The Commercialisation Layer
A repeat software founder who has spent two decades at the commercial edge of the agency world, on why scoping and pricing decide whether creative businesses keep their margin.
"I think grit is a really important thing. I think determination and grit."
Tracey Shirtcliff is the Founder and CEO of SCOPE Better, a configure price quote platform built for the scoping and pricing problem she says the workflow and ERP tools never solved. She is a repeat software founder who has spent her career at the commercial edge of the agency world, where creative businesses price, scope and protect their margins.
Shirtcliff studied geology and zoology before cross-crediting to a master's in marketing and commerce, deciding early that a career on an oil rig was not for her. She spent much of her career client side, then started and ran her own content agency before moving into software. Her first business was Sonar, whose product Traffic became Traffic Live, an early software as a service workflow and project management tool for agencies. She recalls launching it in 2007, when the cloud was so unfamiliar she used to ship Mac Minis to offices and spend most conversations explaining infrastructure.
Traffic Live was used by large global agencies across WPP and other networks, and Shirtcliff sold it to Deltek in 2015 with, by her account, over 1,000 agencies, three offices in London, Sydney and New York, and nearly 80 staff. On exit she saw that the workflow and accounting tools left scoping and pricing untouched, so she built SCOPE Better to close that gap. Her thesis is that pricing is the commercialization layer of an agency, and that fixing it, rather than chasing the next client, is what lets creative businesses grow and scale.
Constantly winning more business without fixing the fundamentals
"You should be using deliverables, outputs, and even out to outcomes"
Shirtcliff argues that time and materials pricing is a relic that AI should have finished off, yet most agencies still cling to it. She wants agencies to price deliverables, outputs and, where they have the rigor, outcomes, packaging what is delivered, who does it and how into a fee. It is harder, she concedes, which is exactly why it has stayed in the too hard box.
"It's still gonna take, um, the interaction of humans in order to understand the, the client and all of the human conditions that come into to pricing"
Shirtcliff expects AI agents to assemble pricing and build scopes better than people within a few years. But she draws a firm line at judgment: humans remain the commercialization layer, reading the client and the human conditions no agent can weigh. AI does the grunt work, people decide.
"That you've gotta make it look really good. It's gotta be drag and drop."
Having built two products for people who dislike software, Shirtcliff has firm views on design. It has to look good, work as drag and drop, and absorb feedback quickly. And it has to flex, because creative agencies are creative inside their own businesses as much as outside them.
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