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When’s The Last Time You Took a Big Swing?
Signing your incorporation papers is a big swing.
Hiring your 1st employee or contractor is a big swing.
For most agencies, though, that’s it. Everything from there on out is tiny things:
Tweak your ICP
Raise your pricing
Change your offer
All of those tend to be smaller - multiple iterations over time that end up in big changes…but every step is small…so the risk is controlled.
Back in the dot com boom, the CEO of the company I worked for said, “if you aren’t ‘betting the farm’ every 18 months you aren’t committed to growth”. He isn’t right, but he isn’t wrong. At that time, the internet was exploding, so every 18 months the world was sufficiently different and new opportunities emerged, so it made sense to “bet the farm”.
The Last Decade or So, The Agency World Has Been Pretty Stable
Sure, there have been changes - iOS 14, the rise of TikTok, etc. - but none of those represented a real change to how you did anything in your agency. You tweaked, you tested, you adjusted…but nothing cataclysmic changed so that you would have to re-imagine your agency.
But all of that changed with the rapid march to AI. First it was ad platforms removing targeting options because their machine learning driven data was better than your judgement.
AI is here and switching things up, and you probably can’t tweak your way forward anymore.
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Little Things Into Big Swings
My old CEO was right that you need to “bet the farm”. But you aren’t betting the farm on some crazy idea. That isn’t what he meant.
You need to have a clear vision of where you are leading your agency in the next 18 months. You need to develop a point of view that will inform your market narrative, and moreover, inform your decision making.
But how do you set that vision…you don’t know what’s going to happen next. GPT-5 is just around the corner - in 18 months the world could be dramatically different. How can you own an effective point of view?
You start with little things…what do you notice?
Are prospects feeling good or feeling fear?
Is the market expecting shifts?
Will are or less money be headed into whatever channels you work on?
Can the verticals that you serve keep on the same growth trajectory?
Do you see a consolidation happening in that vertical?
Black Swans Are A$$h0l3s To Everyone
You start with your POV based on what you see today in the market. That is likely to continue for some time. If clients are feeling good, they are likely to do so for a while, so you can extrapolate your direction. If you think that there is going to be a consolidation in your customer target, extrapolate your point of view from that…
There is stuff that you aren’t going to get right, and there may be a “black swan” event - a change that catches everyone by surprise - put you can’t let the fear of the unknown from you making a directional decision right now.
AI is here to stay - where do you think it is headed? Even if you are fuzzy on details, you can make an educated guess about the direction, black swans be damned.
This is a Big Swing
Choosing a direction on limited information is a big swing. Jeff Bezos said that leaders need to make decisions based on about 70% of the information that they’s like to have.
Waiting for any more data causes delays that diminish the advantage of making a decision quickly. So, even in a small agency, you need to get comfortable with making decisions based on incomplete information. That feels scary, right?
What if you are wrong? What if that last 30% of information would have convinced you to make a different decision?
Bezos also said that there are very few decisions that are 1 way doors - most of them are 2 way doors - meaning that you can reverse or change the decision. There may be some cost associated with changing your mind, but rarely is a decision an existential event.
But choosing your direction for the next 18 months FEELS LIKE A GIANT F^CK!NG SWING, doesn’t it? You are putting your reputation on the line by saying to your team and your market that “This is the way that I see things unfolding from here…”.
But you aren’t…all you are saying is “Based on what I know TODAY, this is how I think things are going to unfold…” A point of view is a 2 way door - having a point of view doesn’t preclude you from changing your mind. And even if you made a big decision based on that POV (like acquiring an agency), you can change your mind and shut it down. (I made that choice a few years ago…it wasn’t fun, and I lost a few bucks, but my POV changed and my approach needed to change as well. What felt like a 1 way door wasn’t…it was something that was fluid enough for me to adapt to new information.
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Don’t Be Afraid of the Big Swing
What’s going to happen in the next 18 months? I dunno…but here are the ideas that are guiding my POV:
Agencies are going to continue to have to do more with less. (That’s nothing new…but at least we will have AI to share the workload with…)
Agencies will have to elevate above being execution only. (You are worth SO MUCH MORE than knowing HTML or how to run campaigns in Ad Manager.)
The skills that you develop running an agency (sales, copy & management) are skills that will yield even more benefits in the future. As the mechanics of advertising get easier, the real skills of understanding people and value will increase dramatically in value.
AI will not kill agencies. Agencies are going to change…they always do. AI isn’t thinking of your agency as the enemy - you are thinking of AI as a multiplier that drives even more value.
So I building big swings on those elements - all extrapolated from incomplete data that I have RIGHT NOW. Could those big swings be wrong? Almost certainly…
But since big swings are 2 way doors - it’s all OK. Swing away.