Most Agencies Drift Into Their Future Instead of Choosing It

The future of your agency is being decided right now.

Not in some big off-site pivot. Not in the rebrand you keep meaning to do. Right now, in the small, unglamorous calls you’re making this week while you’re heads-down trying to hit the month.

I came back to this after reading Carl Smith on how the future of work isn’t about selling more work. It put words to something I’ve felt watching a lot of agencies operate. Most of them aren’t choosing their future. They’re drifting into it.

By default or by design

Every agency is becoming something. The only question is whether it’s on purpose.

Built by default looks like this. You take the client who’s a little off-ICP because the revenue’s there. You add the service because one account asked. You keep the process because changing it is uncomfortable. None of those are bad decisions in isolation. Add up two years of them and you’ve built an agency nobody actually designed, including you.

Built by design is slower and it’s harder. It means letting some revenue walk. It means saying “that’s not us” out loud, to a client, with money on the table. It means choosing the shape of the thing before the market chooses it for you.

Drift and adaptation look identical from inside

Here’s the honest complication, because “don’t drift” is useless advice on its own.

Adding a service because a client asked is sometimes exactly the right call. That’s how most good agencies found the thing they’re now known for. So the problem isn’t responding to what the market puts in front of you. The problem is doing it without ever deciding.

The test I use is whether you can say what the change rules out. A deliberate expansion has a cost attached that you named in advance. We’re adding this, which means we’re not doing that, and here’s who owns it and what it means for how we hire next year. Drift has no cost attached, because nobody ran the trade. You just added.

Second test: could you have said no? If the honest answer is that you couldn’t afford to, that’s fine, but call it what it is. That’s a cash decision, not a strategy, and it belongs in a different conversation than the one about who you’re becoming.

Three questions worth sitting with

Carl’s framing left me with three questions every agency leader should actually answer, not just nod at.

Who are you today? Be honest, and not the positioning statement. The real one. The work you actually do all day, for the clients you actually have.

Who are you built to be tomorrow? Not the aspiration. The trajectory you’re currently on if nothing changes. Because you are on one.

And what decisions do you need to make today to lead your team there? That’s the one that matters, because it’s the only one you can act on this week.

The team is answering these whether you do or not

The part that gets missed is that this isn’t a private exercise.

Your team is reading the same signals you are, and drawing conclusions. When the off-ICP client lands and nobody explains it, people don’t conclude “leadership is being pragmatic about cash.” They conclude that the positioning talk was talk. When you add a service nobody was trained for, the delivery team learns that what gets sold is not connected to what they can do well.

Those conclusions stack up and show up later as the good people leaving, usually for somewhere with a clearer story about what it’s building. Deciding on purpose is worth as much internally as it is in the market, and most owners only account for one of those.

The gap between the two is where the work is

Most leaders can answer the first two questions. The distance between who I am and who I’m built to be is usually pretty visible once you stop and look.

Closing that gap on purpose, making the uncomfortable call today that bends the trajectory tomorrow, that’s the actual job. It doesn’t feel like strategy. It feels like a hundred small moments where it would be easier to drift.

The future of your agency is being decided right now. The only real choice is whether you’re the one deciding it.