Post 2 in a series on why we started RPPL Studio
There’s an assumption people carry around about agency size: smaller means less capable. Thinner bench, fewer resources, a step down from “the real thing.” Backwards. Here’s how we built the thing we built.
Small isn’t the fallback. It’s the choice.
Everyone on a small team is there because of the work they’ve already done — not because a training seat was open. Compare that to a big agency, where your budget quietly decides how senior your team gets to be. Smaller budget, more junior people learning on your dime.
Fewer people doesn’t mean fewer opinions worth trusting. It means faster ones. The person deciding is the person doing the work — not someone two layers up, passing the idea from account to creative to production and losing a little of it at every handoff.
And a lot of what you’re paying for at a big agency isn’t more talent. It’s more structure sitting on top of it. Take that away and you’re getting the same level of experience with nothing standing between it and you.
What that looks like
My two co-founders and I worked together for years before RPPL existed, in the same roles we hold now: ops and sales, creative, production. We weren’t betting on potential when we started this — we were building around something we’d already proven.
If you caught the first post in The Long Way to RPPL, you know part of how we got here — the culture at our old agency wasn’t always what it became, and watching that shift was part of why we left. What matters here is what we did once we were out. One of our first priorities was bringing on the very people who had been treated as expendable, grounding our studio in a simple reality: if experience is the asset, you show it by valuing the people who carry it.
We could’ve rebuilt something that looked like what we left. We didn’t, on purpose. Every structural problem from the last post — the approvals, the account-versus-creative tug of war, staffing built around utilization instead of fit — we’d lived inside all of it, and we weren’t interested in recreating it. Staying small isn’t a phase. It’s the model.
The whole thesis, boiled down: the work gets better, and the people doing it matter more, the closer they stay to it. We didn’t build RPPL to test that idea. We already believed it — this was the only way to live it out.
