Agency Growth Leaks
Growth has stopped feeling clean. Each one is a specific leak in one of four places: positioning, pricing, pipeline, or AI capacity. The page helps you recognize which one. The call narrows it. Schmidt Consulting Group helps founder-led agencies find which of the four leaks is costing the most and fixes it done-with-you, staying through the rollout.
Agency growth framework
Current: Growth diagnostic
Founders misdiagnose growth all the time. Most fall into the same trap: they feel growth slow, blame the easiest thing (sales is down, must be a pipeline problem), throw money at it, and watch the leak keep going.
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. Most agencies I work with are running with two active leaks at the same time. The page helps you name them. The call helps you decide which one to take on first.
The page is recognition. The work is the engagement. If you're nodding at this, the call is the next step.
Each one shows up in a different week. I work with founder-led agencies through advisory and fractional marketing engagements. The same four shapes keep showing up, and most agencies I see are running with two of them active at the same time.
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 nobody wants to be the one to raise it. Every proposal still leads with "X hours at $Y" because nobody on the team knows how to write it 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 hasn't moved. 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.
You probably don't, and that's fine. If two of the four cards above made you nod, you're in good company. Most founders read the page and recognize the same week in three of the four. We narrow it on the call.
That's the norm. Most agencies I work with are running with two active leaks at the same time. We name them on the call and decide which one to take on first.
Those are real. They tend to show up alongside 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.
Real diagnosis takes a conversation. I can't tell from a webpage which of your leaks is the one to take on first. The page narrows the question. The call answers it.
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.
Roughly 8 to 12 weeks of focused work, then about 90 days of running the new system across new proposals and engagements. Specifics for each leak live on the pillar pages.
Some founders do it internally. Most don't, because the pattern recognition takes years of seeing the same leaks across different agencies. It's the work I sell. If you've been at it internally for six months and the leak is still there, that's the signal it's not the kind of work the team can do alone.
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 leak shapes show up regardless of size. This page is written for one specific condition: the founder is still in every important call. If that's you, the page is for you. If you've handed the diagnosis to a leadership team that holds it 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 90-day 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? Karl Sakas. Thinking about valuation or eventual exit? David C. Baker. Most agencies stall because 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 worth watching: 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, while embedded 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.
The diagnosis is the engagement. We figure out which one is doing the most damage and what fixing it changes about your week. 30 minutes, no slides.
