How I Work Inside an Agency

I get asked a version of this a lot. What does it actually look like to work with you?

The honest version includes the part where the first thing I do is push back on the thing you called me about.

You outgrew the structure that got you here

I work with $1-5M digital marketing agencies. Mostly digital, content, performance, and creative shops where the owner is still in the day to day alongside a small leadership team that’s already stretched.

The work is good. Clients are happy. Revenue is moving in the right direction. And internally it feels like you’re rebuilding the engine while you’re flying it. Priorities stack up faster than the agency can absorb them, and the structural work loses every single week to the client that’s on fire or the deal that has to close.

I refuse the struggling-agency narrative. My clients aren’t struggling, they’re growing, and most of what they bring me is what growth feels like from the inside. The system that got you here is not the system that gets you there. That’s the bill coming due for doing well.

What you bring me is usually a symptom

By the time an owner calls, they’ve already decided what the fix is. A senior hire. A new PM tool. Somebody to fix pricing. That’s not a knock on them. They’ve been living in it a lot longer than I have, and they’re almost always right that something is broken.

But the same symptom shows up from completely different causes, and picking the wrong one costs you a quarter. Hiring is the clearest case. An owner tells me they need a senior person and they’re usually right that they’re short-handed. But if nobody has defined what good looks like for the work that person would take over, the hire lands in an agency that can’t hand anything off. Six months later the owner is doing the same work plus managing someone. That’s hiring yourself to support yourself, and it’s the most expensive way I know to find out the problem was never headcount.

So my first job is to not take the order. I’m typically the guy who comes in and paints the less rosy picture, and I’d rather do that in week two than have you find out in month nine.

It’s always one of five problems

Everything you tell me sorts into one of these.

1. What you sell and what it’s worth. Whether your capability is connected to something a buyer needs, clearly enough to price and scope it with confidence. Having the skill to do something and having an offering around it are two different things, and the gap between them is where the pricing power goes.

2. Delivery consistency. Whether the work comes out right when a specific person isn’t in the room.

3. Capability. Whether judgment lives anywhere besides you and two senior people. This is the one I spend the most time on. Hiring sits here too, because a hire only adds capacity if somebody defined the role well enough to hand anything off.

4. Visibility. Whether you can make a call without guessing. Margin per account, real capacity, and how much of leadership’s own week is disappearing into account management. That last number is usually the one nobody has, and once it’s priced against your salaries it tends to settle the hiring argument by itself.

5. Growth and account health. Where demand comes from and where it leaks out. Most agencies map the first half carefully and barely look at the second, then get blindsided by a churn quarter.

These aren’t a scorecard. If I hand you five ratings, you’ll spend the next month defending the low ones instead of fixing anything.

We start with your most expensive problem

The first month is the diagnostic. I go deep on how the agency runs and come back with what’s slowing you down, the order to fix it in, and what the first one is costing you in dollars. I call it the Constraint Map.

Then we spend the rest of the quarter fixing the first thing on it, built with the people who’ll be running it after I’m gone. It goes live while I’m still in the room to adjust it.

We fix one thing, not five. There are always a handful of problems dragging the agency down and the temptation is to go at all of them, because they’re all real and they all hurt. But you can’t have conviction about seven things at once. Run at seven and you get a year of half-finished initiatives and a team shipping work nobody in the building believes in.

The uncomfortable part is the conversation where I tell you the thing you’re most excited about isn’t first. Most of us skip that one, and then spend a year defending a plan nobody really committed to. I’m still not great at having it in a first meeting. It feels like talking yourself out of the work. I have it anyway.

I work inside the accounts, not above them

Most fractional ops work stops at the leadership layer. Org charts, a dashboard, a process doc, a standing call with the owner. That’s real work and I do plenty of it. Scoping and pricing models, job descriptions, hiring processes, PM migrations, leadership team advisory.

But none of it goes near an actual client account, and that’s where most of what I’m looking for is hiding. You can’t find a broken handoff from a leadership meeting. It shows up on a Thursday when a deliverable comes back wrong and three people have three different explanations for why.

So I go in, and a lot of what I do in there is revenue-facing. I modernize a service offering that stopped being competitive. I stand up a new service the team has the skill for and no packaging around. I bring in the tech and build the workflows to run it. I build the client strategy deck. I sit in the meeting alongside your account lead and your client services lead and pitch the upsell. When an account starts flying red flags, I take it on directly. Stabilize it, tie what we’re doing back to what their business needs, question our own work out loud in front of them, and put a real point of view on the table.

That isn’t all I do, and I’m not doing it forever. The point is to make action happen first and then hand it over.

Capability doesn’t move because someone handed your team a document. SOPs capture the steps and not the calls you make along the way, and the calls are where the actual work happens. Judgment transfers when somebody does the real work next to you and hears why each decision got made. So I run the thing myself first, then document it, build the AI skills and workflows around it, film the training, and sit with your team one on one while they take it over. The first version is mine, the second one we build together, and by the third I’m reading it instead of writing it.

I can work this way because I’ve sat in every seat. Most fractional ops people come out of one lane. They ran projects, or HR, or finance, and they know their corner cold without ever having worked the others. I’ve pitched, sold, scoped, delivered, managed the teams doing it, and built the systems underneath. I also still run my own consultancy, so I’m writing strategy, running client calls, and coordinating delivery every week. If you’ve ever gotten advice that clearly came out of a deck and not out of a Tuesday client fire, you know the difference.

They don’t hire me because I have all the answers. They hire me because I’ve made all the mistakes.

Nobody got into this to fight fires

Your best people came to your agency to do the best work of their career, and the grind kills that first. It hits you hardest, because you started this to build something, not to spend every Sunday night bracing for Monday.

I know that one personally. I left my last agency role because too much had concentrated on me over the years and it was breaking me. So when I’m pulling load off you and your leadership team, it isn’t an abstract ops exercise for me.

Tell me about your agency

What you’ve built, what’s working, and what keeps landing back on your plate. A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether this is worth doing.

Come in with the thing you’re certain you need to fix. I’ll take it seriously. Then I’m going to ask what has to happen first.