"Productize or plan on 60-hour weeks forever": Andrejs Zenkevics of Get A Copywriter on His Business Setup and Operating Model

Managing an agency—or building anything client-facing—can be messy. There are at least three players: the client, your team, and outside contractors. Add unclear scopes, vague feedback, and last-minute changes, and you're in firefighting mode.

Stopping that spiral begins with productization. It's not just a nice-to-have—it's your first real upgrade as a founder. A way to bring structure to services, simplify communication, and make your business scalable before you burn out.

From Get A Copywriter to Epiic, a web development company, to a white-label platform we developed for agencies, that mindset has shaped everything I've built. In this column, I'll share why this setup works, when white label becomes the smart move, and what I got wrong in my own journey as a founder.

Productized Services or Nothing

It's been a while since productized services became a real game-changer for me. Whether you're a freelancer, consultant, or running a full-scale agency, it just makes life easier—easier to sell, easier to deliver, and most importantly in my case, easier to scale.

Instead of negotiating the details every time, you offer a clear "menu" of services. The client knows what they're getting, when they'll get it, and exactly what it will cost. That clarity removes friction on both sides—fewer emails, fewer surprises, and faster decisions.

Sometimes I hear people say productization isn't for everyone. I couldn't disagree more. It's become the default model across all kinds of industries—from digital marketing and web development to content creation and even cleaning services.

Take SEO, for example. You can package your offer into tiers—"Basic," "Advanced," "Premium"—each with a defined number of keywords, on-page optimisations, and link-building tasks. Clients pick what fits their goals and budget, and you avoid endless back-and-forth trying to price a custom project.

And no, productizing doesn't turn your business into a vending machine. It doesn't mean everything has to be self-serve or that you stop explaining what you do. It's about making your services easier to understand and buy. Clients aren't paying for your hours—they're paying for outcomes. Packaging your work like a product makes those outcomes more visible, more tangible, and much easier to say yes to.

For me, productization was the difference between building a company and staying stuck in a job. It's about structure, automation, and simplification—turning creative services into something consistent and scalable. If the business can't grow while I'm off-grid on a Friday, then what's the point? Productize or plan on 60-hour weeks forever.

Headcount Isn't a KPI

Every entrepreneur starts with a big dream. For many, that dream still includes a huge office, a team photo with dozens of smiling faces, and a fast-growing headcount that looks good on LinkedIn. But here's the thing: your scale shouldn't be measured by the number of your workers—whether you're growing is better judged by the number of your clients. Clients pay the bills. Headcount often increases them.

Especially early on, adding full-time employees too quickly puts serious pressure on your margins. Payroll is one of the biggest costs you'll carry, and more people don't always mean more progress. Revenue per employee might look healthy, but profit per employee is the real test. That's your return on talent. That's what matters.

And once again, this is where productization earns its place. A structured, repeatable offer means you don't need to grow your team just to keep up. You can simplify delivery, automate parts of the workflow, or bring in a white-label partner instead of hiring in-house. Work gets done, clients are happy, and margins are good.

So leave the "Hey, we're 142 people!" for applause on LinkedIn. It's not a balance-sheet win.

Growth Engine First

Until your marketing and sales run on rails, fulfillment can't be where all your energy goes. The good thing about productized sales is that they remove a huge amount of friction. People already know what you offer, which saves endless intro calls, negotiations, and custom quotes.

The shops everyone calls "lucky" usually spend 90% of their time acquiring new clients. The truth is, this is not luck—it's a system. They've built a sales engine that works on repeat, and everything else supports that momentum.

At Get A Copywriter, we treat sales and fulfillment as parts of the same loop. On the quality side, we rely on NPS (Net Promoter Score) to track client satisfaction after every project. Both internal and external clients are invited to rate their experience and leave feedback, which helps us refine the platform continuously. We also hold structured performance reviews with contractors twice a year, giving us a broader view of where we're doing well—and where we can improve.

When It's Time for White Label

By the second or third time you build a business, the ego fades. You stop chasing vanity metrics and start valuing consistency. Headcount flex doesn't impress anymore—consistent money in the bank does. And frankly, nothing helps you sleep at night like a white-label partner who delivers on time and without drama.

When a client asks for something outside of your core offer, you don't need to say no—and you definitely don't need to reinvent your team. Find a great partner, stamp your logo on the file, and keep your revenue inside the company. The client gets what they need, you double down on what you do best, and it's a win all around.

That was the logic behind launching our own white-label platform. A big part of our client base at Get A Copywriter is made up of agencies, and most of them were managing a patchwork of external contractors with no system in place. We'd already built internal workflows to handle that chaos, so we productized those tools and made them available. Letting agencies tap into our infrastructure under their own brand helped them streamline delivery and helped us keep the relationship strong.

Freelancers might seem cheaper—until they ghost you the night before launch. Those "benefits" don't last long. For a one-off task, sure, it might work. But when you're dealing with multi-step deliverables, white label is the safer bet. You need a professional crew—not a cat-and-mouse game.

White label means the partner does the work front-to-back, you brand the deliverable, and the client stays inside your ecosystem. Clean, repeatable, profitable. At the end of the day, cash matters more than vanity.

My Hybrid Play

I've never believed in going all-in on either extreme. Half in-house protects the secret sauce—the stuff clients come to you for. The other half? That's where partners come in. They give you the flexibility to scale when demand spikes and the breathing room when it doesn't. Pipeline surges? I can grow without torching the margin. Pipeline dips? I'm not stuck paying idle payroll.

This setup gives me the best of both worlds. It lets us move faster, take on more, and adapt without rebuilding the team every time the market shifts. You don't have to own every moving part to deliver great work. What matters is having a system that holds up under pressure and adapts when things shift.