfectly and change nothing, and the agency has delivered exactly what was bought.
I want to be fair here, because this isn't fraud and the people running these businesses mostly aren't cynics. A package is an honest answer to a real problem, which is that assessing every business properly is slow and doesn't scale. They've solved their problem. It just isn't your problem.
Why you learned to ask for one
You weren't born wanting a package. You were trained.
Ask anybody in this industry what something costs and the traditional answer is "it depends", followed by a discovery call, followed by a proposal that arrives a week later with a number nobody can explain. Do that to somebody twice and they will start demanding a fixed list, because at least a fixed list can be compared.
So the package didn't win because it's good. It won because the alternative was worse. It's a defence against being padded, and it works, in the narrow sense that you know what you're getting.
What it costs you is that you're now comparing the wrong things. Three quotes for a five page website tells you which of the three is cheapest at building five pages. It tells you nothing about whether five pages is the right answer, and it quietly establishes that it is, because all three of them said so. It's also how businesses end up on a template with their content poured into it, which is a different trade-off than most people realise they are making. Template websites vs custom built
The comparison that gives it away
Here's a thing worth sitting with. Big companies don't get sold packages.
Nobody walks into a business doing tens of millions and hands them a silver, gold and platinum sheet. They get assessed. Somebody spends real time working out what's actually going on, and what comes back is specific to them, because at that size everyone accepts that a serious problem needs looking at before it gets solved.
There's no reason that's only true above a certain revenue. The problems aren't less specific further down. A retaining wall builder whose ads are full of price shoppers and a dentist whose front desk never rings anyone back have almost nothing in common except that both of them could be sold the same package tomorrow.
What actually changes with size is who can afford to be assessed. That's a cost problem, not a truth problem, and it's worth naming because it's the only honest defence of the package model. Assessment is expensive. So the industry sells the thing it can produce at volume and everyone agrees not to mention the gap.
What we do instead, and what it costs us
We assess the business first and then decide together what to buy and what not to buy. Sometimes that means we take things off the list, including things we sell.
The clearest example is when we find something that already works. A CRM that's actually got the pipeline in it. A site on a platform that performs, that can connect to things properly. We keep it. What a CRM is actually for, if you have never had one, is worth reading on its own. Five automations every business needs Rebuilding something that works to make an invoice tidier is the easiest money in this industry and it's theft with a nicer font on it.
The ongoing work is a managed service with different levels of involvement, and which one you're on is a decision, not a tier you're sold. For some clients that's the ads and the whole marketing operation. For others it's a CRM. For others it's a website and a CRM and nothing else, because nothing else is the problem. What it never is, is a list that existed before we met you.
And the number is fixed before any work starts. That matters, because the case for a package is protection from being padded, and if we don't answer that we haven't answered anything. You get the number up front, and if the scope changes we say so before we do it rather than on the invoice afterwards.
Here's what that costs us. We can't sell while we're asleep. Somebody has to sit with each business for an hour or three before anyone knows what the answer is, and a fair few of those conversations end with us saying there isn't enough here to work on yet. That's a worse business model in the obvious way and I've thought about it a lot.
How to tell which one you're being sold
Four questions, and you can ask all of them in one email.
What would you take off the list? Anyone selling a package can't answer this, because the list is the product. If they can't name something you don't need, they aren't looking at you.
What happens if I already have one of these? If the answer is that you get it anyway, you're paying twice on purpose.
Which part of this is the part that matters? There's always one. Somebody who's assessed your business will say it immediately and will usually want to do that part first. Somebody who hasn't will say all of it is important.
What does month seven look like? A package tends to go quiet after the build. Ask what actually happens in a month when nothing is being launched, and see whether the answer is a set of activities or a set of outcomes. What is your monthly actually for? is the same question asked about the invoice.
One more thing before you sign anything with a term on it. Australia's unfair contract terms rules changed in November 2023 and they cover standard form contracts with businesses under a hundred staff or ten million in turnover, whatever the contract is worth. Automatic renewal unless you cancel inside a window, and terms letting the other side change the price or the conditions on their own, are both on the ACCC's list of the kinds of term that can be unfair. That doesn't make every twelve month agreement a problem. It does mean the clauses are worth reading, and that you aren't being difficult by reading them.
None of those are hostile and none of them require you to know anything technical. They're just questions a package can't survive.
The honest limit
There's a version of this where you should buy the package. If you know exactly what you need, if it genuinely is a five page website and nothing else, and you'd rather not have the conversation, then buying a well-made standard thing from somebody competent is a perfectly good decision and I'd tell you to do it.
The problem isn't packages existing. It's packages being the only shape on offer, so that a business with a positioning problem, or a follow-up problem, or a problem where their advertising is recruiting exactly the wrong customers, goes and buys a website, because that was what the menu had.
That's the bit I'd like to change, and it's why this piece is on our own website rather than in a folder somewhere.
