From Pretty to Profitable: Why Your Website Needs To Work Harder Than You Do
For a lot of small agencies and creative businesses, the website question feels deceptively simple.
“Do I really need more than a decent looking site on Square Space or Shopify?”
In a recent episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim sat down with Endeavor co founder Matt Dorman to talk about what separates a merely pretty website from a truly profitable one, and how that ties into profit, pricing, and staying sane as an agency owner.
This was not a design conversation. It was about money, margins, and leverage.
Let’s dig in.
When “Good Enough” Websites Stop Being Good Enough
Matt is clear about one thing. Not every business needs a complex, custom built site.
For a lot of smaller brands, platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are perfectly fine. You can get online, sell some products, and look respectable without touching a line of code.
The game changes when the numbers get bigger.
Once a business starts moving serious volume, the “little tweaks” on a website have very real dollar impact. A slightly better experience, a faster page, smarter personalization, or better conversion path can mean tens of thousands of dollars instead of tens of dollars.
At that stage, architecture matters.
Not because your site needs to be fancier, but because:
- You need performance under load
- You need content and features tailored to different types of visitors
- You need to experiment and optimize continuously
In other words, high performance websites become profit infrastructure, not just digital brochures.
Your Website’s New Job: Show Up In AI Answers
For years, the primary argument for having a website was simple:
“People will Google you. If you do not show up, you do not exist.”
That is still true. But now there is another layer.
Matt pointed out that people are increasingly typing questions into tools like ChatGPT and other large language models to get answers. Your future clients are not always searching “CPA in Oklahoma City” anymore. They are asking:
- “What should I look for in a creative agency?”
- “How do I know if my website is costing me sales?”
- “What kind of accountant do I need for my agency?”
If your content does not help answer those kinds of questions online, you will not show up in the responses that these tools generate.
So the job of your website today:
- Be technically sound enough to be discovered and indexed
- Provide clear, question-driven content that models can “understand” and use
- Still read like it is written for humans, not robots
A simple tactic Matt mentioned in spirit: treat every page like a mini FAQ, and build out the questions real people would ask about that topic. You are not just trying to rank in traditional SEO now. You are training the systems that are increasingly mediating how people discover businesses like yours.
“I Get All My Clients From Relationships” Is Not An Excuse
Christian shared a pushback he sees often, especially from accountants and other professionals:
“The reason our website is bad is because we invest our time in relationships. We get business from networking, not the internet.”
On the surface, that sounds noble. Underneath, it is mostly an excuse.
Even if all your leads come from lunches, events, and referrals, those people are still going to look you up online afterward. The website is not replacing the relationship. It is reinforcing it.
Your site lets prospects:
- See more of your story than fits in a 30 minute coffee
- Review case studies and client stories you did not have time to share
- Explore your services in more detail, at their own pace
- Build trust when you are not in the room
You get a limited window of live conversation. Your website is the unlimited follow up.
Niching Down: From “We Do Everything” To “We Do This Better Than Anyone”
Both Matt and Christian have lived through the “we’ll take anyone who will pay us” phase.
When Endeavor started, they did work for all kinds of clients on all kinds of sites. Over time, they began niching into specific verticals:
- Active lifestyle brands like mountain biking, skating, snowboarding
- Outdoor and off road companies that align with their personal interests
- Content heavy media and publishing sites that need to publish at high speed
Niching down had two big effects:
- Higher gross margins
When you do similar kinds of projects repeatedly, you build reusable tools, patterns, and internal expertise. Each new client in that niche becomes more profitable because you are not reinventing the wheel every time. - Faster problem solving and better outcomes
If you already know the industry, the buyer, and the common website issues they face, you do not waste time “figuring it out” from scratch. You get to the real problem faster and can fix more in the same time budget.
Christian uses a sports analogy: if you keep switching between baseball, football, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, and more, you never become excellent at any one of them. Businesses do the same thing when they chase every type of client. They stay perpetually average and perpetually exhausted.
The goal is to niche down to a segment that is small enough to be specific, but large enough to support your growth target. You want to work in a narrow enough lane that you can grow at your chosen pace without constantly expanding into new, unfamiliar markets.
The Hourly Trap: Outcomes vs Billable Time
The conversation eventually turned to pricing models.
Agencies and professionals love to track hours. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, and developers are all famous for it.
Matt shared Endeavor’s current reality:
- They technically track hours internally, for financial insight and capacity planning
- Most client work is priced as fixed projects or monthly retainers
- They frequently go over on hours without billing more, especially when they are learning new things or helping clients fix inherited messes
They lean on the long term relationship. Over a year or two, the high effort months average out with the lighter months.
Christian contrasted that with his experience as a client of a law firm that was obsessed with “six billable hours a day” per attorney. The model they claimed to offer was “fee for service,” but it worked like a strict retainer. When his account went “over” in a given month, they wanted to charge more, but there was no recognition of the past months when there was nothing to do.
The core tension:
- Clients buy outcomes
- Service providers often price inputs
Your customer does not care how many hours something takes. They care that the problem is solved at a fair price, consistently.
As AI, automation, and better systems allow you to work faster, the hourly model gets even more fragile. If you get twice as efficient, you should not be punished with half the revenue. Value based pricing and clearly scoped offerings become the path forward.
Macro Headwinds And “Crackhead Energy” Marketing
This is a tough year for a lot of agencies, and Matt did not sugarcoat it.
They are seeing:
- Clients delaying projects because of economic uncertainty
- Tax law changes that temporarily made tech investments more painful
- A general “let’s wait and see” attitude that keeps websites broken and budgets frozen
On top of that, Christian Brim sees what he calls “crackhead energy” in the marketing world. Many agencies celebrate client retention that works out to effectively churning half their clients every year.
To keep the lights on, they have to constantly go find more quick fix buyers who will cancel as soon as the “high” wears off. That is not building a business. That is running a treadmill.
If you are actually solving real problems in meaningful ways, clients should stick around. Retention in the 80 to 90 percent range is a sign you are delivering ongoing value, not just selling adrenaline.
Back To Basics In An AI World
Both Matt and Christian landed in the same place:
The basics of good marketing matter more now, not less.
You still need to:
- Identify your ideal client clearly
- Understand their problems in practical, financial terms
- Craft a message that speaks to those problems in their language
- Show up where they already are, online and offline
- Use your website to deepen trust and demonstrate expertise
AI and automation do not replace this foundation. They just give you new tools to execute it.
In the end, a profitable creative business is not built on hacks. It is built on focus, systems, and a clear understanding of the value you create.
Now, Do This
Ready to turn your passion into profit with systems that keep the clients you work so hard to win?
Book a call to CORE and subscribe for new episodes with Christian Brim on The Profitable Creative.
