I blab.
A lot.

Agency stuck at $70K/month for six months. They think it's a lead problem. Wrong. Their positioning is "whatever digital marketing you need, we do," so they can't say no to anyone. They stay on the freelancer marketplace, sign bad-fit clients, burn the team out, churn at 2 months. Repeat. "More leads" feels like the fix. Pouring leads into that machine just turns the churn rate up to 11. Fix the order of operations: Know who you are. Keep the clients you've got. Then go get more.

Did y'all know that agency founders are magical? It's true. They all have this thing called "Founder Magic". It's a superpower that can accelerate your agency like a Lucid Sapphire (1.86 seconds 0-60 mph) in the early days. But it can seriously slow down you agency growth when that magical founder starts to pull away from the day to day. In this Motor Trend Car of the Year award-winning issue of The Agency Inner Circle, you are going to learn how: 1. The way that you sell as a founder isn't transferrable to someone else (without some serious work) - no matter how good they are at sales. 2. Your agency brand is trapped in your head. If you don't let it out, your team is going to forget the right direction. (And your market is gonna forget you too) 3. Why INVESTING your founder magic is imperative. 4. We talk a little bit about why we built SalesOS I bet there's other nifty stuff in there but I don't wanna spoil the whole thing. BTW, if anyone has a Lucid Sapphire they aren't using any more and would like to get me a belated birthday gift, you know where to find me.

YOUR JOB ISN'T TO MAKE HAPPY CLIENTS. YOUR JOB IS TO MAKE TEAMS & SYSTEMS THAT MAKE HAPPY CLIENTS. I said that on a podcast back in 2018. I had a call this week with an agency owner who has built something that they genuinely hate. They are the bottleneck, the accelerator, and the single source of truth for every question from a prospect, client or staff. Every decision routes through them. Every client relationship is based on their expertise. Every piece of content sounds like them because it IS them. I know why they do this - they are afraid someone else is going to fuck it up. I guarantee that they will fuck it up, at least once or twice. There's nothing you can do to change that learning curve - but refusing to help your team learn that curve is forcing you to build a an agency that you hate. I've got a fix - I call it UNSCALE. UNSCALE doesn't mean your agency does fewer things. It means YOU do fewer things. You let the experts on your team lead. You let them put their faces on the content and the social and the YouTube so that prospects can actually see the people they are going to work with. You let someone else run the sales process. You stop being the single point of failure and start being the architect of a thing that runs. Most agency owners I talk to say they want to build a $10mm or $20mm ot $100mm agency. When I dig in a little, what they actually want is cash and autonomy. You don't need a huge team to build an agency that allows you to manage the agency while your team operates the agency (cuz that's what you really want...after 30 year in this biz, you gotta trust me on this one...). Ping me & we can maybe talk about what UNSCALE looks like for you...

If your positioning doesn't make you think "Oh, shit...did I go too far?", friend, you've got a lot of work to do. Sure, positioning helps draw the right people to you, but it also scares the wrong ones away. Here's what happens when you positioning has all the spice of macaroni & cheese: Visitor 1: "Wow, I wonder what they do? It's hard to tell..." Visitor 2: "They don't mention any companies that I've ever heard of...they must work with small businesses just like me." Visitor 3: "I should probably request a quote on their website - that seems like a good way to. find out if they can help me." YOUR CRM: Full of broke people who don't know what you do. When you add a little Carolina Reaper to the recipe: Visitor 1: "Wow - they work with regional accounting firms that want to grow like a "Bat Out Of Hell! That's awesome - Bat Out of Hell is MY favorite Meatloaf album. And my accounting firm is ready to kick some ass." Visitor 2: "Jane, I know that these guys are "award winning" but I'm not sure that "Bat Out of Hell" is the right idea to support our new Dayton office. Can you find two other agencies that are, um, "rocking fewer tattoos"? Did I say that right, Jane?" Visitor 3: "OMFG, I wish they helped goth-inspired flower shops...but next time I talk to our accountant Spike, I am going to INSIST that he call them right now." Your CRM: 1 hot lead. 1 bad fit client that didn't waste your time (yay!). 1 referral waiting on Spike to close out the month end books for Angsty Agatha's House of Dramatic & Dark Floral Joy. See the difference?

Most agency proposals are a built backwards. They start with process overview, team bios, a BS award from Clutch from 2020 & logos you hope the prospect will recognize. That's stupid - they are just squawking about themselves Open with description of their situation, their actual goals, the exact language they used to describe the pain... and they'll think holy shit, they actually got it. Clients hire the agency that made them feel understood. Your POV and insight closes deals, your "proprietary process" or "platinum platform partner" are just decorations. Lean into they stuff that matters to your client... THEM Start your next proposal by talking about them and see what happens.

AI makes hard shit faster. It does not make hard shit unnecessary. So many agency founders (and their teams) pump out metric tons of AI slop. Tt's showing up in their client work too... You've seen the ads, images and emails that scream "THIS IS AI SLOP!" You know that they focused on "faster" rather than BETTER. Great positioning, a discovery process that builds trust, the insight that makes a prospect say "Thank gawd I found you !!!" and great marketing execution all existed before AI. It was just really, really hard to do well, so most agencies didn't do itwell. And because marketers do, in fact, ruin everything - they've decided that more, shittier work is better than less, higher-quality work. That is bro-marketer "MUST SCALE" BS amplified by ChatGPT (or Claude - or whatever you love the best) AI as a force-multiplier is only true if there's something worth multiplying. More manure coming out of the chute doesn't make you a better marketer...it makes you a shit spreader. You still have to create revenue, trust, and real acceleration for your clients. AI didn't change that - it just made it easier to indulge your worst instincts. Take the time and CREATE the work that needs to be created to move your client's needle. Once you can do that reliably, THEN use AI to amplify, multiply & any other -ply you want...but if you indulge AI slop, you are going to be rolling around in the sty like all the other lazy little piggies.

AI is a management problem. Definitely not an existential threat. A management problem. Every few years there's a new thing that's going to kill everything. The internet was going to kill print. WYSIWYG editors were going to kill developers. Machine learning was going to make everything simple. None of that happened the way the hype said it would. And yet here we are, agencies losing their minds again, asking the same panicked questions they always ask when something new shows up. Do I need to rebuild everything? Do I need to hire someone who understands this? Am I already behind? Those are the wrong questions. The agencies that are going to actually benefit from AI are the ones who already know what they do, who they do it for, why they're different, and how they create impact. For those agencies, AI is a force multiplier. It makes the stuff they already understand how to do faster, more complete, more scalable. For everyone else? AI is just going to help you produce more of the wrong stuff, faster, at a lower cost per unit of mediocrity. You don't have a technology problem. You have a management problem. You need to know what you are trying to accomplish before you can point any tool at it and expect results. The agencies that skipped the work on positioning, on sales process, on understanding what actually creates impact for their clients... pointing an agent at that mess doesn't fix it. It just automates the confusion.

Here's what you want to hear from your prospects: "I found you because you do X for Y". There's so many agencies that can't even say "WE DO X FOR Y" without it being really flabby. WTF do I mean by "flabby"? Flabby: We do paid social for ecommerce. → That's flabby because "paid social" means a bunch of things to a bunch of people. Ecommerce applies equally well to Amazon as it does to the dropshipping bro in Bali. How do I make this "non-flabby"? Well, we start with WHO you want to talk to...and it's got to be pretty specific: → VP of Marketing for ecommerce brand - FLABBY → VP of Marketing for ecommerce brand between $10mm & $50mm in revenue - LESS FLABBY → VP of Marketing for DTC ecommerce brand between $10mm & $50mm in revenue in the beauty space - LESS LESS FLABBY → VP of Marketing for DTC ecommerce brand between $10mm & $50mm in revenue in the beauty space with a subscription play - FIRM Now that you know WHO, now we can define X & Y: Y= Beauty brands that want to break the $50mm revenue plateau. X= We do UGC, Influencer & Brand video ads on Meta & TikTok to maximize subscription growth while keeping CPA in the 1st transaction profitable zone. A non-flabby "We do X for Y": We create & manage UCG, Influencer & Brand advertising on Meta & TikTok to help DTC beauty brands that want to break the $50mm revenue plateau. A really non-flabby "we do X for Y without Z": We create & manage subscription-focused UCG, Influencer & Brand ads on video-first social channels to help DTC beauty brands break the $50mm revenue wall without sacrificing 1st transaction profitability. DemandOS was built specifically for this. If you want to figure out what you actually stand for and say it in a way that makes the right people raise their hand, hit me up.

Your proposal probably sucks. And it's not a proposal problem. Most agency founders treat proposals like the big moment. They spend hours on the deck, agonize over pricing presentation, fiddle with the scope language. And then they email it into a void and wonder why the prospect ghosts. The proposal isn't the problem. The conversation before it is. Three rules. Break any one of them and you are probably cooked. Rule 1: Don't agree to write a proposal until you know three things. What the prospect is actually trying to accomplish. How big a deal they think this problem is. How they make decisions. If you don't know all three, you aren't writing a proposal, you are writing a wish list of stuff you want to get paid for. Nobody buys a wish list. Rule 2: Never just send the proposal. Winning proposals get presented. If you email it without a scheduled walkthrough, you are handing your prospect a document full of things they can misread, misinterpret, and use to talk themselves out of it. Get the meeting first. Walk through it live. Every time. Rule 3: Nothing in your proposal should be a surprise. Every line, every number, every scope item should be confirming something you already talked about together. If your prospect reads your proposal and sees something they didn't expect, you didn't do enough discovery. Full stop. Surprises don't close deals, they open debates. If your proposals aren't closing, don't rewrite the proposal. Go back and look at the conversation that happened before it. That's where you lost it.

Wrong-fit clients are a positioning problem, not a discovery problem. Agency founders who are drowning in bad-fit clients want to fix their qualification questions, tighten their discovery process, build a better intake form. All of that is treating the symptom. You invited those clients. Your website did it. Your LinkedIn did it. Your "data-driven, ROI-focused, extension of your team" copy opened the door and said, come on in, everybody. When you write safe, broad, offend-nobody positioning because you are terrified of scaring someone away, you don't scare anyone away. Including all the wrong people. The agencies I see with the cleanest pipelines are the ones who said something real, something specific, something that made a certain kind of prospect go oh thank gawd I found them and made everyone else go yeah, that's not for me. Both of those outcomes are wins. Your messaging is supposed to do the qualification work before anyone picks up the phone. If it isn't doing that, your discovery call is going to be a rescue operation, not a conversation. Stop fixing your sales process. Fix what you're saying about yourself first.

Your proposal is really a test of how well you listen. Most agency founders treat it like a highlight reel. Process. Team. An award from 2022. Three logos you might recognize. The prospect opens that document and immediately knows you weren't paying attention on the call. Every proposal that leads with your credentials is just the Generous Professor showing up in PDF form. You are so eager to prove you are smart, so desperate to demonstrate that you can do the work, that you forgot to show them that you actually heard them. The proposal is where you prove whether you passed the listening test or failed it. Lead with your methodology and you've written a proposal about you. Open with a crisp, accurate description of their situation, their actual goals, the specific thing keeping them up at night that they mentioned in minute 22 of your call... and they'll think holy shit, they actually got it. Clients hire the agency that made them feel understood, not the one with the most impressive deck. Your POV closes deals. Your process is just the container. And your POV only lands when it's aimed directly at their problem, not broadcast at the room. Start the next proposal with their words, not yours. See what happens.

YOUR CASE STUDIES ARE MAKING YOU THE HERO. That's why they don't work. Most agency case studies read like a memoir. Back when we started with this client, the world was dark... we worked incredibly hard on 17,000 things... and eventually, the client made money. Nobody cares. Seriously. Nobody. The prospect reading your case study doesn't give a shit how busy you were or how complex the engagement was. They care about one thing: Do I see myself in this story, and does it end somewhere I want to go? Most case studies commit a capital crime: They turn you into the hero. Your process, your methodology, your team, your awards, your thinking. All of it. Front and center. The client? Somewhere in the back, like an NPC. Flip it. The client is the hero. You are the vehicle. The framework is dead simple: 1. Before. 2. After. 3. Your agency in the middle. That's the whole thing. They had this blocker, you removed it, here's what changed. BTW - case studies age like milk. The tactics you used 18 months ago might be completely irrelevant today. So stop trying to make them beautiful, permanent, design-award-worthy artifacts. Make them fast, disposable, and effective. A prospect who self-identifies in 30 seconds and wants to talk to you is worth a thousand people who looked at your hero images and said "Wow." The goal of a case study is singular: Move someone from audience to prospect. That's it. Result up front, client as hero, you in the middle. Done.