We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.

We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.

While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.

Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.

Their talent is sometimes oversold

Top agencies typically garner the top talent — until they don’t. A specialized HubSpot partner soon discovers that not many employees  have extensive experience in HubSpot development. While the pool of seasoned HubSpot developers is growing daily, the demand is growing at a far greater pace. An agency might have  a few talented, seasoned developers working for it,  but the developers cannot keep up with the workload the agency is bringing on,  especially if they’re a Diamond or Elite HubSpot Partner that is constantly funneled leads from HubSpot onboarding reps. In addition, those top agencies lose talent as developers go out on their own to become freelancers or open their own HubSpot development agencies. The combination of  the deficit in talent and the slowdowns from overworked talent can be felt across the organization. 

What to watch for:

A development agency is only as good as its development team, so if they struggle with high turnover or you’re being shifted around to new account reps on the regular, you may want to explore what changes are going on inside the agency. Of course, many agencies run deep in expertise on HubSpot development, typically those whose CEOs and owners are developers themselves: A developer-run agency is often better situated from a depth-of-talent perspective than other agencies. 

Check in with the agency and find out where their talent comes from and how they vet their developers, how those developers hone their skills, and what recent projects they’ve completed. Sift through those projects and check load times, bugs, and usability issues to determine how their work is holding up.

Their team is underpaid

Here’s the real truth when it comes to agency life: Developers are not always compensated properly. I said what I said. One of the reasons our owner left the majority of the agencies that he worked within was a heavy workload and compensation that wasn’t commensurate with expertise. It’s a difficult position to be in, as an agency, since clients can be sensitive when it comes to billable time and per-hour billable rates. But as in almost every aspect of life, you get what you pay for. If a client isn’t paying a significant monthly fee, you can almost guarantee that their talent is subpar or very underpaid (and likely to leave). 

What to watch for:

Agencies that are willing to discount their hourly rates significantly can only afford to do so because they either have lower overhead or they’re paying their teams much less than they’re charging for margins. If they also charge a low hourly rate to begin with, they’re probably outsourcing work to inexperienced developers who  may not be qualified to cleanly code and develop with a lot of intention inside the HubSpot CMS. 

Related: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development

Their team is overwhelmed

When becoming a HubSpot partner and the associated boost in lead generation result in a tenfold revenue growth or the doubling of staff, you can almost guarantee that teams are overwhelmed. When a lot of new employees are introduced, new team structures are established, or new clients are assigned to existing teams (which, let’s face it, is a major issue during this widespread period of "employee shortages"), developers will be overwhelmed with a massive amount of work. Overwhelmed and unhappy employees are 10% less productive. We probably don’t need to go over how unproductive employees affect the client experience, but there’s a lot of research out there: Dissatisfied employees are two and a half times more likely to say they do not provide excellent customer service and twice as likely to say they do not deliver quality outcomes. 

What to watch for:

Many prospects approach us with partially developed websites. Quality assurance is among the most important aspects of our delivery and launch process at deckerdevs. If you notice that you’re approaching the finish line with your project and running into an alarming number of unresolved issues that your development team didn’t seem to catch, this may be a red flag. If you’re not hearing back from your account executive or developer, or it's taking days or weeks to get changes completed, these are also signs that their teams are overwhelmed. 

Their team has underwhelming skills

From slowly loading pages to poorly coded sites to ill-conceived resource centers to hard-coded modules and lots of bugs and script errors: We’ve seen a lot of things that you should never see coming from big agencies. People paying the premiums that the biggest HubSpot agencies get deserve better. The executive teams at those agencies probably agree. 

What to watch for:

Red flags include buggy websites, rationalizing why a new feature can’t be added, slow-loading pages, minimal feedback from a usability perspective, and stopping work once the project is done. We have long-standing relationships with all our clients to execute projects on their behalf long after a project is completed, whether it’s a single module edit or a full website overhaul. We work closely with clients to determine the best balance between their budget and wishlist, then execute properly with infrastructure that is proven to make things easy for the client.

With such a huge talent gap when it comes to HubSpot CMS developers, it’s important that you do your homework when you’re interviewing development agencies.

To avoid these issues, during the sales process, ask who is developing your project; you can even request that you have some face time with the developer. While not all developers are able to meet with clients, depending on the agency, you can at least gain some knowledge and ask the agency for developer references, past projects, and the amount of time they’ve been working in the HubSpot CMS. 

Hiring an agency with a CEO or owner who has a lot of experience in HubSpot development is critical as well. Ask them about their process, what you should expect, the anticipated timeline, what their expectations are from you, how they’ll be handling bugs, what the QA process is, and how long they’ll support their project post-launch. You’ll also want to understand what happens if you decide the relationship isn’t working out:  A lot of bigger agencies have iron-clad agreements that can be difficult to exit. 

While the majority of the experiences from the biggest HubSpot development agencies are positive, we want you to be as prepared as you can be when you’re interviewing prospective agencies. The more you know and the more questions you ask, the easier it might be to avoid potential issues down the line. While we always love to be the ones to fix any problem we’re approached with, we’d much rather you have the right experience the first time around.