The TL;DR of this report is that agencies are really optimistic. Maybe too optimistic. Maybe delusional.

Now you know, I am a fan of agency entrepreneurs being delusional, because it's really the only way to effectively believe you can corral this quantum chaotic mess of marketing into something that reflects order and profit. Plus one for the delusional people, I guess. But here are the things that really struck me:

Since the world of agencies is decidedly a bunch of big folks and a bunch of small folks, I guess those numbers don't surprise me all that much. Here's the number that shocked me:

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Only 20% of agencies have somebody focused on marketing & only 30% of agencies have people focused on selling.

You know what that means to me?

Somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of agencies are resting on the shoulders of the founder. Now, that isn't always a negative, because honestly everybody's gonna start somewhere, but functionally, 70 to 80 percent of all agencies have truncated their growth opportunity.

There is so much to be done when you're running an agency:

There's all sorts of stuff. Founders are busy people…really busy people. Founders are also amazing because they can handle an extraordinary amount of different requests on their time and their attention pretty well.

But two things that are extraordinarily important in creating an agency that's sustainable, profitable, & enjoyable are sales and marketing. Eventhough more profits are generated from retaining clients, getting new clients is a signal to the markets and to your team that you are good at what you do, create value and are a desirable firm to hire or work at.

In that context, growth is HUGELY important. If you aren't growing at least as quickly as the advertising market, and in 2026 it's somewhere between 9-16%, then you are functionally shrinking. And NOBODY wants to go all in on a shrinking business.

Does it make sense, then, that both sales and marketing would be relegated to part-time jobs that the founder does when they get a minute? That doesn't make any sense to me.

Now, if you are small agency (under $1mm), you don't need full-time people to sales and marketing. You don’t have the resources or lead flow to justify, but you do need people who are tasked with and regularly focused on those things. Often, this is where founders get in trouble because they get stuck thinking that they have to own and execute both of those responsibilities, exclusively.

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Here's a funny fact…when you are operating as the CEO of your business, you aren't sitting in the owner's seat. You are sitting in the employee who just happens to be the CEO seat. The ownership part is a stock thing, not an operational thing.

Consequently, you need to start thinking of yourself like an asset that the company needs to maximize. If you have a team of 6 or 10 or 25, and you are you doing all of the organizational stuff and handling all of the sales and marketing? You aren't maximizing the value of your team or your own your value as the CEO employee.

You need to create the opportunity for your team to help with sales and marketing.It can be uncomfortable for many founders, because they do not believe that their team has the requisite skills, insights, or experience to be able to contribute to the sales and marketing efforts for the agency.

Yes, because that's their primary job. But sales and marketing are such an integral part of your agency surviving, never mind thriving, you need to get all hands on deck as soon as you can, because practice makes perfect for all of you.

You think your team is not ready to deal with sales and marketing. What is equally true is that you are likely not ready to have your team deal with sales and marketing. As you are growing an agency, one of the one of the things that is hardest for many founders to realize is in order to grow the skills of their team, they have to grow their skills as a manager and delegator.

Believe it or not, most entrepreneurs aren't very good at the management and delegation part. Entrepreneurs work at a different speed and with much more fluid context than their team. When the time comes to teach somebody how to write a proposal or create a LinkedIn post or an outreach email, the founder doesn't have a real process. Like Nike, they just do it.

this is an answer that lots of agency entrepreneurs don't like to hear. You have to create a process map of how you work. That means you need to slow down, think about the task in front of you, and parse out the choices and the actions you take based on their source. Are you basing this decision or action on data, or has it come to you through experience, or are you mashing together intuition and pattern matching?

Most of us make decisions without the benefit of an established process. Many of us take action based on the decision that came out of a process without any clear resolution. For you as the founder, that's okay! As we've talked before, your brain is just different. Try as you might, your brain will not make sense to somebody who is not an entrepreneur. The only way to help them catch up is to create your personal process map.

Here is my personal process map process:

If my goal is to analyze how I write a blog post, minimally, I would have to understand:

When you look at this flow, there's really only one thing that is an experiential decision… the desired impact of the content. The only thing that I do completely off the cuff is decide what I want this to accomplish - get attention, build credibility, teach, get a lead?

I've realized that in marketing and sales, anything that feels like I'm deciding in the moment or on a whim is a time that I'm just being lazy. Those are times when I am indulging my ADHD and going without a script. As I look back on my agency career, these moments without structure are usually the ones that turn out the most poorly.

The transition from agency founder, on whom everything is resting, to agency leader, who is maximizing the performance of an organization, isn't anything magic. It's mostly intentionality and structure.

That’s why we build DemandOS & SalesOS.

For Instance, when I was working with a teammate and wanted to explain how I decided what the desired impact of content was I had to really think. Even though I felt like I was doing it instinctually, I wasn't. I actually had a real process that considered:

I realized that I put it into a framework all the time, and that became the 4E framework from DemandOS. By slowing down and creating a process map of my own process, I was able to take what I thought was an intuitive in-the-moment inspirational decision and expose it as me doing pattern matching faster than my brain could understand it. The framework turned into a core part of creating content, and I've used this 4E Framework across dozens of agencies to help them create their own high impact content.

A lot, actually. It means that even if you believe that you do everything because of advanced pattern matching instinct, experience, and natural talent, your brain is executing a framework. You just don't realize it. In order to drive growth and get your entire team working with you on sales and marketing, (rather than you being the founder-martyr “I’m too busy” bottleneck) you just have to expose your internal frameworks.

If you are good at what you do, those frameworks work. While your less experienced team may never have been able to create the framework, you can codify the decision making and inputs to make sure that sales content, marketing content, sales decks, follow up emails, and outreach have all the elements & hallmarks of your approach. When your language, your way of thinking, is expressed through the mouths, fingers, and attitudes of your team, your message is amplified, never diluted.

If you would like to be one of those agencies in the 20- 30% that are poised for growth and not be one of the 64% of agencies who want to grow but don't position themselves to do so, start breaking down your actions into frameworks where your team can help you accomplish the mission.

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