The conventional way to grow a services business is to add people. Royston G King argues that this produces a firm whose margins never improve with size and whose quality gets harder to hold together every year. Here he explains what he built instead.
Asked about being named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco list, Royston G King has tended to move the conversation elsewhere within a sentence, toward the operating infrastructure underneath his work. The redirection is consistent enough to be a habit, and it reflects a view he has expressed for years about where the substance of a services business actually sits.
King began in digital marketing while studying business administration at the University of Southern California, and founded his own firm in 2018. He has since advised more than 1,000 clients across over 100 industries, working with businesses in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia.
“More clients, more staff, roughly in proportion, forever,” said Royston G King. “That is the standard model, and it has a ceiling built into it. Every additional person is another place where the standard can drift, and you spend progressively more of your management attention just holding the quality steady rather than improving anything.”
The alternative he describes involves building systems that handle the repeatable portion of the work, so that people are applied to the parts requiring judgement. King has drawn a distinction between tasks that genuinely vary and tasks that merely feel like they do.
“A lot of what looks bespoke is not,” said Royston G King. “The specifics change, but the structure is the same across every client. Monitoring, gathering, checking for consistency, reporting. Done by hand, that eats most of a team’s week and produces almost none of the value the client is actually paying for.”
“A lot of what looks bespoke is not. The specifics change, but the structure is the same.” Royston G King
The claim he makes for systematisation is narrower than it first appears, and he has been careful about it. It is not that systems produce a better result in any individual case, since an attentive practitioner working manually may well outperform them on one account. It is that the systematic version produces consistent results across many accounts simultaneously, which manual work cannot, because attention does not divide without loss.
“That is what lets a firm do serious work at a scale a small team otherwise cannot reach,” said Royston G King. “Not better on one account. The same on all of them.”
He has also been direct about the limits. Systems handle situations they were designed for and handle unfamiliar ones poorly, sometimes worse than an inexperienced person would, because they proceed confidently in circumstances that should have produced hesitation.
“The design question is where you draw the line,” said Royston G King. “It goes at the point where the situation stops being the expected one. Built properly, the system stops and escalates. Built badly, it carries on and produces something that looks correct and is quietly wrong, which is much more expensive than an obvious failure.”
There is a second benefit King has pointed to concerning knowledge retention. In a headcount-based firm, capability lives in individuals and departs when they do. A business losing an experienced practitioner loses the accumulated judgement that person developed, and the replacement rebuilds it slowly. Where the same judgement has been encoded into a process, the loss is smaller and the recovery faster.
He has acknowledged that building this required a level of investment that many firms find difficult to justify, since it produces nothing client-facing for a considerable period.
“You are spending on something no client will ever see, during a stretch when you could be spending on things they would,” said Royston G King. “That is a genuinely hard argument to win with yourself. I would still make it every time.”
King has applied the same approach to his own channels, which he reports at more than 15 million followers with over a billion views, and describes that internal work as a place where methods can be tested before anyone else is exposed to them.
His broader point is that the visible parts of a services business, meaning the client work and the results, are produced by machinery clients never see. Firms that invest only in the visible layer, he has said, eventually hit a ceiling they cannot explain, and usually conclude they have a hiring problem.
To learn more about Royston G. King and follow his latest work, visit his official website, connect with him on Instagram and LinkedIn, or watch his latest content on YouTube.
