That’s where I come in.
I work with agency leaders and their teams to find better ways of working together. Most owners have the right instincts about their business. I bring the insight, guidance, and methods to make your vision achievable.
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I spent four years at RAND as a management scientist trying to answer it, studying how organizations produce outcomes their designers never intended. I got an MBA at USC studying why owner-operated businesses thrive or eat themselves alive. Then I ran Sapient’s Los Angeles office, 105 people, and discovered I was part of the problem.
I built two companies after that (PDIT and Modulant, both made the Inc. 500), sold my share, trained in leadership coaching at the Hudson Institute, and went looking for the answer in a different place: inside other people’s agencies. That was fifteen years and 200+ engagements ago. The methods I built along the way became AgencyAgile. The book I wrote about what I learned, UNMANAGED, won six awards, five of them golds.
The question I am working on now is the one every agency owner is asking: what happens when AI changes what clients will pay for.
Every org chart I’ve ever seen describes reporting lines. None of them describe how work actually moves through the building.
Agencies love to cut meetings. They almost always cut the coordination ones and keep the status ones.
Management layers that don’t touch the work create distance from the client. The distance is invisible until the client points it out by leaving.
Family is an accountability-free metaphor. The firms that work well together have something more specific than love. They have shared language.
Agencies have always been businesses in motion. New clients, new services, a growth spurt, going remote, and now AI: there’s always something, and every shift quietly pulls the way the firm runs out of alignment with what the firm has become. Running an agency well is largely the ability to realign as change happens. It’s a skill, and it’s hard to exercise if you’ve never done it or watched it done; most owners are facing this round for the first time. Done well, realignment does more than fix the drift; it reinvigorates the place. I’ve been in the room for hundreds of these.
Read: Culture Drift →Pick your proudest value. What’s the most common behavior in your firm that quietly refutes it, and how will you change that?
Who in your firm hasn’t been asked for their thinking in a month, and how did a disempowering process find its way in?
What does someone in one of your departments believe about another department that they’d never say in a mixed room, and what’s your evidence it isn’t true?
Where are your leaders spending their time: sorting out org charts and promotions, or elevating the conversation with clients, present and future?
Count the tools your firm runs on. How many are bending your people to their way of working, and how many have dissolved into everyone doing their own thing?
And now this.
AI collapsed the cost of the assembly layer: drafting, structuring, producing. It did not touch the judgment layer: formulating the right question, interpreting ambiguous evidence, knowing what the data means for this client. Most agencies are using a restructuring technology as a productivity tool. That makes the structural problems worse, not better. Adding a motor to the hamster wheel.
Work quality ranks only #30 out of 91 attributes in driving high client ratings. Clients who rate 9/10 are 3x more likely to praise the experience than the output.
Agencies helped
Paid back within 3 months
Would recommend
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30 minutes. No pitch, no deck. You tell me what’s not working; I’ll tell you what I’d look at first.
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