Agency A said that to me as we were working through some different positioning for his agency. They haven’t been growing terribly quickly, and his sense is that many people don’t value a narrow, single-service agency as much as they did 5 or 10 years ago. “It’s like no one cares about all of this expertise we’ve earned.” He is thinking about trying to sell his agency before, in his words, “the bottom falls out and it’s worth nothing.”

Agency B had some explosive growth in ‘23, ‘24 and ‘25, but 2026 has been a real slog for them. They feel lucky if their net client growth is zero every month. "In in the past, if we wanted to grow, we just needed to send more LinkedIn DMs. It was easy.” But since about Q1 of '25, their LinkedIn response rate has slowly dropped. They propped up that decline by adding cold email and some WhatsApp messaging, and they were holding their own. “All of a sudden,” he said, “nothing worked, regardless of how much technology or how many people we threw at it. What’s worse is that, since we use LinkedIn DMs, cold email, and WhatsApp for our clients, this is like a total freaking nightmare. Last week, my mother told me that I could always go back to grad school…”

Ooof. That’s some passive aggressive tough love from Mom…

But as I thought about these two calls, the tingle of pattern matching started. I listed all of the stuff that they had done to insure continual agency growth. Here's all the stuff that Agency A and Agency B did to insure longevity:

That’s it - end of list.

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That's great, and I'm super glad that you are doing okay. But what are you doing to make sure that you are okay 6 months from now? My the real diagnosis for both of those agencies is that they found a shape that was comfortable for them.

My paid search guy has been running paid search as a freelancer and then as an agency owner for about 8 years. And he vaguely adapted his business development over the year, transitioning from marketplaces like Upwork to referrals to some partnerships, but for the most part, he had never unlocked a thing that drove aggressive growth. But they grew, largely because his clients at a small company would move to a bigger company and hire him, pay him more, and that would happen again. As such, he kept on facing new paid search challenges and opportunities and evolved the quality of his service over time. Frequent flier clients are truly the unsung heroes of the agency world, but he was always the paid search guy. So social advertising, AEO, SEO, email, YouTube advertising, etc., none of that stuff came to him. Those budgets grew exponentially, whereas his media budgets grew incrementally. At the end of the day, if it wasn’t keyword-based, it didn't fall in his lap.

My LinkedIn DM pal did unlock some really terrific growth mechanisms by mastering data, response rates, and message formats via DMs. He may have also used his direct messaging skills to slide into a lot of attractive people's DMs, and because he was a baller, I think his personal DM strategy worked out pretty well for him, too.

The issues started when LinkedIn put limitations on how many connection requests you could make, and then they started cracking down on faux accounts, and they cracked down on spam of all sorts. Even though this company was not spamming, they were doing things at such a scale that LinkedIn almost certainly throttled their ability to do outreach. But instead of adapting to that environmental change, they just tried to brute-force their way around it.

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Some of the loudest voices in direct marketing, like Russell Brunson & Alex Hormozi, have regularly preached "one market, one offer, one channel" until you hit a particular level of scale. I think that was amazing advice in the pre-pandemic and for most of the pandemic time frame, but the world is just different now.

The 1 offer framework essentially says that you have a solution to a consistent problem. And there may, in fact, be problems in the market that you serve that you can solve consistently in a controlled way. In marketing, however: if one were to solve, let's say, email open rates, and that is the contained offer that you deliver, it's incomplete because all of the pieces of marketing (even across channel) are all interrelated because they all touch the customer. There is nothing discrete in marketing.

That diminishes the value of being an extraordinary tactician - now, I'm not sure if the diminishment is actual or perceived, but I think it's harder and harder for an agency or a provider who does one narrow, contained thing to build a sustainable business. It’s even more treacherous, if, like our DM Lothario, your growth and your customers' satisfaction rest on that same narrow thing.

I think you have to start thinking about how to create magic.

Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It’s not just advanced technology that creates the feeling of magic, it’s any sufficiently advanced form of understanding of your prospect or client’s circumstances that allows for the idea of magic to become real.

Paid search guy and DM Lothario may, in fact, have had truly magical levels of understanding of how paid search and direct messaging could enhance their clients' opportunities. But if the client cannot connect the wonder of your magic to the perceived size of their problem or opportunity, your magic isn't strong enough.

I keep on coming back to what paid search guy said: “It’s REALLY clear what we are responsible for.” The more I play that phrase over and over in my mind, it becomes more and more clear that his value has diminished because his scope of responsibility has stayed the same, while the scale of complexity for his client has grown exponentially.

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…of both what you do and how it connects to everything else in the ecosystem in which you live, and how well you understand the circumstance of your client.

I want you to make sure that, even if your shape right now is very comfortable and it's very effective (and you are growing your revenue, profit, and client satisfaction in an outrageous way), it is going to change. Unless you are continually willing to invest in testing different shapes of your company, different shapes of your service, different shapes of the way you engage with clients, and the different shapes of how you build your business, the magic will begin to fade.

I think it is your responsibility to be preparing your business and your clients for what's going to happen in 3 months, 6 months, or 5 years. In order to create a perspective on that, you have to be willing to not keep the same shape. That is deeply uncomfortable and scary, but in that undiscovered country of change is where you can access the parts that make you magic.