In Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix), Jay-Z says, “I ain’t a businessman, I am a business, man…” It’s just so damn right. He isn’t running the business of Jay-Z, he is the embodiment of the business. He is the business made flesh. He is the corporeal business.

Today I had call with a client who is wrestling with showing a more authentic version of their agency to the market. Like everyone else, they are in a brutally competitive space, where vendors are nearly interchangeable.

For years this agency had delivered amazing work by helping shape their client’s digital experience via best practices. They’ve come to a point in their agency maturity that they need to get more and bigger clients to support their growth goals. True to their experience, when it comes to them reshaping their own brand, they want to follow best practices. They have been looking at the bigger, better, faster, stronger agencies in their vertical looking for clues of what drives category leadership .

The category leader's current brand, messaging & digital experience is, in fact, best practices. The category leader does not say anything controversial or have any unexpected website functionality, nor does it have any content that you wouldn't expect.

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Jay-Z is the business because he is the product. It’s his story, his talent, his ambition, his success, his fire… And that made him a category leader, or maybe moreso, an icon.

When you are just starting out, your agency ispowered by you. It's your insight, your personality, your drive, your language, your ambition that creates traction.

If you are lucky, the agency becomes something bigger than you. When that happens, instead of “you” driving the brand, it needs to become an "us". That's where things fall apart for a lot of agencies. The founder can't figure out how to not have the founder be the business, man.

When the business is bigger than just you, where you are no longer the driving force behind the thinking and delivery and client management, but your brand is still just you, YOU ARE LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE.

You are thinking that Jay-Z doesn't leave any money on the table. You were probably right, but Jay-Z is both the businessman and the business, man, because what he sells is the idea of Jay-Z. It's an abstraction, a hologram, an idealized version of Jay-Z…

There's plenty of people in the marketing space who build a powerful personal brand that feeds into something else. Some great examples:

All of these personal brands, too, are abstractions, holograms, & idealized versions of these folks. Primarily, these brands live to serve a business. With my eponymously named company, you can see I am no stranger to the world of personal brands.

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I know it sounds a little weird because on DAY 1, it was just you and maybe a partner and your agency. Having done this a couple of times, I can tell you from personal experience that the line between person and agency gets a little fuzzy.

As your agency grows from a me to a royal we to an actual us, your personal brand might actually be at the very heart of the agency brand. The agency brand was built atop your values, your insights, and your thinking. Once your agency becomes made up of multiple people with deep talents and strong opinions, yours is but one voice in the crowd. It isn't right or fair or desirable to have all of those brilliant people, deep thoughts, and pure marketing genius hidden behind you.

Founder-led branding is incredibly effective and it is really economical. But unless you keep a bright line between your brand and your agency brand, you subvert the potential power of your agency brand. Only because you have the letters C, E, and O in your title or “founder” somewhere in your “About Me” listing, It's hard for people on the outside to understand that you and the agency aren't one in the same.

Jay-Z has been a star for 30 years, I would guess. He didn't need more fame, or more money, or more notoriety. I'm quite sure that he had enough of each of those three to satisfy any single human. But when he met Queen Bey, in addition to their love, I'm sure that each of them saw a huge asset that would empower their brand and their mission.

Their combined forces created something that was bigger than either of them, but somehow managed to not overshadow each one of their lights. You and your agency are similar. If all of the spotlight goes on you, your agency will never be able to thrive. If all of the spotlight goes on your agency, you will never be able to thrive in a way that supports and empowers your agency.

So, what's an agency owner to do?

You've got to marry Beyoncé! Lucky for you, Beyoncé is your agency (in case you didn't see where I was going with this…)

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The three of you live in a thruple. Ideally, you all love one another, but frankly, many agencies and agency owners forget about the team. From a marketing & growth perspective, the team is 3rd wheeling. When you and your agency are making goo-goo eyes at one another, it's easy to do.

Why do we leave them out in the cold? Why do we forget about their contribution to your role of Jay-Z and Beyoncé filling the role of your agency?

Here’s why - your team is made up of individuals. They all have different strengths and different insights and different ways of expression, so it might feel like herding cats to get them communicating with the outside world in a way that “reinforces your brand”.

They don't reinforce your brand…and therein lies their true magic and power.

Your personal founder brand might be incredible. It might be authentic and honest and engaging, but in no way is it real. It's not real because you developed your founder brand with a purposeful agenda or out of a strong need to growth visibility & impact. Over time, your agency probably developed its own version of a brand. That, too, might be incredible and it might be authentic and honest and engaging. But just like your personal brand, it is in no way real. It's not real because it serves a purpose and had been constructed to evoke particular feelings, particular thoughts, and particular actions in your target audience.

But you know who is incredible, authentic, honest, engaging, and real? It's your team. They don't have their identities mixed with the agency. They have not conflated their lives and agency success. For most of them, they might love the culture, the company, the work they do, but it's a job. They do their job because you pay them. (Whereas, I bet for many of you, you have built an agency because you couldn't not build an agency.)

At this point, you're probably wondering, "Why is that a good thing?"

Just like the uncanny valley of AI video or TikTok filters or clever lighting, there is something artificial in a brand, even if it's really earnest. Since your team has no identity-laden connection to the agency, they have a remarkable opportunity to be themselves. And when they are themselves, their unbranded, unbridled humanity scuffs up that polished founder brand or agency brand just enough for people to feel like it's real. In fact, your team is so real that they are going to call out the bullshit that lives in your founder brand and agency brand.

This happens because they are not confused about the difference between founder and agency. They know who is whom:

If you able to let them be themselves, make mistakes in public, say the wrong thing and explain something in a way that you would never say it, you should count your lucky stars, because what you have there is an incredible tool.

Your team is a built-in accountability council. They aren’t going to let you misrepresent them, nor are they going to let the agency brand create promises that they can't fulfill. Their insistence the the promises you and your agency make is actually what they can deliver is such a remarkable gift. It takes all the fake away. The accountability council ensures that what is promised is delivered, and that builds your credibility. It's kind of crazy that them calling you on your BS promises makes you more credible, and it makes your agency brand stronger, but it does.

They are the reality versus your brand fantasy.

In addition to their role as the accountability council, your team is a growth engine that you probably never knew you had at your fingertips. Everybody on your team has an opinion, an insight, or an idea that you would never come up with (and if you don't believe that's true, you have either hired the worst team, or you aren't up to speed on how awesome they are…) What’s truly magical about them owning an opinion, insight, or idea that is foreign to you is that they all have mouths, keyboards, phones and relationships.

If you are building culture well, your team shares ideas amongst themselves. They iterate on those ideas. They sharpen them, they fold them, and they turn them into something that is wholly theirs.

Also, if you're building culture well, your team feels safe in sharing those ideas. They feel confident in your support of them speaking their mind.

If you jump into the wayback machine, you'll remember back when you were sharing ideas and insights and opinions. You'll remember the impact it had on your growth. Back in the olden days when you started, a great insight sent in an email to the right prospect, or a fantastic LinkedIn post, or a comment on somebody's Instagram feed could change the trajectory of your business.

That's still true. The trajectory of your business can be radically transformed by somebody on your team sharing their insights, their brilliance, and their power with their networks. The bright future that you envision and the amazing clients that you want to help, and the incredible work that you will inevitably do might be trapped behind a well-placed tweet that somebody on your staff's college girlfriend's roommate sees.

This is the entire idea behind DemandOS.

You have great ideas.
You have amazing insights.
You, however, have but one mouth and one network.

Let’s imagine that you have 5 people on your team (a total of 6 in your company). You come up with a great insight and it reaches 1146 people.

Now, image that your team took that same idea & presented it through their perspective…and each got half as much reach as you did. That would be 5×573 impressions or 2865 impressions. That just boosted the overall reach of your idea 3.5x.

Let’s imagine that everyone has a great idea, and each one does as well. That’s a total of 6 ideas with an aggregate reach of over 24000! Then let’s imagine that you make a blog post from one of those ideas & it attracts 5000 visitors over a year. And then your team takes one of the ideas and turns it into a video that get 300 views, plus 5 shorts from that video get shared by everyone on your team…

Those 6 original ideas became 36 original posts, 1 long form content post (shared by all 6 of you), a YouTube video (shared by all 6 of you), & 5 YT Shorts (shared by all 6 of you).

If that isn’t a powerful brand scuffer upper and amplifier, I don’t know what is.

DemandOS is designed to scale from small founding teams (1-3 people) to emerging agencies (5-20) to scaling agencies (20-75) people. It’s not a silly repurposing approach, its something that builds the depth and texture of your brand, empowers your accountability council, and revs up your exponential amplifier.

Is probably cooler than what it’s like at Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s house…I mean barely, but cooler.

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