Happy 22nd Birthday Archie Gallagher! Season-ticket holder for 15 years already, celebrating today in the Matthew Harding Lower. Have a brilliant birthday at the Bridge! 💙 #cfcmatchday@chelseafc

Your agency probably has a sales problem disguised as a delivery problem. You think you need better processes. What you actually need is enough leads that you can stop saying yes to every brief that walks through the door. Abundance of leads solves 80% of agency problems. The other 20% is structure

The agency pricing model has three stages: 1. Let me do for you (selling time) 2. Let me think for you (selling value) 3. Let me build the system that does it for you (selling IP) Most agencies are stuck at stage 1. AI makes stage 3 possible for agencies that never had the team to build products before. That's where the real margin lives.

10% of growing an agency is knowledge. 90% is mindset. After 60,000+ hours working with agencies, I'm convinced of this. The information is out there. Books, podcasts, advisers, communities. What separates the ones who scale from the ones who stall is the willingness to actually do the uncomfortable things they already know they should do.

A management buy-in can be transformational for a stalling agency. Bring in an experienced operator with capital, give them equity, and watch what happens when fresh energy meets an established client base. It's not giving up control. It's buying acceleration.

The agencies growing fastest right now share one trait: their founders are visible in their niches. Speaking at events / Podcasts / Panel Posting consistently. Building meaningful connections & conversations Building personal brands. It's not vanity. It's manifest trust. When a prospect Googles your name and finds nothing, you've lost before you've started. Your personal brand is your agency's best marketing assets.

A prospect once told our BDM that money was no object for a three mini-game project. Vim worked until 4am on proposals. Came back with a competitive £18k quote. The prospect said they were thinking £2k each. "But you said money was no object!" Vim never proposed again without getting the exact budget first. Neither should you.

Work expands to fill the time available. Parkinson's Law. This is why agencies without proper project management always over-service. Without someone tracking time and scope, every project slowly balloons. The PM isn't overhead. The PM is the reason you make a profit on the work you've sold.

Employee Ownership Trusts are quietly becoming one of the smartest exit routes for agency founders. Tax efficient. Preserves the culture. Motivates the team through shared ownership. Not right for everyone, but if you care about legacy as much as payout, worth understanding.

We never lost on price. Not once. Even when our day rates were higher than nearly all our competitors. When a prospect tells you that you lost on price, 9 times out of 10 they just didn't want to have the awkward conversation about the real reason. You didn't lose on price. You failed to convince them you were the best choice, the best value and the best agency for a successful outcome.

Three agencies. All at £1.5m revenue. Agency 1: 31 staff, 1 project manager. No profit. Agency 2: 27 staff, 2 project managers. Some profit. Agency 3: 22 staff, 3 project managers. Most profitable of all. More organisers, fewer doers. That's the counterintuitive lesson most agencies learn too late.

If a client represents more than 20% of your revenue, you need a plan to dilute that within 12 months. Not because they'll definitely leave. But because the dependency changes the power dynamic in every conversation. They know they're your biggest client. And they behave accordingly.

AI won't fix a broken delivery process. It will accelerate it. If your projects are already late and over-serviced, adding AI tools will just help you fail faster. Fix the process first. Then automate it. That's the order that works.

If you want a sales culture, make new business everyone's business. Every team member should be able to deliver your elevator pitch. Every team member should share agency content. Every team member should understand the sales targets. The agencies that grow fastest don't have sales teams. They have sales cultures.

If you can't make your agency a success, you're unlikely to make a product business a success. I've watched agency founders lose focus chasing product ventures. One invested so heavily the agency entered a CVA. Once they refocused on the agency alone, it grew to £4m in three years. Focus on one business at a time, that's the multiplier.

I've met hundreds of agency owners in their 50s and 60s who want to sell their lifestyle agencies so they can retire. Almost all of them were shocked at how little their businesses were worth. They spent 10-20 years drawing out every penny of profit. Never reinvested. Never built an asset. The agency was worth the goodwill value of its client book. Which wasn't much.

"New business is everyone's business." That's not a slogan. It's an operating principle. Your whole team should know the elevator pitch by heart. They should be sharing content. They should understand the sales targets. Challenge: ask your team to describe what your agency does. Record it. I guarantee 90% will say something different.

Your competitors' pitch documents will tell you everything about where the industry is heading. We once asked a client for a competitor's pitch deck after winning. We were winning on substance but losing on presentation. AI tools now make world-class pitch materials accessible to every agency. The playing field just got flat. What differentiates you now is the creativity and the thinking.

The buy and build strategy is massively underused by independent agencies. Find 3-4 complementary agencies of similar size. Form a group. Strip out duplicated costs. The combined entity is worth significantly more than the parts. You don't need PE money to do this. You need a shared vision and decent advisors ;-)