TL;DR We’re building a private insights group for agency leaders interested in real data about what’s going on in the market. Sign up now. For agency leaders who have their strategy, revgen, and structure in place, employee experience (EX) is the next step that can drive significant long-term growth. Developing EX through the service-profit chain provides agency leaders with a solid framework to link EX to agency performance. The S-P chain is essentially: Happy employees make happy clients....
15 days ago • 7 min read
TL;DR There are 12 key components to our updated Factory-Consultancy Framework: Project uniqueness Delivery complexity Pricing model Degree of customization Talent mix and cost Staffing difficulty Service maturity Sales cycle Client concentration Revenue predictability Contract negotiation complexity Presence of substitutes Almost all of them have a few key activities needed to move right toward consultancies. We've also updated our Factory-Consultancy Diagnostic to account for the new...
29 days ago • 5 min read
TL;DR Last call for the AI survey! We're refreshing our Factory-Consultancy framework Adding zones: Commodity Factory - Speed and volume Procedure Factory - Repeatable processes Frustrating Middle - A mixture of other zones Gray Hair Boutique - Veteran knowledge Rocket Science - Cutting edge transformation Introducing the service lifecycle lens - A method for tracking service commoditization and knowing when to act. A KPI risk dashboard - Teal-world metrics, risks, and mitigation steps for...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
TL;DR We're doing a micro-survey (<10 questions) on how agencies are pricing and packaging the AI services they're selling to clients. Agencies exist because: client teams are strapped, agencies are ahead on the tech curve, they execute faster, know more about specific tech and industries, and offer a quality outside perspective that cuts through (some) politics. Clients are buying revenue, margins, and/or risk mitigation. AI eases bandwidth constraints for both clients and agencies, but this...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
TL;DR The 2025 Digital Agency Web Host Report, get your copy here. Privately, many agency leaders are uneasy about where to steer their firms. Their key concerns lie in AI, growth, and team management. AI is obvious, but anemic growth has made team management almost impossible lately. Fixing growth can make management easier. We summarized responses from 50+ agency leaders over the last few months to find pockets of strength and where they're seeing weakness. Leaders most often flagged...
2 months ago • 5 min read
TL;DR The 2025 Digital Agency Web Host Report is live. There were five top hosts that ranked above average in Performance & Reliability and Agency Fit: AWS, WP Engine, Google, DigitalOcean, and GoDaddy. Security, site speed, and uptime were the most important core factors when it comes to agency leaders making hosting decisions. Agency leaders ranked partnership programs the lowest deciding core factor because the current partner programs don't do enough to move the needle. There's an...
3 months ago • 2 min read
TL;DR Our next opening for an agency consulting project is in late September. Please get in touch early if you're interested in a Revgen Review or a Custom Strategy Project. The AM/PM confusion has spread all the way to McCann as they restructure to replace their AMs with PMs. Unfortunately for them, AMs and PMs serve two different but complementary roles. AMs drive growth while PMs drive margin. The core purpose of an account manager is to oversee the client relationship. The core purpose of...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Special Survey Edition This is a special edition of our newsletter. We'll be back next week with our standard deep dive into a new agency topic. Today, we're doing a study on how digital agency teams evaluate web hosts, and we'd appreciate your perspective. As a thank you, we'll send the full analysis and a $25 gift card to everyone who submits a valid response. Research Invitation I'd like to invite you to participate in our research. It takes about 5min on average. We're hoping to learn...
4 months ago • 1 min read
TL;DR NEW SURVEY: Web Host Sentiment open through 5/30. Agency leaders are slightly optimistic about their agency's outlook for the rest of the year. Many leaders view 1H25 as a low point, so it’ll be pretty easy for the second half to be better. Web development services face polarized demand depending significantly on client industry health and exposure. We saw high demand for strategy services (digital and marketing strategy). The weakest services were content marketing, social media...
4 months ago • 4 min read