When Senior People Become the Backstop, Growth Work Stops

When you’re investing all of your senior level resources into making sure stuff doesn’t break, you’re not proactively investing in the things that are going to lead to growth.

I talk to a lot of agency owners about why they’re not growing. What’s holding them back, where the pain is. And the answer I get back is almost always some variation of the same thing. We’re too busy. We’re slammed. We’re at capacity.

Busy is the excuse.

The first question is busy with what

When I hear “we’re slammed,” I don’t start with how to fix it. I start by trying to understand what everyone is busy with.

So I look at the key players on the team, the ones who are the bottleneck, the ones whose time would have to free up for the agency to invest in anything new. And I try to figure out what they’re working on, day to day, hour to hour.

What I find, a lot of the time, is that those people are getting drained by work they shouldn’t be doing. It’s work that belongs to somebody else on the team, someone below them or to the side of them. Your head of strategy is reviewing production work line by line. Your account lead is rewriting a deliverable that came back from the client. Your most senior person is on the call explaining why the thing was late.

None of that shows up as a problem on its own. Every one of those hours feels necessary in the moment, and every one of them is.

How senior people end up as the backstop

With one agency I’m working with right now, the pattern showed up early in the engagement. They were underinvesting in the front-end strategy work. So the tactical production work was getting pushed into delivery without enough direction, and it was coming out the other end with pretty severe quality issues.

That pulled senior strategy and leadership support into the back end. Clients were calling the work out, it was getting sent back, and the revision cycles were way too bloated. Three rounds of revisions on work that should have been done in one.

And every round of revisions eats into your delivery margin.

So instead of asking what the right process is, and how to get the work right the first time, the agency did what most agencies do. It threw bodies at the back end of the cycle. People, brains, senior attention, all stacked at the end as a backstop to make sure bad work didn’t go out the door.

It works, in the sense that the bad work mostly stops reaching the client. It also means your most expensive people have become your quality control.

The cost is what never gets built

The margin hit is real, and it’s the part people notice first. Three rounds of revisions where there should be one is three times the hours on the same deliverable, and the client isn’t paying for the extra two.

But the bigger cost is everything that doesn’t happen while those people are busy catching mistakes. At that agency, it was the new service they were going to roll out. The marketing campaign they were going to launch. The broken process they needed to fix. None of it got done.

That’s the part that keeps an agency stuck. The things that lead to growth almost always need your senior people’s time and judgment, because they’re the ones who know enough to build them. When that time is spent at the back end of delivery, growth work gets pushed to next month, then next quarter, and then it drops off the list entirely.

You finish the year exactly as you started it, hoping that next time will be different.

“But someone has to catch the bad work”

Yes. Nobody wants work going out the door that embarrasses the agency, and pulling senior people in is the fastest way to stop it. In the short term, it’s the right move.

The problem is when the short-term move becomes the system. If the only thing standing between a client and a bad deliverable is your head of strategy’s evening, you’ve built a process that depends on your most expensive person working overtime forever.

The fix sits at the front of the cycle. Put the strategy time in before the work goes into production, so the people doing the work know what good looks like before they start. That’s slower on day one. It’s a lot faster than three rounds of revisions, and it gives your senior people their time back for the work only they can do.

I’ve been on the other side of this

I see this across dozens and dozens of agencies, including agencies I’ve led. I know the pain, and I know what’s wrong, because I’ve been the senior person stuck at the back end catching things.

The time of your best people, your smartest people, your most expensive people ends up drained in production. Busy feels like proof the agency is working. Look at what they’re busy with before you believe it.