Simplify: The Strategic Superpower Agencies Keep Ignoring
In Simplify, Richard Koch argues that the world’s most successful companies become “star businesses” because they do one thing exceptionally well: they simplify. They make life easier, cheaper, or more delightful for customers, so compellingly that the market reorganises itself around them.
And while the examples in the book range from budget airlines to Uber to the iPad, the underlying principle is incredibly relevant for digital agencies and service businesses today… especially those stuck in the danger zone of looking, sounding, and operating just like everyone else.
Koch explains that you really only have two strategic choices.
1. Price Simplifying
Make it dramatically simpler and dramatically cheaper.
This is the Ryanair, McDonald’s, and IKEA playbook: radically reduce complexity in the product so that you can reduce the price, often by half. This unlocks mass market expansion and creates businesses where low price *is* the value proposition.
For most agencies, this path is a dead end.
Why?
Because you can’t halve your prices and deliver custom strategy, labour-intensive creativity, or senior talent. Agencies simply aren’t built like scalable product businesses where you can remove frills, self-serve the experience, and push everything through a low-cost model.
So rule this out unless you’re building a fully productised, automated, fixed-scope, templated studio with near-zero delivery friction.
2. Proposition Simplifying
Make something sophisticated radically easier to understand, use, or buy.
This is where agencies can win… and where the majority fail.
Proposition simplifiers take complex, expert-driven products and make them:
easier to engage with
easier to understand
easier to use
easier to get value from.
Think:
The iPad → made computing intuitive.
Uber → made transport effortless.
Boston Consulting Group → made high-end strategic thinking structured and repeatable.
These businesses charge more, not less. Customers pay a premium because the experience is frictionless, intuitive, and satisfying. Simplicity becomes the differentiator.
Why Simplification Works Strategically
Koch argues that when you successfully simplify (through price or proposition):
You unlock *global* opportunities, not just incremental growth
You become the “hub” of a new way of doing things
You redefine customer expectations across your category.
Think about how Airbnb changed accommodation or how IKEA changed furniture: customers now think differently because those businesses exist.
Agencies rarely think with this level of ambition. But they should.
The Trap: You Can’t Do Both
Most businesses try to simplify everywhere: price, proposition, product, operations.
Koch’s point: pick one strategic vector and commit to it fully.
Price simplification → cheaper, simpler, mass-market
Proposition simplification → better, easier, more premium.
Trying to become the cheapest and the most premium simply collapses both strategies.
What This Means for Agencies
Almost every agency should default to the boutique, premium, proposition-simplified path:
Make your experience easier than anyone else’s.
Remove friction from onboarding, scoping, communication, and delivery.
Make your value obvious, consistent, and codified.
Create a signature method, system, or framework that clients can instantly understand.
Become the category’s “intuitive choice”, the one that feels easier, safer, clearer.
That’s where the margin is.
That’s where differentiation is.
That’s where the star businesses live.
Final Thought
Simplification isn’t about dumbing things down.
It’s about eliminating friction and amplifying value.
Koch’s message is a helpful reminder for agency owners:
You can’t win by being everything to everyone.
You win by making one thing unmistakably, unignorably better.
Choose your path.
And simplify deliberately.