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What I'm
thinking about.

Here are some of my latest thoughts on marketing, strategy, entrepreneurship, and productivity.

Aug 28 2026

Half of What Looks Like a Strategy Problem Is Client Services

Client services is the most underrated function at an agency. When an account is struggling, about half of it is the...

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Aug 28 2026

Six Things I Built in Claude Code Instead of Buying a Tool

I built six things in Claude Code this week that an agency would normally need a developer for. None of them came out...

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Aug 28 2026

Where Agency Growth Comes From and Where It Leaks Out

Agency growth is two systems, not just one. Where new revenue comes from, and whether the revenue you already have...

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Aug 19 2026

Build Your Agency’s Marketing Around Your Most In-Demand Person

The person you can least afford to pull off client work is exactly the one your marketing needs. Why running your...

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Aug 18 2026

Why Agency Owners Avoid Tracking Account Profitability

Almost every agency owner tells me they don't track profitability by account. They are not avoiding the math. They are...

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Aug 17 2026

SOPs Capture the Steps, Not the Calls You Make Along the Way

You rewrote that client deck at midnight because it was easier than delegating it. That is exactly why your agency...

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Aug 13 2026

Inconsistent Delivery Is Five Different Problems, Not One

Inconsistent delivery is almost never on the list of suspects. It is not one problem, it is five, and everyone reaches...

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Aug 12 2026

Selling Capabilities When Your Clients Are Buying Solutions

Agencies sell their capabilities. Buyers buy a solution to their problem. That gap is where your future margin...

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Aug 11 2026

The Five Domains I Analyze Inside Every Agency

Client fires, gut-priced proposals, margins gone by month three. These are symptoms. Here are the five domains I...

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Aug 6 2026

Why I Still Run Client Work While Advising Agencies

Most of my week goes to advising agencies. The rest of it I'm running client work myself, and that is what keeps the...

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Jul 31 2026

Put the Value Before the Expertise in Your Proposal

Your expertise is the reason to believe the offer, not the offer. What actually goes in the value section, and what to...

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Jul 28 2026

Reading the Numbers Is the Bottleneck, Not Pulling Them

Pulling the numbers stopped being hard years ago. The constrained resource is the person who can say what they mean,...

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Jul 22 2026

The Weekly Performance Review I Built Out of My Own Data

Nobody hands a solo operator a performance review, so I built one out of my time tracking, my meeting recordings, and...

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Jul 15 2026

Account Strategy Is the Skill AI Can’t Replace

The person who walks out of a going-sideways client call knowing what is actually wrong is the reason clients stay. It...

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Jul 14 2026

Your Point of View Is the Product

Agencies abandon their point of view the second a client gets antsy. Holding it almost never requires a no, it requires...

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Jul 13 2026

Why Account Managers Struggle With a Sales Mandate

The friction is not a talent problem, it is proof they are good at the job. How to make stewardship produce expansion...

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Jul 6 2026

Perspective Is What You Buy When the Answers Are Free

A founder can get a half-decent action plan for any agency problem in seconds. What none of it has is perspective, and...

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Jul 4 2026

Commodity Drift Is the Real AI Risk for Agencies

A commodity is not low quality, it is undifferentiated. How to spot the drift months before the renewal that never...

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Jul 3 2026

Clients Buy Solutions to Problems, Not Services

When an agency opens with its capability list it is answering a question the client never asked. Owning the problem...

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Jul 2 2026

Don’t Flinch When a Client Wants to Cut the Budget

The gut-drop when a retainer client says we need to talk about the budget. Why defending your line item loses, and what...

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Jun 27 2026

Start With the Delivery Email

You can't turn order-takers into strategic AMs overnight, but the email they already send every month is carrying...

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Jun 24 2026

Adopting Agency Advice Without Breaking What Already Works

There is a coach, a course and a template for every part of growing an agency. Two questions to ask before you roll any...

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Jun 22 2026

How to Decide Which Shiny Object to Chase

Cost to produce against impact on strategy, and four outcomes. Why most pilots are not pilots, and what to do when a...

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Jun 19 2026

Ask Your Account Manager the Goal KPI

If they pause to look it up, the number is not driving the work. Why an AM who knows the wrong number cold is more...

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Jun 16 2026

Understanding the Client Beats the Perfect Pitch Deck

The plan you pitched gets rewritten by week five. Your read on the business only gets sharper. Why research is not...

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Jun 13 2026

Why Agency Leaders Wait Too Long to Decide

Perfect data rarely comes. Optimize for accuracy over precision, and use the cost of being wrong to tell you which kind...

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Jun 12 2026

Tell the Client About the Bad Month Before They Find It

A bad month almost never costs you the client. Them seeing it on their own dashboard first does. Set the range before...

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Jun 10 2026

Nobody Renews a Retainer Because the Clicks Went Up

The exec on the QBR wants to know what it means for the bottom line. There is no setting in your dashboard that answers...

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Jun 10 2026

A Reporting Platform Rollout Is a Capacity Problem, Not a Tools Problem

It took me 14 months to migrate 15 client accounts onto a new reporting platform. The build is senior client services...

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Jun 9 2026

Agencies Don’t Lose Momentum for Lack of Effort

Leadership teams work flat out and still run in place, because the list gets reordered by whatever hurt most recently....

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May 29 2026

Your Time Tracking Initiative Has an Accountability Problem

It is not the tool and it is not lazy people. It is a mandate with no structure, leadership exempting itself, and a 90%...

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May 28 2026

The Monthly Report Is Where Renewal Gets Decided

Pulling the numbers is the easy half. What a point of view sounds like next to a paraphrase, and how to do it across a...

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May 27 2026

Put Your Delivery Team in Front of Clients

The AM as gatekeeper fails the client, the delivery team, and the AM. How to draw the line by topic so nobody gives...

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May 22 2026

You Don’t Need Your Account Managers to Be Strategists

Hiring a more senior AM does not fix a messenger mindset. What to do the first time their position turns out to be...

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May 1 2026

Most Agencies Drift Into Their Future Instead of Choosing It

Drift and adaptation look identical from the inside. The test is whether you can say what the change rules out, and...

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Apr 27 2026

When a Client Asks for Work Your Agency Doesn’t Do

Every agency feels the pull to say yes to revenue it knows it shouldn't take. Four ways to handle a client asking for...

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Apr 13 2026

What to Do When a Client Changes Your Point of Contact

Contact turnover is one of the most destabilizing things that happens inside an engagement, and the first two or three...

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Apr 10 2026

You Can’t Hand Off What You Haven’t Run Yourself

Most consultants stay in the conceptual layer because going deep means working yourself out of a job. The opposite...

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Apr 9 2026

Your PM System Doesn’t Look Like Your Agency

The owner blames the tool, the ops lead blames adoption, the PMs blame training. Everyone is right about the symptom....

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Apr 3 2026

Stop Letting Your Prospects Diagnose Themselves

Agencies — stop letting your prospects diagnose themselves. I keep running into the same thing. A prospect shows up,...

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Mar 24 2026

The Gap Between Good Agency Reporting and Great Client Relationships

The gap between a good agency and a great client relationship isn’t the results. It’s the interpretation....

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Mar 24 2026

What Agency Leaders Actually Need Isn’t a Better Plan — It’s Speed and Confidence

The two things holding most agency leaders back aren’t strategy or talent. It’s speed and confidence. You...

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Mar 24 2026

Good Ops Isn’t an Efficiency Play — It’s a Growth Strategy

Good ops isn’t an efficiency play. It’s a growth strategy. Most agency leaders hear...

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Mar 24 2026

The Missing Middle Layer That’s Quietly Killing Your Agency

I’m about six weeks into doing fractional ops work with agencies and I keep bumping into the same thing. And...

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Mar 24 2026

When Your Product Is Your Brain, Your Treadmill Is Your Calendar

When your product is your brain, your heart, your energy, and your time — how do you scale it beyond business hours?...

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Mar 13 2026

Stop Selling and Start Asking

I’ve sat through hundreds of first calls with prospects and clients. And I can tell you, within the first ninety...

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Mar 13 2026

Managed Revenue Tells You Almost Nothing

Here’s what your leadership dashboard won’t show you: an AM managing $80k a month across four clients can...

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Mar 2 2026

Focused Pilot Over Giant Pitch: How to Win Without Losing Your Margin

When that game-changing half-million dollar account shows up on your doorstep, sometimes you’ve got to pass. Or...

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Mar 1 2026

Referrals Are a Liability: Why Your Agency Needs a Real Growth Strategy

I keep hearing agency leaders say “most of our new business comes from referrals” like it’s a badge...

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Feb 28 2026

System-Led vs. Strategy-Led: Why Your Agency Needs to Think, Not Just Do

You built an agency that runs. But it doesn’t think. It can ship a blog post, an email, an end-of-month report....

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Feb 27 2026

Content as Sawdust: How to Build a Content Engine From Work You’re Already Doing

Most agencies and consultants struggle with content creation because they treat it as a separate workstream. You need...

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Feb 26 2026

You Don’t Need a Documentation Initiative — You Need People Who Document

I’ve tried the top-down documentation rollout multiple times. Company-wide Notion buildouts. Mandatory SOP...

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Feb 24 2026

Where to Focus Your AI Adoption: A Practical Framework for Agencies

Every agency knows they need to adopt AI. Where to focus your investment is the hard part. I was in a conversation this...

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Feb 22 2026

Your Best Strategist and Your Best Ops Hire Are Rarely the Same Person

You’ve built a team of people who kill it at delivering — managing timelines, keeping clients happy, shipping...

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Feb 20 2026

People as Infrastructure: Why Your Agency Breaks When Key Players Leave

Your senior account lead just quit — and suddenly you realize they’re the only person who knows how your best...

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Jan 11 2026

How I Work Inside an Agency

Most owners have the fix decided before we ever talk. The harder question is whether it's the fix for what's really...

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Dec 16 2024

Back to the Grind: Finding your authentic voice in an AI-driven world

In this comeback episode, Mack and Gary tackle the complexities of crafting...

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Dec 16 2024

The First 90 Days: The Ins & Outs of Onboarding to a New Marketing Team

In the latest episode of The Marketing Grind, Gary and Mack tackle the critical first 90 days in a...

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Dec 16 2024

The Upside of Empathy: Standing Out and Breaking Through in B2B Marketing

In this episode, Mack and Gary get real on empathy's make-or-break role in B2B marketing. They break down the...

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Dec 16 2024

From First Click to Closed Deal: Marketing’s Untapped Impact on the B2B Sales Pipeline

In this episode, Mack and Gary dive deep into the crucial role marketing plays across the full B2B sales pipeline. They...

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Dec 16 2024

The Zero Click Revolution: How Empathetic Content is Transforming B2B Marketing

Alright, let's talk about the "zero click revolution" that's been shaking up the B2B marketing world. In this episode,...

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Jan 2 2023

How to Get 1% Better in 2023

From work and family to health and play, here’s my plan to make the most of...

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Jun 16 2020

Should you auto-syndicate posts across social media platforms? | The Marketing Grind QUICKIE

In this episode, Mack and Gary talk through the pros and...

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Jun 11 2020

Where’s the best place to host your content? | The Marketing Grind – Ep. 3

In episode 4 of The Marketing Grind, Mack and Gary talk about what you need to think...

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Jun 2 2020

Why you should develop a show as part of your content strategy | The Marketing Grind – Ep. 2

In episode 2 of The Marketing Grind, Mack and Gary talk about why they...

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Jun 2 2020

Welcome to The Marketing Grind with Mack & Gary | Episode 1

Welcome to episode 1 of The Marketing Grind where brothers & marketers, Mack Magnone and Gary Magnone...

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