Most agency advice sounds the same: niche down, processize early, charge what you’re worth. Tory Gray, Founder and CEO of Gray Dot Co, has spent over 13 years running a digital agency after starting out in-house at startups – and she built her own woman-owned, value-driven consultancy by questioning most of that advice. Her answers to our questions are the kind you don’t usually get from someone still trying to impress you.
What’s a failure that significantly changed how you run your agency?
One of my most cringe-worthy early moments was presenting an SEO growth strategy to an exec team for the first time as an in-house marketing manager. It was nerve-wracking on its own, but what made it worse was that what I was presenting was, honestly, more a list of tactics than a real strategy. Several to-dos, and many reasons why, but nothing connecting the dots in between.
I didn’t yet understand the gap I created. While the to do list was, in fact, well-informed by my knowledge and understanding, I didn’t understand that the exec team didn’t have that context and trust and experience already. They can’t leap from point A to point B without that insight, and therefore I set them up for failure. Or, more accurately, my own, as they opted not to move forward with the plan.
That experience was uncomfortable but formative. It pushed me to get much better at telling the story – not just what we recommend, but why it matters and how it all fits together.
What’s the most difficult conversation you’ve had with a client?
The hardest conversations are usually the ones where I have to tell a client that the SEO work we’re doing isn’t going to move the needle – not because the work is bad, but because it hasn’t been implemented.
I’ve said this a lot: SEO isn’t magic; if you don’t deploy the work, nothing will change. Considering the SEO growth curve, time is of the essence. Waiting a month for perfection really just means you’ve lost a month of trajectory.
Getting there sometimes means a very direct conversation with leadership about where the bottleneck actually is. No one likes to be the blocker!
But I’d rather have that conversation than collect a paycheck that offers no ROI for the client. That sets everyone up for long-term failure and disappointment.
What’s a belief you had early on that you no longer agree with?
I used to think value-based pricing was the gold standard: the thing you graduated to once you’d “made it” as an agency. I don’t believe that anymore. In practice, it often just means charging larger clients more without any real connection to the additional value you’re actually delivering. That felt wrong to me.
I’d rather have pricing that’s honest and tied to the actual work. Similarly, I ignored a lot of standard agency-building advice, for example the “processize everything early” crowd, the “only hire junior staff to keep costs down” camp. Here, I believe my instinct was right. Dogma dressed up as best practice is still dogma.
You have to question what advice actually fits your agency, your values, and your model, rather than adopting it because it’s what everyone says you should do.
What’s a mistake that new agencies tend to repeat?
I have several for this one!
Doing great work and assuming it’ll speak for itself. You can do excellent SEO and still lose a client because they don’t understand what changed or why it matters to their business. That connection – between the work and the outcome – doesn’t make itself. You have to build it deliberately, every time.
Niching down, especially too early. Common advice suggests that picking a niche is profitable. I won’t argue that it won’t, as I’ve seen it work incredibly well. But that reward comes with significant risk, too, and no one seems to talk about that. What happened to the SEO agencies targeting tourism and hospitality, or arts & entertainment, when covid hit? What was once targeted and profitable suddenly became a huge liability.
Not building in room for error. Entrepreneurship isn’t: “try something, fail, and stop”. It’s more like “try something, fail, try again, fail, try something else, and… maybe something will work out?” If you assume you will fail – in large and small ways – and you plan for ways & time to handle that failure, you increase your chance of success. For example: you will underquote a project, and then have to deal with the consequences. You will also over-quote a project, and miss out on that business. It’s inevitable. If you don’t plan to learn from these errors, you won’t survive them.
Looking back, what would you tell your agency at year one?
Honestly? I didn’t set out to build an agency. I fell into it. After years in-house at startups, I was freelancing and looking for what came next, and 1.5 years in I realized I was already doing it. So year one me was winging it more than I’d like to admit.
What I’d say now: be more intentional about who you work with, earlier. That goes for clients and for collaborators. These relationships matter more than almost any tactical decision you’ll make.
Related: doing good work for good people isn’t just a nice sentiment. It’s a strategy, and smart business. It’s how you get referrals, how you retain clients, and how you build a team you actually want to work with.
Final Thoughts
Tory didn’t set out to build an agency and doesn’t run one by the book – and that’s precisely what makes her perspective worth reading. Whether it’s scrapping value-based pricing, having the hard conversation about unimplemented work, or planning for failure as a matter of course, the throughline is the same: question the defaults, stay honest, and build something you can actually stand behind.
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