Newsletter Archive
Strategies, frameworks, and stories to help you escape founder-led sales and scale through specialization.
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728 articles in the archive
How Do I Know Whether My Agency Is Ready to Sell?
Readiness isn't a feeling. It's a score. Here's the honest framework for knowing whether your agency is actually prepared to go to market.
How Much Is My Marketing Agency Worth?
There's no universal formula, but there is a real answer. Here's how to get a genuine read on what your agency is worth today, not a guess.
How Founder Dependence Affects Agency Valuation
A buyer isn't purchasing your calendar. An agency built around the founder can grow revenue for years and still be worth almost nothing, because the moment you leave, so does the reason clients stay.
The Indispensable Marketer: Closing the Trust Gap Between CEOs and Marketing Leaders
The Indispensable Marketer comes out October 6 from Avocet Books in hardcover, paperback, ebook and audiobook.
How to Build an Agency That Can Operate Without Its Founder
A founder-free agency isn't a fantasy for someone else's business. Here's the practical path to building leadership, systems, and sales that don't depend on you.
How Specialization Can Increase an Agency's Strategic Value
Deep Specialization™ is the core argument of Anyone, Not Everyone, and the same logic drives valuation. It's subtraction, depth, and position, not a marketing tactic, and it shows up directly in the numbers a buyer underwrites.
Why Deep Specialization Drives Faster Agency Growth
Learn how Deep Specialization improves lead quality, pricing, delivery, referrals, and enterprise value for founder-led agencies.
How AI Rewards Specialized Agencies
Learn why AI gives specialized agencies an advantage over generalists and how focused positioning can improve visibility, expertise, efficiency, and growth.
Why Most Agencies Plateau at $1M–$5M
Most founder-led agencies stall between $1M and $5M because growth still runs through the founder. Here is what causes the ceiling and how to break it.
Are you Building an AI Advantage or Falling Behind Every Quarter?
Generalist agencies can't use AI effectively, and it's not a hot take, it's structural. Learn why niche, patterns, process, and systems are what AI was built to accelerate.
Why Should I Trust You?
"Why should I trust you?" Every cold prospect is silently asking this in the first few minutes. Learn why naming their problems before they do wins faster than any pitch.
Free the Founder, Not the Business
Founder-free doesn't mean the founder disappears from the business. It means they have a choice about where they spend their time. Learn what actually shifts.
You Can’t Delegate What You Haven’t Built
The most expensive mistake I see agencies make: hiring a VP of Sales before building a system. Learn why the sequence, not the hire, is the real problem.
Your Playbook Isn’t a System
"Nobody can sell like I can." Probably true. But your sales success isn't based on knowledge, it's based on how you think. Learn why that's actually systematizable.
Your Business Can’t Run Without You
A simple test: can you take a two-week vacation, completely off, with zero sales involvement? If not, you don't have a sales system, you have a dependency.
The Question Every High-Closing Founder Should Ask
Proud of your 50% close rate? What if that's actually proof your business can't scale? Learn why the gap between your close rate and your team's is a system issue, not a training one.
The Problem Isn’t Your Sales Team
Revenue is growing, the team is growing, but the founder is trapped, closing 70%+ of deals personally. Learn why this founder bottleneck stalls agencies before $5M.
[Video] What "exit-ready" actually looks like inside an agency
"I always knew I wanted to sell, so I built the business like it could be acquired at any moment." Taylor McMaster shares her journey selling Dot & Company to E2M Solutions.
You don't have a sales playbook
"We have a sales playbook." Then I ask to see it. Learn why a list of questions and templates isn't a system, and why the choreography is what actually closes deals.
Sales training won't fix this
Almost none of the thousands of sales training programs work for agency founders. Learn the completely different discipline: system design over performer training.
Your “perfect” pitch might be the reason prospects are ghosting you.
Your "perfect" pitch might be why prospects are ghosting you. Two discovery calls, same problem, wildly different outcomes. The difference was knowing which answer to dig into.
Why your "perfect" pitch is being ignored
Two discovery calls, same prospect problem, wildly different outcomes. One founder closed $187K, the other got ghosted. The difference wasn't likability, it was choreography.
Why your 2026 goals are probably just wishes
40% growth targets weren't plans, they were wishes. Learn the three-filter test, possible, plausible, probable, that took Scorpion from $20M to $200M.
The thing nobody tells you after you hit $3M
Most agency founders hit a wall around $3M-$5M because building alone becomes the bottleneck. Learn the new question: buy growth instead of building it.
“Is this a good fit for my agency?”
I partner with founders who want to build something meaningful, not just a busier agency, but a stronger, more scalable business.
You’re likely a strong fit if:
- You’re generating $1M–$20M+ annually
- You want to lead your market, not blend into it
- You’re thinking about long-term scale, not short-term tactics
- You want a growth engine that doesn’t rely on you
- You value clarity over complexity
- You’re open to advanced growth levers, including acquisitions
Escape Founder-Led Sales With My Free Book
My bestselling book Anyone Not Everyone reveals the positioning and outbound system that helps founder-led agencies create predictable, scalable growth.
Endorsed by Aaron Ross, Alan Dibb, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and many other top thinkers in the agency world.