Scaling From Within: Building an Agency Business Unit

For larger digital agencies, specialist expertise creates a structural challenge. Knowledge often sits with individual developers or project teams, while new skills are added primarily through recruiting. An internal business unit offers another way to organize that expertise: bringing people together around a technology, creating structures for knowledge transfer, and giving new talent a path into specialization.

TYPO3 partner agency 3m5. provides an example of how that can work in practice. Its TYPO3 business unit has grown to around 30 people, from apprentices to senior developers. Yet over the past nine to ten years, the agency says it has hired only one developer specifically for TYPO3.

The unit grew largely from within.

Once the group exists, the next challenge is creating a practical route into it. Instead of expecting new employees to arrive with the full specialist skill set, agencies can deliberately build that expertise internally.

One way to do this is to bring new developers and apprentices into real projects early, while giving them an experienced mentor as a consistent point of contact. Rather than confronting newcomers with the full complexity of a technology at once, they can start with a specific area or feature, develop expertise there, and gradually broaden their knowledge.

“In the nine to ten years I've been at 3m5, we've hired one TYPO3 developer. That also means our unit is naturally quite large, and now the question of course is, if we don't hire developers, how can we build up that kind of expertise and unit in terms of skills?”

— Jan Suchandt, Project Lead

This is particularly relevant for technologies with a steep learning curve. Mentoring, practical project experience, and access to an established expert group can lower the barrier to specialization without lowering expectations.

For an agency large enough to sustain such a group, this creates a second route to specialist capacity. Expertise does not always have to be recruited ready-made. It can be developed systematically among the people already entering and working within the organization.

Internal expertise only scales if people continue to develop it and share what they learn. That means creating both the time and the incentives for learning.

Certifications are one mechanism. Initially, getting people interested required effort. Once more colleagues became certified, however, they began motivating each other. Achievements were shared internally and even developed into a friendly competition over who could earn more certifications. Preparation budgets and a small financial reward from management provide additional support.

“There were even competitions at times over who had more certificates. And we hit that one point where it eventually took on a life of its own. In that case, it's now such that even people who have nothing to do with the solution, with the unit, are already keen to get certificates."

— Jan Suchandt

Events and community involvement extend that learning beyond the agency. Less experienced colleagues can meet people working with the same technology, exchange ideas, and experience the community surrounding it. The knowledge gained does not have to remain with those who attended: internal presentations and follow-ups can bring it back into the wider team.

This creates a learning cycle in which expertise is continuously added to the unit and redistributed among colleagues and projects.

A specialist group can also become too focused on its own structures.

In the earlier stages of building the unit, too much attention went into technical details, conventions, and development standards. There were many meetings, but not enough tangible outcomes or enthusiasm.

The lesson was to shift the emphasis from defining standards to involving people.

“We noticed that it's not about setting standards and establishing standards in development or in the units, but about involving and activating people.”

— Jan Suchandt

Mentoring, knowledge exchange, certifications, community participation, and room for individual initiative all helped lower the barrier to getting involved. Leadership itself emerged partly through that participation, as colleagues who showed initiative increasingly took responsibility for organizing and developing the group.

For agencies considering a similar model, this may be the most transferable lesson. A business unit needs structure, but structure alone does not create expertise. It needs mechanisms that allow knowledge to spread and give people a reason to contribute.

An internal business unit will not remove the need for recruiting. But recruiting does not have to be the only way an agency increases specialist capacity.

The wider benefit is what happens to knowledge inside the organization. Developers and project leads exchange what they learn, newcomers have access to experienced colleagues, and ideas can move between different technology teams rather than remaining within individual projects. That can extend to client work as well, with specialists contributing their expertise directly to conversations and developing solutions together with clients.

In that sense, the value of an internal business unit goes beyond the number of specialists it contains. It creates a structure through which individual knowledge can become organizational knowledge, junior talent can develop towards specialization, and expertise can spread across teams and projects.

The experience of building a roughly 30-person TYPO3 unit largely from within shows what this requires: not simply bringing specialists together, but creating an environment in which people can learn, participate, take responsibility, and pass their expertise on.

This article draws on insights shared in the Business Insights podcast. The full episode is available here, along with a complete English transcript available here.