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As our agency business emerged from the fog of the pandemic, I started to notice a trend.
Our clients and prospects were asking for significantly different kinds of engagements and services, and the variety was accelerating. The conventional jobs and budgets we forecast against were getting replaced by complex work that required a different kind of approach: big ideas in small packages.
Clients needed to move fast with specialized experts and technical depth. They wanted small teams who could make decisions quickly, not layers of account management coordinating global offices. This was a disruptive opportunity for a small independent agency like Siberia. Clients were willing to pay for excellence but not for overhead.
The traditional agency response would be to hire specialists and build those capabilities in-house. But that creates its own problems. You need to keep those people busy, which means taking work that isn't the right fit just to maintain utilization. These conditions very quickly turn into a problem. Clients end up paying for infrastructure that doesn't serve them and teams end up working on projects that don’t motivate them.
In 2023, we spun our business out of United Talent Agency, and pivoted our operating model to look more like a network of specialty talent. We also welcomed external investment, bringing two of our longest standing collaborators, Silverpine Software and Foxhole QA, into the fold as equity partners in Siberia. Bringing them closer in as business partners created a unique structure that aligned incentives and helped us compete for some of that increasingly complex work. We didn't merge operations or create a holding structure. While we kept our teams independent, this structure lets us compete for work that traditionally required massive in-house teams, while staying lean, profitable, and focused on what we do best.
Here's how it actually works.
Specialization over generalization
With minority ownership by Silverpine Software, a mobile development firm, and Foxhole QA, a trusted Quality Assurance Testing company, we’re able to legitimately position our offering in a more robust way, which many of our clients are compelled by. When we pitch complex technical work, we're not bringing in subcontractors we found last week. We're bringing in co-owners who've been working together for years and have genuine skin in the game.
In a recent tech-enabled hotel brand pitch, the client was justifiably concerned about integrating with their Fortune 500 partner’s technical ecosystem. Having worked for years on mobile keyless entry services, Silverpine was brought to the table early in the sales process. Their innate knowledge of the platforms accelerated the technical scoping process, and brought comfort to the client. We were able to offer them direct access to valuable expertise without the sprawling overhead that would have been required for Siberia to own that knowledge base in house across all of our client’s sectors. We’d be too big, and we’d be too expensive.
Each company maintains deep specialization in their domain. Silverpine doesn't do research, value proposition development, or product design, and we are far from experts on the nuances of Android’s Bluetooth SDK. The network model depends on each node being genuinely excellent at their specific thing.
Networks over in-house expansion
The old approach was to bring capabilities in-house: hire developers, hire QA specialists, hire strategists. Build the whole stack internally. That creates bloat fast. You need to keep those people busy, which means taking work that might not be the best fit just to feed the machine.
The nimble network model lets you scale expertise up and down based on what each project actually needs. We're not maintaining permanent capacity for every possible client requirement. We're assembling the right expertise for each challenge.
This isn't just us. Look at the Red Antler Group or how other independents are forming strategic partnerships. These models work because they prioritize what clients need over what looks impressive on an org chart.
The economics matter here. Without the pressure to feed a massive overhead structure, we can compete for work that traditionally required massive in-house teams while staying profitable at a smaller scale. More importantly, we stay nimble. We can say yes to the right work and no to the wrong work, without worrying about keeping utilization numbers up.
Senior talent over permanent headcount
The labor model is critical. We're not talking about a loose collection of freelancers or some gig economy staffing play. These are senior practitioners who share values around craft and how work gets done.
Our core team stays lean - senior people who've worked together long enough to move without coordination overhead. When a project needs specialized expertise, we bring in people from our network who we've worked with repeatedly. They know our standards. We know their capabilities. There's trust.
This creates a better environment for the practitioners themselves. No quarterly business reviews where someone beats you up over profit margins. No need to justify your existence through organizational theater. Time goes into solving client problems instead.
The traditional agency model (large, integrated and often loosely connected within holding structures) needs junior people to be profitable - lots of them, billing hours, keeping rates lower by mixing experience levels. The network model inverts this. We can pay senior people well because we're not carrying overhead or managing utilization of people who aren't working on active projects.
Performance over process
Here's what we don't do: monthly reporting structures designed to justify everyone's existence. Quarterly planning sessions that produce slide decks nobody reads. Status meetings about status meetings.
When you're co-owners with your key partners, the incentive structure changes completely. Everyone has skin in the game. Nobody needs to be convinced to care about outcomes. The work either succeeds or it doesn't, and we all feel it.
This sounds obvious, but it's actually rare. Most agency partnerships are transactional - find the cheapest subcontractor, negotiate the deal, manage the relationship. That creates friction at every decision point. Co-ownership removes that friction. We're solving problems together, not negotiating who's responsible for what.
The culture this creates is different. We're not trying to build fluffy team-building exercises or maintain some performative notion of "agency life." We're trying to build a system where high-performers can focus on doing excellent work without wading through bullshit.
What this enables
This model changes what's possible. We can compete for work that traditionally required massive in-house teams. We can move faster than organizations ten times our size. We can bring genuine expertise to complex problems without the client paying for the infrastructure that makes a thousand-person agency function.
When a prospect asks how we'll handle their eight-country rollout, we transparently show them our network of partners both in and out of Siberia’s ownership group - the specific companies we've worked with in those markets, the actual people who'll do the work, and the track record of delivery.
That honesty is refreshing to clients who've been burned by the traditional model. They've paid for "global capabilities" and gotten account coordinators reading from a deck. They've paid for "integrated expertise" and gotten siloed teams who don't talk to each other.
The network model works because it aligns everyone's incentives. The client gets direct access to expertise. The practitioners get to focus on craft instead of politics. The business model stays profitable without extraction.
Why this model matters now
This shift is happening because the economic reality demands it. Clients can't afford to pay for the infrastructure required to make large, full-service, agency models function. They need partners who deliver value efficiently, who can assemble the right expertise for each challenge without maintaining it all on permanent payroll.
The agencies that thrive in 2026 won't be the ones with the most impressive employee count or the slickest pitch deck about being "AI-first." They'll be the ones who figured out how to deliver integrated expertise through strategic partnerships - building constellations of specialized talent with aligned incentives, not empires under one roof.
Networks are emerging as the model that makes this possible. Not because they're trendy or because someone wrote a case study about them. Because the math works better for everyone involved - clients, practitioners, and the agencies themselves.
