Why I only work with 4-6 clients a year.

Back in 2017 I was running a digital marketing agency in Madrid. Eighty active clients, forty-two people on the team, an office in Chamberí. Whenever anyone asked how it was going, I always said the same thing: "growing". It was true. It was also the worst way to describe it.

One Monday in November we lost three clients in a single week. None of them for bad work; all three for the same reason. They wrote to me, almost in the same tone: "we feel like we don't know you any more". It was true. I didn't know them either. We hadn't spoken in months.

That same month I started to understand that the problem wasn't those three clients. The problem was the model.

The arithmetic nobody tells you about.

A mid-sized agency works like this. You have a senior — someone with ten or fifteen years' experience who can read a Google Ads account in thirty seconds and spot exactly where the budget is being burned. That person costs between seventy and a hundred and twenty thousand euros a year.

For every senior, the agency hires two or three juniors. They cost twenty to twenty-five thousand euros. They do the day-to-day: updating campaigns, writing reports, replying to client emails. The senior supervises.

On paper it makes sense. In reality, here's what happens:

• Fifty clients per team of three people.
• The senior has four hours a day to split between fifty accounts.
• That works out to 4.8 minutes per client per day. I'm not exaggerating.
• The junior has five or six accounts assigned. You're one of them.

If you run the numbers, you discover that the senior you think you're working with literally doesn't have time to look at your account. They glance at weekly reports. They approve strategic changes. They show up for the quarterly meeting. But the day-to-day is handled by someone with two years of experience — and you're one of six accounts on their plate.

The agency model isn't bad by accident. It's bad by design: it only works if you dilute senior work across lots of small clients.

Why SMEs pay this price.

The information asymmetry is brutal. When an SME hires an agency, what they get is a pitch deck with logos of well-known brands, a shared Slack and a dashboard with pretty charts. What they don't see is how many real senior hours will actually go into their case.

While the agency runs margins of 40-50%, the SME is left with the feeling they're overpaying for "professional expertise" that's actually being delivered for junior with sporadic oversight. And when results don't come, the blame always lands on the market, the product, the context. Never on the model.

What changes when you only have six.

When I started Petit Roig I set myself a strict limit: a maximum of six active projects. It's not arbitrary. It's the number that lets me do these three things without short-changing any of them:

1. Actually look at your account every week.

Not "have a quick glance" — really opening Google Ads, reading the week's search reports, seeing where the spend is drifting, identifying the three levers I'd pull if it were my own business. That's two hours per client per week. For six clients, that's twelve hours. Done. The rest of the time is for strategy, deeper changes, talking to you.

2. Knowing your business by heart.

Knowing your margin per product, which clients are profitable and which aren't, when you had your worst month last year and why. You can't do that with fifty clients. It's the reason generic marketing advice fails so often: without context, any recommendation is a shot in the dark.

3. Being available when it matters.

If you've launched a new campaign on Monday and something strange happens Wednesday at nine in the evening, you can call me directly. Not an account manager who'll log a ticket to forward it to the senior tomorrow morning. Me. That's a promise no fifty-client agency can honestly make.

The craft is going back to small.

We've built an industry that rewards scaling. More employees, more clients, more offices, more revenue. Every year the same question shows up on LinkedIn: "how much have you grown?". Never "what have you gone deeper on?".

It took me eight years to understand that growing wasn't the answer. That the outcome for the client — the one paying the bill — was better when I worked with ten clients than with eighty. And that my own work felt better too.

Petit Roig is an experiment in returning to the right size. Six clients a year, no more. If that means next year I can't take you on because we're full, I'll refer you to someone I trust. If it means the hourly rate is higher — yes, it is. But for every euro you pay, it comes straight to me, not lost in structure.

How to know if you fit.

It's not for everyone. If your total marketing budget is twenty thousand euros a year, I don't make sense for you — the gap between what I'd charge and what a small agency costs doesn't add up. There I'd recommend working with a direct freelancer or, if you're just starting out, booking a 90-minute diagnostic and making the changes yourself.

Petit Roig makes sense if:

• You bill more than €200-300K a year and marketing is a meaningful share of growth.
• You've worked with an agency before and came away feeling it wasn't worth it.
• You're willing to pay more per person in exchange for that person actually knowing you.
• You want to think in 12-24 month horizons, not just optimise this week's ROI.

If that sounds like you, let's talk for 30 minutes. If not, I'll save you the other 29.