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When you complete your profile, you’ll receive an exclusive special report, Lifeblood: Guide to Agency Growth. This comprehensive guide is based on hundreds of interviews with agencies around the world and decades of hands-on experience.
Back in 1990, my wife quit her job at an OmniCom agency and we launched our own company with big dreams and even bigger blind spots. We thought talent was all we needed. But reality hit us like a freight train.
We were good at our craft. We soon found out that being good at your trade doesn’t mean you know how to run a profitable business.
I remember trying cold calling, thinking, “How hard could it be?” I made a fool out of myself. I had no clue how to sell. I was awkward, stumbling over my words, and the calls went nowhere. The only work we could get was cheap postcard designs for the local hospital. No offense to postcards, but that wasn’t what we envisioned for our firm.
Even after we had enough success to afford a fancy downtown office, our learning curve continued. We were still struggling with the basics. For example, we didn’t know how to hire the right people. The mistakes we made cost us tens of thousands of dollars and years of valuable time.
Yet we started winning Fortune 100 clients. As our reputation spread, our challenges multiplied. From the outside, we looked successful. On the inside we were scrambling.
Then came the real gut punch—we found out our bookkeeper had been embezzling money from us. We didn’t have any proper financial controls in place, and when we fired her, we quickly realized no one else knew how to keep the books.
We didn’t even know what operational processes were at the time, let alone how important they were. We had zero systems in place to protect ourselves or to run things smoothly. It’s honestly a miracle we survived those first few years.
We had very talented people, but talent wasn’t enough. We had no idea how to price ourselves, target the right clients, or even structure a sales conversation without looking like amateurs. Our firm was a mess, our relationship strained and we knew if we didn’t figure it out, it was only a matter of time before it all collapsed.
We joined a group of successful agency owners who had already been through the trenches and figured it out.
They were sharing not just advice, but real financials, processes, and templates. But it wasn’t cheap. We had to invest about $10,000 a year just to be a member, plus travel costs and the time away from our business.
It was a major commitment—but it was also the turning point we needed.
Suddenly, we had a blueprint. We learned how to structure pricing to reflect the real value we were delivering. We figured out how to hire the right people and build processes to keep the business running even when we weren’t there.
That peer group gave us access to hundreds of years of combined experience so we could develop the strategies that helped our firm grow to $1 million in revenue within three years.
Two years later, we were at $6.5 million in recurring fees with a gross profit of 80%.
In fact, we still struggle with aspects of the business even after over thirty years of running it and helping hundreds of clients.
We turn to the members at Agency Founders Network when we need help and we do our best to help the other members.
I don’t have all the answers and, just like you, I’m too close to my own business to see the forest for the trees. I still depend on mentors, colleagues and peers to help me sort things out and, in return, I can help you do the same.
That’s why we started The Agency Founders Network—it’s a place for marketing services owners like you to learn from people who’ve been in your shoes and for you to share what you’ve learned.
You don’t have to fly across the country or spend thousands of dollars to get access to expert advice, processes, and templates that will help you be more successful.
Join a community of marketing firm founders who are eager to share their hard-earned lessons with you. We only ask that you do the same. You’ll get access to real-world strategies that are working today—no fluff, just proven systems to help you grow.
And when you complete your profile, you’ll receive an exclusive special report, Lifeblood: Guide to Agency Growth. This report is packed with the strategies that took my firm from being always on the edge of collapse to millions in revenue.