Agency growth and how to avoid it

You start an agency, attract a bunch of clients, and before you know it, your days are filled with meetings about paint chips and expanded office space leases and IT upgrades, and if someone’s working from home, will they also need lumbar support? It’s the curse of growth.

And what most business leaders don’t realize is, it can all be avoided.

At The Wrong Agency, if there’s one subject we can practically write a doctoral thesis on, it’s not growing.

We know you’re probably looking at us from afar and asking: “How do you do it?” And because you’re afar, we don’t hear you.

We say, “What?” And you reply, “HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO RUN A SUCCESSFUL CREATIVE CONSULTANCY WITHOUT ANY CLIENTS???”

Now the answer will surprise you.

We’re successful precisely because we don’t have any clients. At our previous jobs, 30%, 40%, even up to 50% of our time was spent thinking about a client’s business.

That’s practically half our time on the account.

We’re pleased to report that those days of pandering and obsequiousness are behind us. Today, we’re able to focus 100% on our own brand without trying to make clients happy or deal with other unpleasantries associated with a growing business.

Are you wondering how you can not grow your agency too?

The secret is to create parameters for working together that only the rarest, most risk–taking marketers would ever agree to.

We have four. They are:

1. Agree to only work directly with the decision maker. That’s ‘decision maker’ not ‘decision makers’. No one likes decision–by–committees, but most brands have in place a minefield of decision makers, surrounded by an armada of other stakeholders, some of whom only come to meetings because they have concerns and/or heard there’d be bagels. Find a brand that has one person responsible for making marketing decisions (ideally, the founder, CEO, or CMO), and you will have already winnowed your new business prospects to but a handful. So far, so good!

2. Insist all communication is single-minded. Most marketers are allergic to simplicity. They don’t just want to tell people about a product – they want to tell people ALL about a product; how else can you explain why a marketing person at NyQuil saw its once–famous tagline, ‘The night-time sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so-you-can-have-messed-up-dreams medicine,’ and thought, “Can’t we say more?”

Today, the brand says (and I’m not making this up), ‘Turn to NyQuil Cold & Flu Nighttime Relief Liquid to relieve your cough due to minor throat and bronchial irritation, sore throat, headache, minor aches and pains, fever, runny nose, and sneezing, so you can get the sleep you need.’ OK, so you can probably scratch NyQuil off your list of remaining qualified leads.

3. Forbid them from changing the work. Of course, it’s your clients’ money – they can choose to buy or not buy an idea. But that doesn’t mean they should be invited to “improve” the idea through rounds of feedback and revisions. We realize that means a marketer might be put into the unenviable position of needing to follow the advice of an expert in their field. Finding a decision maker who will simply hire someone to do their marketing and then trust them to do it is practically unheard of. So at this point, your list of viable prospects should be roughly as long as your list of favorite Tone–Loc songs.

4. Promote revolution, not evolution. The most difficult task of any communication is to simply get attention. Yet in an attempt to do so, most brand leaders practice incrementalism – taking small risks and expecting people to notice. To scare the incrementalists away, try insisting they take brave leaps, not cautious steps. Say things like “Every brand must be a disruptor brand” and only show the kind of ideas that reframe categories and spark criticism and keep competitors awake at night. That kind of unreasonable behavior should just about remove any remaining hope that you’ll be hired.

Even if you take these steps to safeguard your days of un–billable bliss, it’s possible that you end up growing anyway. That you’re so clear upfront about what you believe are conditions for great work, you actually attract a brand that is willing to agree to your absurd demands.

And before you know it, you and yourself spending all your time working directly with a decision-maker who has a simple message and trusts your opinion about how to express it. And pretty soon, you’re doing fame–building, business–generating work together.

Which would be wonderful, of course. But also soooo distracting.

Kevin Lynch is the founder of The Wrong Agency, a creative consultancy whose distinctive brand asset is a non–ringing phone. He can be reached on LinkedIn. As can The Wrong Agency. Read more opinion on The Drum.

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