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When a client leaves, the reason on record is usually straightforward. Budget cuts. A leadership change. Procurement. A decision to consolidate agencies. A new strategic direction. Sometimes that's the whole story. But in agencies I've worked with, the conditions that make an important client vulnerable often start much earlier — and inside the agency itself. That's why I think churn is better understood as a lagging indicator. By the time the revenue disappears, something ma

Walk into almost any agency pitch this year and you'll hear some version of the same claim: We're ahead on AI. We understand AI search. We're already helping clients navigate the shift. That's not necessarily wrong. But when almost everyone in a category starts making the same claim, the claim itself stops being differentiation. What matters next is proof. And right now, there's a significant gap between what agencies are saying about AI and what many can actually demonstrate

Almost every agency founder I talk to has thought about building out operating leadership. Far fewer have actually done it — and the ones who waited too long almost always describe the same regret: not that the hire was wrong, but that they made it two or three years later than they should have, and reached for the first title that came to mind instead of the right one. The reason is rarely just money. Cost matters, but it's rarely the only reason founders wait. More often th

Every agency founder eventually asks some version of the same question: what happens to this business without me? Most don’t like the honest answer. At $10M–$20M, the agency is usually still built around its founder — not because that founder wants it that way, but because that’s how agencies get to this size in the first place. Founders close the biggest deals, hold the deepest client trust, and make the calls nobody else is positioned to make. It works. Until growth require

Most founders who hit a plateau between $10M and $20M assume they have a growth problem. They don’t — not usually. In three decades of running and advising agencies, from Digitas through MRM Worldwide, eBay Marketing Services, and BlueAcornICI, I’ve seen the same pattern show up again and again: revenue stalls, the founder reads it as a sales or marketing failure, and a year gets spent chasing more leads instead of fixing what’s actually broken. The plateau almost always come

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The marketing services industry is undergoing a major transformation. Agencies that want to thrive in 2025 and beyond must anticipate change, act quickly, and align their capabilities with emerging client expectations.