The economics of a Master-first agency

The pattern across all three studios is the same: discovery and design stay human, implementation compresses. Projects that used to be quoted in weeks are now quoted in days, and the quote holds more often.

Margin improves less than you would expect from the time saved, because the studios reinvest the difference into more iterations per client. The visible win is fewer fixed-bid overruns.

The operational change that mattered most was templating: each studio keeps a starter project with their own design tokens and auth flow, and remixes it per client.