Agency Coaching Strategy That Actually Sticks

I'm Kurt Schmidt, founder of Schmidt Consulting Group, and if there's one thing I've seen across hundreds of conversations with agency owners, it's this: most of them are building on sand. They've got revenue, sometimes serious revenue, and almost none of it came from intentional go-to-market decisions. It came from referrals. From relationships. From saying yes to everything that showed up.

That works for a while. Then it stops working. And when it stops, the agency has no idea what to do next because they never built an actual agency coaching strategy. They built a client service operation dressed up as a business.

Let's talk about what it actually takes to fix that.

Why Do So Many Agencies Skip Positioning Entirely?

The short answer is fear. Every agency owner I've sat across from who resisted niching down was running a quiet calculation in their head: if I say no to certain clients, what if the right ones never show up?

That's a scarcity mindset, and it deserves to be named directly. I've talked through this with agency coaches who've done the math on market size with their clients, and the numbers are almost always shocking in the owner's favor. Take a city-level agency doing SEO. If you pull chamber of commerce data, filter to the business types you actually want, apply a reasonable market penetration assumption, and run the numbers, you might be looking at a $6 million opportunity without ever leaving your metro area. The instinct to go national, to target everyone, is actually the riskier bet.

Part of why this is harder for agencies than product companies comes down to how services feel. If you manufacture water pumps, it's obvious you can't build a train engine. The category boundary is physical. But in a services firm, the leap from SEO to paid social to TikTok strategy feels small on the surface because all of it is "digital marketing." So agencies keep expanding scope until they've quietly built three separate businesses inside one org, each with a different buyer profile, and none of them with a real go-to-market strategy behind them.

I've seen this collapse on itself. The weight of running three separate marketing motions for three different buyer personas, inside one P&L, with one team, is a strategic problem.

What's the Right Order for Building a Positioning Strategy?

Here's a framework I've found useful, and it comes from separating two things most people conflate: niche and positioning.

Niche is who you're targeting. Positioning is how you're seen. They depend on each other, but they're different muscles. The question of which to build first depends on where you're starting from.

If you already have market access, start with niche. You know engineers because you used to be one. You have relationships in manufacturing, or healthcare, or logistics. Start there. The fastest way to fail at niching is to pick a lane where you don't know a single person you can call tomorrow. Market access is a prerequisite.

If you don't have a clear niche yet, start with positioning. Figure out how you want to be known. Fast iteration? Deep specialization? Radical transparency with clients? One agency I know built their entire identity around speed: test fast, break things, optimize quickly. That point of view attracts a specific kind of client and repels others. That's the goal.

positioning strategy

David C. Baker, who has written extensively on positioning for creative firms (his site is davidcbaker.com), frames it well: positioning is about who you seek. That single reframe changes everything. You're no longer waiting to be chosen. You're making choices.

The other thing to say clearly: you're not flipping a switch. A positioning shift is a crossing. One approach I've seen work is building a parallel landing page with tight, specific positioning and running traffic to it before changing anything on the main site. When prospects convert on it, that's the proof of concept the owner needs to actually commit.

How Do You Choose a Niche You Won't Regret?

Four things. And I want to be direct about each one.

First, you have to like the people. I know that sounds obvious, but I've worked with founders who are years into running an agency and they dread every client call. It's a targeting problem that compounds over time. You'll be going to their conferences, engaging with them on LinkedIn, building content that speaks to their world. If you don't genuinely enjoy those people, stop now.

Second, the total addressable market should be growing. Picking a declining sector means you're fighting for a shrinking pie. Every year is harder than the last.

Third, they need to have money. This sounds obvious and it gets missed constantly. Podcast editing for personal podcasters is a real example I've heard come up multiple times. Most personal podcasts don't generate revenue; they're a hobby. A business podcast, by contrast, is a deliberate investment because the owner believes it'll generate clients on the back end. Same service, completely different buyer active.

Fourth, and this one matters for culture: you should enjoy the actual work. Separate from liking the clients, do you get excited about the problems in this space? Because that enthusiasm is what builds compounding expertise, and compounding expertise is what makes you genuinely hard to compete with after five years.

When owners get stuck, I back them into elimination. Instead of asking what you want to do, ask what you refuse to do. When I launched Foundry, I did this with my partners. The list of what we didn't want came together fast. That list made the decision easier than any brainstorming exercise would have.

Why Do Agency Teams Lose Direction as the Firm Grows?

This is where founders get surprised, and they probably shouldn't be.

Agency owners are wired for change. They're always scanning, iterating, pivoting. Their teams are not. To a team member, every new direction the founder announces is one more thing that destabilizes what they thought they were building. Even if the founder feels like they haven't changed much lately, the team has likely absorbed a dozen micro-shifts in priority and is quietly exhausted by it.

I worked at an agency where your utilization rate was the first thing you saw every time you logged into the main system. Leadership thought it was motivating. And it was, in one sense. But it also created strong incentives to game the number. The same active plays out in Salesforce implementations across larger firms: mandate the tool, watch adoption sit at 40-50% after year one, call a bunch of meetings, watch data quality collapse as people fill in fields just to look compliant.

Both of these are symptoms of the same problem. Numbers without culture behind them are just pressure. And pressure without context produces workarounds.

I learned something from my time running and advising agencies that I keep coming back to: the only thing a leader truly owns is the culture. Everything else, tools, processes, reporting, can be built and copied. Culture is what you install over time through consistency, through example, through who you hire and who you let go. Seth Godin defines culture as "people like us do things like this," and that's exactly right. It's the invisible contract that holds a team together when everything else is in flux.

The exercise I've seen work best is what some coaches call agency design: before you build anything else, map out what you want the agency to actually look like. Do you want no one working more than 30 hours a week? Great. That's a lifestyle agency and you build it differently. Do you want to grow as fast as possible? Also fine. But the map looks completely different. If the owner doesn't know the destination, the team can't follow.

agency culture

What Does "Good" Actually Look Like in an Agency Context?

This is where I want to spend real time because I think it's undervalued.

There's a meaningful difference between what done looks like and what good looks like. Done is a checkbox. Good is a standard. Most agencies are much clearer on the former.

Early in my career, I'd deliver work and a leader would say it wasn't right. I'd iterate. Still not right. I spent months assuming the problem was my execution. With more experience, I came to understand that a lot of those leaders couldn't describe what good looked like. They knew it when they saw it. That's a different problem, and it's the leader's problem to solve.

When I became a business owner, that experience stuck. If something came back wrong, my first question was whether I'd explained it clearly enough. Did I give the team the information they needed? Did I show them examples of what I was going for? Because there's a direct line between your positioning and your ability to define quality standards. When you know precisely who you serve and why, you know what outcomes matter. When you know what outcomes matter, you can build a swipe file, a process, a rubric. Your team can self-assess. Client conversations become easier because your definition of good and your client's definition of good are already aligned.

This is also how you screen clients during sales. If a prospect's standard for good is fundamentally different from yours, that engagement is going to be painful. Getting clear on your own standard makes it much easier to spot that mismatch early.

quality standards

What Should Agency Owners Focus on in 2026?

Strong positioning. Full stop.

The barrier to starting an agency has never been lower. Two people with laptops and a shared Google Drive can call themselves a social media agency and start competing with firms that have been at this for a decade. Expertise is being democratized fast; AI shortens the ramp from novice to competent faster than anyone anticipated.

The differentiators that used to work, speed, tools, even expertise to some degree, are compressing. What's left is your point of view. How you see the world. What you believe about your clients' problems and the right way to solve them. That can't be copied because it lives in your culture, in your hiring, in your content, in the conversations you have with clients at 7pm when a campaign is underperforming.

The niche bar is rising too. "I work with manufacturing companies" was a niche five years ago. At this point you need "I work with design engineers at textile manufacturers on their inbound lead generation." And even that isn't safe unless it's backed by a real perspective on their world. Someone can always claim the same niche. They can't claim the same worldview.

I covered the compounding advantage of deep specialization in depth on The Schmidt List, and it keeps coming up because it keeps being true.

The agencies that will still be standing in five years are the ones who stopped trying to serve everyone and started being genuinely, specifically, visibly themselves.

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Key Takeaways

• Referral-only growth is a ceiling, and most agencies hit it without a plan for what comes next.
• Separate niche (who you target) from positioning (how you're seen); build whichever one you have a head start on first.
• Market access is a prerequisite for niche selection. Pick a lane where you already know people.
• Culture is the one asset competitors can't replicate quickly, and it starts with the founder defining what the agency is actually for.
• There is a difference between what done looks like and what good looks like. Closing that gap is leadership work.
• Positioning in 2026 means a specific point of view on a specific problem for specific people, backed up by everything you do.