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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Every agency is unique. Its miseries are not.
Tolstoy said it the other way, that happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But after working inside more than 200 agencies and talking to maybe three times that number, I’ve found the opposite is true.
When you dig into how an agency actually operates, they are all different. The cultures, the founders, the work, the clients; no two look alike. But the problems? The problems are almost always the same.
And they’re strange problems. They don’t really exist anywhere else, not in this breed or at this magnitude. They come from something intrinsic to agencies: the collision between the chaos of running one and the impossibly high standard of the work itself. Every agency is trying to do something unreasonably close to perfect, inside an organization that is unreasonably difficult to manage. That tension is what drew me to this industry in the first place.
The other thing I can tell you after 200 engagements is that almost nobody manages to fix just one problem. The significant challenges inside an agency are all connected. They form a system, and the system spits out changes. You can see the evidence in the gap between how an agency thinks it operates, if you read its process documentation, and how it actually operates. The real delivery system gets forged in the furnace of time-based delivery, over-allocated teams, and short deadlines. It’s not optimal. But it gets things done.
Good enough. That might be the greatest tragedy I’ve seen: leaders and managers, trying to make things better, often make the battle for success harder.
It has been my pleasure to work alongside gifted leadership teams and the people inside these places. The work we’ve done together has made many agencies (and many lives) measurably better. I’m grateful for the experience, and for what they taught me about how an agency really needs to operate.
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.
Help No Longer Wanted
“Stop considering, start training.”
Nathan Yerian, Adhere Creative“Arguably one of the smartest training investments we’ve made this year.”
Sarah Hofstetter, CEO, 360i“So thank you, truly the greatest investment we’ve ever made.”
Alex Craven, Bloom AgencyAgencies 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?
Help No Longer Wanted
“They are on a mission to bring out all of the skeletons in our collective closets and help us address the real issues.”
Rebecca Flavin, CEO, Effective UI“The focus on the cultural shifts versus just implementing tools has already shown more results than anything else we’ve done in the past.”
Amanda Ferber, 22squared“It opened my eyes to how insufficient we may have been in the past.”
Michael Rykalsky, GTBAnd 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.
The changes that stick are the ones the team helped create. That’s not a philosophy; it’s the pattern from 200 engagements. We work on real projects with your real teams, changing how the work flows: simpler structures, less hierarchy, rituals that put people back in deep engagement with each other and with clients.
How we work together →Help No Longer Wanted
“In that first week, I literally saw our team members come alive in front of me.”
JaNette Connell, Insperit“Everyone loved it. They say, ‘I don’t want to go back to the old way of working.’”
Ned Johnson, GTB“It creates a forum where everyone is in the same room creating. I think it’s the future of working in our industry.”
Katie Reeves, Bloom AgencyAgencies helped
Paid back within 3 months
Would recommend
Faster delivery
Help No Longer Wanted
“In just a few days, you’ve done more work than we’d typically expect to get done in 2 months!”
Ron Merbler, Ford Motor Company“All of our projects have come in on or under budget. That is a huge win for our small agency.”
Bryan Shavaner, Fifty&Fifty“The week we spent in training was truly transformative. It unified our entire agency.”
Kim Manning, CEO, Cronin“Cross-discipline collaboration is radically improved beyond our expectations.”
Dave Foster, COO, LaneTerralever“We’re seeing large projects come in with fewer quality issues and at higher profitability rates.”
Deana Derocha, HelloWorldIf something here resonated, I’d like to hear about it.
30 minutes. No pitch, no deck. You tell me what’s not working; I’ll tell you what I’d look at first.
Book a Conversation →Prefer email? Tell me a bit about your agency and what’s on your mind. I’ll get back to you personally.
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