Building Reliable Revgen Machines

Progress meetings suck when you're missing targets.

They suck even more when it happens multiple times in a row.

We've seen too many leadership teams have these conversations quarter after quarter for years now.

So, we're designing a new service to help agency teams quickly find and fix key revgen issues.

It includes a full review of an agency's:

• Leadership vision, alignment, and goals
• Positioninig
• Roles and responsibilities
• Brand
• Service mix
• Pricing
• Messaging
• Channels and audience
• Sales funnel
• Sales process
• And more

Once reviewed, we're pulling together over a decade's worth of research on growth benchmarks and best practices to give leaders everything they need to build a reliable revgen machine.

This solution is designed for agencies that fit the following criteria:

• Offer some mix of digital services (dev/design/marketing)
• Do solid work, but have less-than-ideal growth
• In the U.S. or Canada
• 10-100 full-time employees
• Are independent / not part of a holding company or agency group
• Are willing to give feedback on the service and results

The full service will be priced around $14k when it launches later this year.

We have four beta spots available for the full service at a $5k discount in exchange for candid feedback.

We're targeting a 2-4 week turnaround from kickoff to final results.

You get a Gap Analysis Report and Presentation, a Resource Bundle with templates, benchmarks, and best practices for solving each challenge area identified in the Gap Analysis, a Custom Revgen Plan with timelines and stakeholder flags for each component, and optional implementation support.

If your agency meets the criteria and you're interested in learning more, grab a time on my calendar that works best for you, and we can chat through the details.

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Agency Priorities

Revgen is THE top priority for agencies as we begin 2026.

We presented this quarter’s agency pulse results to Delphi members last week, and one of the topics we surveyed was the quarter's key initiatives.

Revgen was first, followed by evolving service offerings, and then internal improvements.

What was interesting, though, was that many of the second and third-tier initiatives were also related to revgen.

The service mix shifts were driven by growth goals, and a good chunk of the leaders working on improving internal processes were focused on positioning and revgen processes.

We’ve been researching agencies for over a decade at this point, and when we survey leaders, revgen is almost always their top priority. The only time it wasn’t was back in 2021-22 when everyone was hiring like crazy. Every other time it’s been revgen.

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Why’s Revgen So Tough?

Take your pick:

• New tech making everything easier/harder.
• Wild economic and political swings.
• Too much on leadership plates.
• Wrong strategy.
• Under-resourcing.
• Overreliance on passive referrals.
• Missing key components.
• Vision-goals-strategy-tactics alignment.
• Consistency.
• And so on.

The reality is that it's often a combination of things.

When leaders focus on what they can control, it's often enough to offset everything else.

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What Can Leaders Do?

The first step starts with leadership. What's the vision for the agency? What are you trying to achieve? Make sure everyone on your leadership team can answer those questions and that their answers align. A TON of revgen issues stem from a missing vision or misalignment.

From there, it's a positioning question. What problem space are you working in? What are you actually solving, and who are you solving it for? Answering these well makes it significantly easier to answer subsequent revgen questions.

Do you have the right roles and responsibilities needed to be successful? Different strategies require different skillsets, and we often come across teams that are more of a hodgepodge of talent vs. a purposeful mix of the right professionals.

How's your brand? Does it clearly communicate your positioning? This is a sneaky black hole that can consume almost endless resources. I don't know if I've ever met a leadership team that was completely satisfied with their brand. There's always something that needs fixing, but it's important to codify "good enough" so you can free up resources for other high-priority work.

What's your service mix look like? Are you offering too many or too few services? Are you proactively investing in tomorrow's service lines? It's incredibly easy to let the market decide because it feels like you're leaving money on the table, but discipline here can create growth that's more resilient to market shifts.

Pricing is next. How do your rates compare to competitors? Are you charging in a way that your client expects (retainer vs. project) for the service? This is another area where leadership can get bogged down with an endless amount of market research and tweaking that ultimately prevents them from making progress. Attract enough leads to raise your rates until you hit a point where your conversion rates get uncomfortable. Back off a bit for a few quarters, then try again.

How do you get those leads? Messaging. How's the clarity? How's the consistency?

Closely related to messaging is where you show up. What channels do you participate in? Do those match with where your ICPs hang out? This one's especially tricky because practitioners LOVE their conferences, and there's typically a ton of value there, but they rarely align with agency ICPs.

Finally, we have to look at the sales funnel and process. The two big questions here are: How are you allocating resources across funnel stages? And how complex is your sales process? We're getting into smaller tweaks here, but this is an area where we've seen shops over-index on leadgen while neglecting closing, and be just as bad off as the shop next door that brought in 1/10th of the leads.

Each of these are spots where we've seen agencies slip up in their revgen game. There are more, but these are the main ones.

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What's Blocking Your Agency?

We're evaluating all those items and more in our new service.

It's in beta, so we're limiting this to 4 agencies, and we're looking for your candid feedback on what's working and what's not. With that said, we've run similar services for years and have helped hundreds of agencies grow more effectively.

​If you'd like help building a reliable revgen machine for your agency, grab a spot on my calendar for next week.​

If not, I hope these questions help spark positive discussions at your shop.

Until next time,

-Nick