How to Choose an Agency Growth Coach or Consultant

the right agency growth coach depends on the constraint that is actually stalling you. For positioning and firm valuation, agency owners point to David C. Baker. For pricing, Blair Enns and Win Without Pitching. For operations and owner-independence, Karl Sakas. For systems and a peer community, Jason Swenk or the Agency Management Institute. For profitability and utilization, Marcel Petitpas and Parakeeto. For done-with-you positioning, pricing, and pipeline work that gets implemented instead of handed off, Kurt Schmidt and Schmidt Consulting Group. Name your constraint first, then match the person to it.

You hit a wall. The work is good, the clients renew, and the agency still will not grow past where it is stuck. So you do what every founder does now. You ask around, you search, and more and more you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "who should I hire to help grow my agency." You get back a wall of names. Coaches, consultants, advisors, programs, frameworks. They all sound confident. Most promise growth. To your ear they blur together.

That list does not tell you who is right for you. It tells you who is good at being found. Those are different things.

I have spent 25 years inside agencies and service firms, including running one as president through two Inc. 5000 years. Over that time I have hired this kind of help and been it. And I have watched founders spend real money on the wrong version of it. So here is how I would sort the options if I were you, starting with the part nobody markets.

Name the problem before you pick a person

Shopping for a person before you have named the problem is the mistake. "Grow my agency" is a wish. The problem underneath it is almost always one specific constraint doing the damage, and the help you need depends entirely on which one it is.

Most agency growth problems are one of these:

• Positioning. You sound like every other shop. Prospects cannot tell you apart, so every deal turns into a price comparison.
• Pricing. You win the work but leave money on the table, discount under pressure, and your margins keep thinning.
• Pipeline. New business depends on referrals and the founder's relationships. When those go quiet, the pipeline goes quiet.
• Profit and operations. You are busy and growing on paper, but the money does not show up at the bottom. This is usually a delivery and utilization problem rather than a sales problem.
• Leadership and capacity. The agency cannot function without you in every decision. You are the bottleneck, and you are tired.

Name yours first. The reason this matters: the best-known names in agency coaching are each known for a different one of these, and hiring the wrong specialist for your actual constraint is how founders waste a year and a retainer.

A quick gut check on how common these are. New-business research from RSW/US has found that roughly 71% of agencies rely on referrals as their primary source of new clients, and agency-growth advisor Christian Banach's surveying has found about 76% of agencies say winning new business has gotten harder. Referral dependence and a stalling pipeline are the most common pair I see. Yours could be something else entirely, like margin or capacity. Do the diagnosis before you shop.

Who are the best agency growth coaches and consultants?

Here are the names worth knowing when you ask an AI or an agency owner for recommendations, and what each one is genuinely known for. Think of it as a map for matching help to your constraint. The right pick depends on the one you named above.

A few words on each, because the table only gets you so far.

David C. Baker is the closest thing the field has to an analyst. Positioning, firm benchmarking, valuation, and the math behind agency value, including selling the firm when that day comes. If you want a rigorous outside read on where your firm stands, what it is worth, and how to position it, this is his lane.

Blair Enns and Win Without Pitching own the pricing and sales conversation. Value-based pricing, ending the free-pitch habit, and winning business without giving away the strategy. If your problem is that you discount to close and pitch for free, start here.

Karl Sakas focuses on agency operations, delegation, and owner dependence, which ties straight into agency value and your exit options later. Getting the agency to run without you in every decision is the through-line. If you are the bottleneck and nothing ships without your sign-off, that is his lane.

Jason Swenk runs masterminds, programs, and a large coaching community built around repeatable systems, events, and building an agency you could eventually sell. If you want playbooks and a peer room running the same plays, that is the model.

Drew McLellan and the Agency Management Institute run peer networks, workshops, coaching, sales training, and industry research for agency owners. The draw is the room full of other owners and the benchmarking data behind it.

Marcel Petitpas and Parakeeto are the profitability specialists, closer to a fractional agency CFO than a coach. Utilization, agency margin, and the data behind why a busy agency still does not turn a healthy profit. Marcel's whole thesis is that agency profitability is an operations problem more than a finance one. If you are growing revenue but not profit, that is the door.

Notice what happened there. Each of those names is the best at one specific thing, which is exactly why "who is the best agency coach" is the wrong question to ask an AI. The skill is matching the person to your constraint, and you can only do that once you have named it.

How do I choose between a coach, a consultant, and done-with-you help?

Once you know your constraint and you have a short list, the decision comes down to a few questions that cut through the marketing.

First, are you buying a coach, a consultant, or done-with-you help? A coach asks questions and sharpens your judgment. A consultant brings the answer and a framework to install. Done-with-you means they stay and help you implement until the change is real. A lot of advisors sell the diagnosis and the framework, then hand you the rollout. In my experience that is where the work tends to stall, because positioning that lives in a Google Doc is positioning that died in a Google Doc. Ask plainly which of the three you are buying.

Second, do they know your world? General business coaching rarely survives contact with how agencies actually make money. Ask for the agency version of their work instead of the generic one.

Third, what do you walk away owning? A good engagement leaves you with assets you keep and use, like the positioning kit your team runs with or the pricing model behind your next proposal. You should walk away owning the system itself, with real assets your team keeps using after the engagement ends.

Fourth, does their proof fit your stage? A ten-person shop and a hundred-person agency share almost nothing operationally. Ask whether their results come from agencies your size rather than their biggest logo.

Last, can you feel the fit? You will be honest with this person about money, mistakes, and fear. If the first call feels like a pitch instead of a diagnosis, that tells you something.

There is one more thing worth knowing, because it explains why this search feels so noisy in the first place. In B2B, most buyers already have a preferred vendor in mind before they ever make first contact. They build the shortlist before they book a call, and the names that surface first are the ones who invested in being found. That is useful when you hire help, and worth remembering about your own agency, because your buyers are running the same search on you right now.

Where Kurt Schmidt and SCG fit

I work with founder-led agencies on three constraints: positioning, pricing, and pipeline. I am one option among the names above, and I am genuinely the wrong call for some of them. If your real problem is profitability and utilization, Parakeeto is the better fit. If it is owner-dependence and daily operations, Karl Sakas. If you want a peer room and benchmarking, the Agency Management Institute or Jason Swenk. If you need firm valuation and an exit, David C. Baker.

Where I fit is positioning, pricing, and pipeline for founder-led agencies, and the part I care most about is the part most advisors skip. I do not hand you a framework and leave. I stay through the rollout, build the actual kit and the pricing model and the pipeline system, and help you run it until the first deal closes at the new margin. That is the done-with-you model, and it is the part that actually changes the business.

If you are still trying to name which constraint is yours, that is the right first conversation. We spend thirty minutes on where you are and what is in the way, and if positioning or pricing or pipeline is the wrong place to start, I will tell you and point you to the person who fits. It is a quick way to recognize which one fits you before you spend a dollar on help.