Agencies, we can do better.
Most people think agencies suck, and I hate to say it, but they’re right.
The reason most agencies suck is that when they’re faced with a service delivery problem that results in client churn, their first instinct is usually not to solve the service delivery problem. Their first instinct is to get more leads.
One of the biggest lagging indicators of agency problems is client churn. Most agencies are glorified churn farms. They prioritize bringing clients in and completely forget that once you bring clients in, you actually have to retain those clients long term. You have to get them results. You have to build the relationship. You have to add an inordinate amount of value into the relationship compared to the value that you take.
The problem is that most agencies spend all of their time and resources on the front end, on sales.
Then, every time there is a problem in the agency, the lagging indicator is poor retention or client churn. Rather than determine the actual problem, which is probably going to have something to do with people management, talent, processes, client communication, service delivery, or some combination of those things, and solve the root cause, they go back to:
“Well, the agency is shrinking, therefore I need more leads.”
That is completely backwards.
And this is why I take such issue with the vast majority of agency consultants promising to help you “scale your agency,” only for you to hop on a call with them and discover that it’s just another sales program.
In a lot of cases, that’s lazy.
Sales can absolutely be a constraint. Sometimes you really do need more leads.
But if your agency is losing clients because the delivery is broken, the team is underperforming, communication is poor, or the service itself isn’t good enough, adding more leads doesn’t solve the problem. It just gives the broken system more clients to churn through.
The agency is shrinking because you’re not holding on to the clients you already have.
And this is why people think agencies suck, because they can see right through you. They can see that the minute they sign the contract, they’re going to be forgotten about. They’re going to be dropped on their ass while the agency goes looking for the next sale, instead of doing what is in everyone’s best interests, which is getting incredible results for the clients they already have.
It is infinitely easier to scale an agency by retaining as many good clients as you can and only letting the right clients in to begin with.
What most agencies do is the opposite. They prioritize bringing in as many clients as will say yes to them and hand them money, and then they drop them on their ass.
This is why agencies suck.
Not all of them, but enough of them that the reputation is deserved.
The good news is that this is completely fixable.
You don’t need to become better at replacing the clients you lose. You need to become the kind of agency that good clients don’t want to leave.
That means solving the actual problems. Getting better people. Building better processes. Communicating better. Delivering better work. Being more selective about who you let in.
Then sales can do what it is actually supposed to do: add clients to an agency that already knows how to keep them.
That is how you build an agency that compounds instead of constantly replacing what it lost.
And frankly, that’s how we make agencies suck a little less.