Our agency does not do Umbraco.

The client is right and the timing is wrong

It is a good account. The kind you built the agency to win: sensible people, real budgets, work you are proud to show. And somewhere in the relationship sits an Umbraco site, or a brief that specifies one, and the quiet internal truth is that nobody on your team does Umbraco. Perhaps you moved the shop to another stack years ago. Perhaps you never did .NET at all. Perhaps the one person who could muddle through left, and muddling through was already generous.

You have been managing it the way agencies manage these things. The Umbraco work gets scoped vaguely and scheduled generously. Small requests sit in the backlog longer than they should, because every one of them costs a developer two days of relearning a platform they touch twice a year. The bigger asks get gently redirected toward things the team can build. And in pitches, when Umbraco appears in the requirements, someone says we are platform agnostic with the specific confidence of a team hoping not to be asked a follow-up question.

None of this is negligence. It is arithmetic. Hiring a dedicated Umbraco developer for one or two accounts makes no sense. Cross-training your team on a platform they will rarely use burns money and enthusiasm. Turning the client away hands a competitor the whole relationship, not just the CMS work, because clients prefer one agency to two. So the account sits in a slow leak: served well everywhere except the platform at its centre, while you hope the site behaves and the client does not notice the hesitation every time they mention it.

The risk is not hypothetical. Their site needs patching that is not happening; my note on what happens when Umbraco 13 support ends is the kind of deadline that turns a quiet gap into an urgent client conversation, and you want to be the one who raises it, not the one who explains why nobody did.

What I do about it

I am the Umbraco department your agency does not need to build. Around forty percent of my work is exactly this arrangement: a specialist behind an agency's brand, delivering the platform work the agency sells. The mechanics of the discretion, contracts, invisibility, and communication styled as your team's are described in my white label answer, and they are contractual, not gentlemanly: confidentiality, including the existence of the arrangement itself, is built into the agreement we sign.

Practically, it means the Umbraco parts of the account stop being the slow, nervous parts. Small requests get done in days by someone who does this every day, billed at a flat £500 a day that leaves room for your margin. Bigger pieces, rebuilds, new features, integrations, run as ordinary Umbraco development under your project management, with me as one of your developers as far as anyone outside the building knows. The always-on layer, patching within 48 hours, monitoring, verified backups, becomes a support and maintenance service you can resell with a straight face, because someone genuinely senior is underneath it.

It also changes what you can say in pitches. Platform agnostic becomes true. When Umbraco appears in a brief, you can bid with real delivery certainty and real numbers underneath the quote, because you priced it with me before promising it. More than one agency has won work they would previously have declined, on the strength of a specialist the client never met.

If the depth matters for your own due diligence: fourteen years on the platform, versions 4 through 17, more than 200 sites, Umbraco MVP 2026, Silver Partner status through my company. Retainers from one to four days a month give you guaranteed capacity if the account has steady flow; ad hoc days work fine if it does not.

The conversation is confidential from the first message, including from your client and your competitors. Tell me about the account through the contact page, and by next week the phrase we do not do Umbraco can quietly stop being true.