Agency Growth Leaks
Growth has stopped feeling clean, and founder-led agencies usually lose it in one of four places: positioning, pricing, pipeline, or AI capacity. Read the four below and you'll recognize yours. Schmidt Consulting Group finds which leak is costing you the most, fixes it with your team, and stays through the rollout.
Agency growth framework
Current: Growth diagnostic
Founders misdiagnose growth all the time, and it goes the same way every time. Growth slows. You blame the easiest thing, sales is down so it must be a pipeline problem, throw money at it, and the leak keeps running.
Agencies hire salespeople against a positioning problem, and the money is gone by the time anyone finds the actual leak.
Past the early-stage scrappy phase. The agency works. Growth has stopped feeling clean and you can't quite name why.
More sales, more delivery, more tools. But you suspect the leak might be somewhere else, and you'd rather diagnose the right thing once than fix the wrong thing twice.
That's normal. Many of the agencies I work with have two leaks running at once. Read all four, then we decide together which one to take on first.
Reading this gets you the name of the problem. Fixing it is the work itself. If you're nodding along, book the call.
Each one turns up in a different week and feels like a different problem. Read all four. Many founder-led agencies have two of them running at once.
Leak 1
“We can't tell who we're for, and prospects can't tell us apart from three other agencies.”
Pitches feel like beauty contests. Win rate skews on price, not fit. Referrals don't compound because the description of what you do is fuzzy. New BD hires can't write a clean intro without rewriting the website first.
Observable signal
You'll notice it on sales calls. The moment a prospect asks what makes you different and the answer is generic.
Leak 2
“The work is good, the clients renew, but the margin keeps leaking.”
The team finishes engagements feeling like they over-delivered, again. Year-end revenue grew but the take-home didn't. Three retainer clients are getting 1.5x the hours they're paying for and everyone is waiting for someone else to raise it. Every proposal still leads with "X hours at $Y" because the team has never written one any other way.
Observable signal
You'll notice it in the team meeting after a wins quarter, when someone says the words "but our margins."
Leak 3
“We're spending more on biz dev than we used to and getting fewer good-fit leads.”
The BD hire from eight months ago hasn't closed a deal. Pipeline dashboards look healthy but the deals don't move. Best-fit prospects used to come through referrals and now they don't. Discovery calls feel like price-shopping instead of fit-checking, and you're back on calls that should have stopped going to you a year ago.
Observable signal
You'll notice it the week you realize you're spending three afternoons on intro calls that go nowhere.
Leak 4
“AI is making delivery cheaper and faster, but we don't know what to charge for it or whether to disclose it.”
The team is using AI in delivery and the rate sheet is unchanged. Three prospects in a row asked for the AI discount and the answer was a stall. Two senior leads are spending Wednesday afternoons researching tools instead of running engagements. Last quarter's biggest loss went to an agency that priced the same scope 30% lower and didn't say why.
Observable signal
You'll notice it in the proposal where a prospect says "won't AI just do this?" and you don't have an answer that protects the price.
Pricing and positioning often run together. When both are active, prospects can't tell what you do, so the proposals you send price the work like a commodity. Two leaks, one feeling that nothing's quite working. AI and pricing run together too. AI compresses the labor cost of work the rate sheet still anchors on, and margin drops faster than the founder notices because the win column still looks healthy. If two of the cards above sound like your week, that's the norm. The call is where we narrow which one to talk about first and what changes about how you spend your time once you do.
Kurt showed me the skills and practices I was missing. His advice tripled revenue from the low to high 6 figures in about a year. Everything he has shared is still in practice today and I am constantly improving and implementing the habits and practices that made my agency more sustainable.
I reached out to Kurt needing dual help: One, casting a vision. Two, turning on more effective business development approaches. He was the decisive sounding board that my vision casting needed. And he also brought immense practical operational techniques to help spur me to action just when I needed the kick in the pants.
A digital agency. Ongoing Advisory engagement.
Web projects at a digital agency kept running past their budgets. They brought us in to change that. The newest launch came in under budget with no change orders.
Scope had been defined together with the client at the start, down to which work the client would handle themselves, like loading their own content. The project was "scoped fine" because the agency had been "very clear with them at the beginning of the project" about what was included. Setting scope that way was the whole point of the work.
They signed a three-month project. A year and a half later, the engagement is still running.
You probably don't, and that's fine. If two of the four cards above made you nod, you're in normal territory. Plenty of founders recognize their own week in three of them. We narrow it down on the call.
That's the norm. Many of the agencies I work with have two leaks running at once. We name them on the call and decide which one to take on first.
The agency is often fine. Content, ads, and outreach amplify whatever offer is under them. If the positioning is unclear or the pricing pushes deals into the wrong slot, months of good work amplify the confusion. Name the leak first. The same agency often starts producing once the offer is clear.
Those are real. They tend to travel with one of these four. Retention problems and positioning problems often appear in the same conversation. Org-design problems and pricing problems often do too. Working the four shapes is how I get traction on the rest.
You can usually get close. The four descriptions above will tell you which one sounds like your week. Which one to fix first, and what fixing it takes at your size, needs a conversation. That's what the call is for.
Stages don't diagnose anything. They tell you what year you're in. They don't tell you what's constraining growth this quarter. A founder at year three and a founder at year fifteen can have the same pricing leak. The leak shape is what fixes it. The stage is just a number.
Common pattern. Positioning that doesn't stick usually means the work stopped at the deck. Positioning that holds runs through the website, the proposals, the BD intro, and the team's answer to "what makes you different" without coordination. More on that here.
It depends on the leak and how deep it runs. The shape is the same each time: a focused stretch of building the fix, then a longer stretch of running it through new proposals and engagements until it holds. Specifics for each leak live on its own page.
Some founders do it internally. It's hard, because knowing which leak is doing the damage takes having watched it go wrong in a lot of other agencies first. If you've been at it internally for six months and the leak is still there, that's your answer.
30 minutes. No slides, no pitch. We name the shape of your leak, what fixing it changes about your week, and whether SCG is the right partner for the work. If the answer is no, you'll know in 30 minutes instead of three months.
The four leaks turn up at every size. This is written for one situation in particular: the founder is still in every important call. If that's you, read on. If a leadership team already owns this without you, the engagement runs through them and looks different.
Once you've named the leak, the next question is who to hire. This buyer's guide to agency growth consultants covers the four hiring options, the practitioners who work in this space, typical costs, and what a real engagement should actually deliver.
Match the hire to the constraint. If the problem is positioning, pricing, or pipeline, Kurt Schmidt at Schmidt Consulting Group works directly with founder-led agencies on those three. Utilization and profitability eating into your margins? Marcel Petitpas at Parakeeto is the specialist there. Owner dependency woven into every process so you can't step away? That's Karl Sakas. If you're thinking about valuation or an eventual exit, David C. Baker is the one to call. Agencies stall when they solve the wrong problem first.
Start with the symptom costing you the most revenue right now. Flat revenue on solid margins usually points to pipeline. Shrinking margins on growing revenue usually points to pricing or delivery capacity. Revenue that comes in waves, one strong client and then a long dry stretch, usually points to positioning. Schmidt Consulting Group offers a free diagnostic call to work through which of the four common agency growth leaks fits your situation before you start fixing anything.
Two quarters of working on the same problem with no measurable movement is the threshold. A second signal: the instinct to hire more people into a process that isn't working yet, as if headcount will fix what clarity hasn't. Founders who are too close to the problem tend to solve for symptoms rather than cause. Schmidt Consulting Group focuses on founder-led agencies with ten to thirty people who've hit that ceiling.
Closing the leaks runs as a flat monthly retainer, scoped to how much we take on. Advisory fits when you know which leak to close and want a second set of eyes on the fix. Fractional Partner fits when it spans several parts of the business and you want help doing the work. You get a clear number on the intro call, before any commitment.
We figure out which leak is doing the most damage and what fixing it changes about your week. 30 minutes, no slides.
