For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more.

I've talked to hundreds of service business owners. The most common complaint sounds something like this: "I'm fully booked, but I'm still not making real money."

The second most common: "My business stopped the moment I went on vacation."

And the third: "I can't figure out how to grow without just hiring more people and making everything harder to manage."

Here's the thing. None of these are random problems. They're symptoms. And they all trace back to the same root cause: you're running a business model that was never designed to produce the outcome you actually want.

Most service business owners didn't choose their model. They inherited it — from how they started, from what clients first asked for, from what felt easiest to sell. The model they're running today is an accident of history, not a deliberate design decision.

That's what today is about.

Every service business — freelancer, agency, consultant, coach, firm — fits into one of four models. Each has fundamentally different economics, different leverage points, and a different ceiling. Knowing which model you're in is the first step to understanding why you're stuck — and what it would take to change that.

This is where most service businesses start. You sell your time, expertise, and attention — fully customized to each client. Think bespoke brand strategy, custom software builds, one-on-one executive coaching, tailored consulting engagements.

The upside: You can charge premium rates. Clients feel genuinely taken care of. You have almost unlimited flexibility in what you offer, which makes early-stage selling easier.

The downside: Revenue is capped by your time. Every engagement is reinvented from scratch. Scaling means working more hours or raising prices — and there's a ceiling on both. If you step away, the business pauses with you.

To win here: The Custom Studio works best when your name and expertise are the actual product — not just the vehicle for it. Protect your time ruthlessly. Charge rates that genuinely justify the model. Don't try to scale it like something else. The goal is fewer, better clients at higher fees, not more of everything.

The Agency replaces your time with a team's time. You're still selling custom deliverables, but you're building the systems and people to produce them without you being involved in every piece. Think marketing agencies, law firms, design studios, accounting practices.

The upside: You can take on more clients than you could solo. Revenue can grow past your personal capacity. You're building organizational value — something worth more than just your individual expertise.

The downside: You're now running two businesses simultaneously: delivering the service and managing a team. Margins compress. Complexity multiplies. You spend more time managing people and less time on client work — even though the client often hired you specifically for you.

To win here: The Agency lives or dies on its processes and its middle management layer. If every decision still routes back to you, you don't have an agency — you have a slightly larger Custom Studio with a higher payroll. Invest early in documentation, repeatable delivery systems, and people who can lead without you in the room.

This is the model most owners dream about but few actually execute. You take what you do best and turn it into a fixed deliverable — same scope, same process, same price, every time. "We build one thing: a fixed-price website in 14 days." Or: "We write your weekly newsletter — same deliverable, same fee, every month."

The upside: You can price it clearly, market it consistently, and deliver it at scale. Sales become simpler because the offer is specific. Delivery becomes efficient because you're doing the same thing repeatedly. Over time, you can hire others to deliver it while you focus on growth.

The downside: You have to say no to customization — and that's genuinely hard, especially early on. Clients who want bespoke won't be a fit. You trade the premium of flexibility for the efficiency of repetition. And it requires you to narrow down enough to actually build a repeatable thing, which most owners resist.

To win here: Start by identifying what you do most often and what you're best at. Build the productized version of that one thing. Resist the urge to allow exceptions. The narrower and more specific your offer, the easier everything downstream becomes — the marketing, the delivery, the hiring, the pricing.

Instead of selling outcomes once, you sell ongoing access, support, or output on a recurring basis. Think monthly SEO retainers, fractional CFO services, maintenance plans, coaching memberships, software-adjacent managed services.

The upside: Predictable, recurring revenue. Lower cost of customer acquisition once clients are on board. A business that compounds — each month, you start with existing revenue rather than starting from zero again. That psychological and financial security changes how you make decisions.

The downside: Clients churn. You need a clear, defensible reason why the ongoing engagement is worth the monthly fee. Scoping is a constant negotiation — "how much is too much?" becomes a question you'll deal with on repeat. And without a clear deliverable, clients start to wonder what they're paying for.

To win here: The subscription model needs a concrete, ongoing value delivery — not just "access to you," but "here's what you receive every month." It works best when what you're delivering is something clients genuinely need continuously: maintenance, reporting, content, advisory access with clear outputs. Define the deliverable even when the relationship is open-ended.

Here's what I want you to sit with: none of these models is inherently better than the others. Each one can be highly profitable. Each one can be a miserable grind. It entirely depends on whether the model you're running matches the outcome you're trying to build.

Most business owners are stuck not because they're working the wrong market or selling the wrong thing — but because they're trying to grow inside a model that structurally can't deliver what they want. You can't scale a Custom Studio like an Agency. You can't get subscription economics out of a project-based engagement. You can't productize something that's still fully custom each time.

The question isn't "which model is best?" The question is: does my model match my goals?

Ask yourself these three:

Pick the model that fits the life you're building. Then stop running the other three on the side.

Until next time,

Steven

P.S. Which model are you running — and is it the one you chose, or the one you drifted into by accident? Hit reply — I read every response.

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