TL;DR Our Agency Operating Model Assessment is live! Use it to identify and fix the key gaps in how your agency operates. Last year, we built Delphi - an insight network for agency leaders. Now hundreds of leaders get quarterly updates that keep them informed about key industry shifts. We're expanding this network and opening a dedicated sponsor slot for 2027. Reply if you'd like to explore sponsoring our Delphi network. Assessing Agency Operating Models Take our Agency Operating Model...
16 days ago • 1 min read
TL;DR This quarter's Agency Pulse Survey is live! Join Delphi to learn if it's you or the market. We're working on the next salary survey, and we'd love your input! Brands hire agencies to solve problems that they either don’t have the knowledge or capacity to handle themselves. AI doesn’t know what’s important, so it rushes to include everything, regardless of merit. We’ve noticed an uptick in the complexity of service offerings in many of our engagements over the last 9 months, resulting in...
23 days ago • 3 min read
TL;DR We reviewed all our Growth Review engagements over the last 10+ years to identify the most common issues. Focus and agency complexity were common issues that have gotten worse recently. Cheap AI builds can make focus and complexity worse by creating expensive distractions. Vision and alignment were the most common, as very few teams could consistently articulate what they're building. Positioning, a critical area for agency growth, was another area where gaps were common. Finally, new...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
TL;DR Beyond referrals, three strategies are driving agency growth today: thought leadership, programmatic M&A, and RFPs. Real thought leadership is the best way to build trust without a referral. The point of view has to come from leaders, and writing is how you develop it. Distribution is expensive, and underinvesting in it is what kills most thought leadership. You can buy trust. Programmatic M&A, a real market thesis executed through smaller deliberate bets, grows agencies, while...
about 2 months ago • 9 min read
TL;DR It's been a strangely flat year for agency leader outlooks. We're sitting about where we were in 4Q25: smaller projects are easy to land, larger ones are stuck behind tight client budgets, and sales cycles keep stretching. AI is great and garbage at the same time. It's making some work faster while killing demand for other work, but it isn't changing overall demand for digital services. For 2H, GEO and in-person events look like the leadgen plays, and we expect marketing and sales...
2 months ago • 6 min read
TL;DR We had the pleasure of interviewing some amazing agency owners about their growth stories. Check out the full recording here Our agency market sizing brief is now available to help leaders and product companies better understand the size and makeup of this industry. We launched a new agency partner directory that allows agency leaders to easily compare partner programs offered by vendors. The latest 3Q26 Agency Pulse went out to Delphi members earlier this week, and it looks like...
3 months ago • 2 min read
TL;DR Our research sponsorship page is live! If you have any SaaS/PaaS friends who want to fund some fantastic agency research, I'd really appreciate it if you could share this with them. We launched a free Digital Agency Growth Diagnostic to help agency leaders understand where to focus their team's efforts by scoring their revgen system. The standard agency's revgen system can be mapped to six core areas: strategy & positioning, marketing, sales, bizdev, account management, and alignment....
4 months ago • 5 min read
Updates We'd like to feature some agency leaders in a new interview series related to our Digital Agency Growth Guide. Spots are first-come, first-served, so be sure to fill this out soon if you're interested in participating. We're going live with our Q3 agency pulse survey next week. If you lead an agency and want a real answer to "Is it me or the market?" join Delphi and find out. We work with SaaS/PaaS companies to fund agency research. We have new research topics we would like to publish...
4 months ago • 5 min read
TL;DR We launched a new Digital Agency Growth Guide The widening gap between thriving and struggling digital agencies traces back to a misunderstanding of revenue generation. A large portion of the industry borrowed SaaS and product go-to-market tactics that don't fit how they win clients, and many misapplied generic best practices. There's no universal "best practice." Tactics succeed when they fit your agency's operating style and fail when they conflict with it. The 78-page Growth Guide is...
5 months ago • 2 min read
