Your Growth Engine Isn't Where You Think It Is

Quick question for you.

If your top three client relationships were mapped out on a whiteboard, how many of the meaningful ones would sit with you or one other senior person?

Because in most agencies I work with, growth still lives at the top. The founder's relationships. The MD's coffees and dinners. The senior person the client "really trusts".

And for years, that worked.

But the reality right now is that senior decision makers are harder to reach, there's less work to go around, and competition is fiercer than it's been in a long time. A couple of strong relationships held by a couple of senior people isn't a growth strategy anymore. It's a fragile foundation.

This came up brilliantly in a talk by Jemma Long, Growth Director at Planes, at Agency Hackers' Happy Clients, and one line has stayed with me since:

Delivery can be your biggest growth engine.

Think about it. Your delivery and account teams are the ones with the inside track. They have the knowledge, the trust, the day-to-day relationship. They have your client's full attention every single week, at a time when a Marketing Director will barely give a new business call ten minutes.

So the opportunity is sitting right there.

And yet what I see happening is brilliant people delivering great work, making clients happy, running smooth projects, and none of it translating into growth. Teams stuck being reactive rather than proactive. Not challenging briefs, not shaping the work, not getting ahead of what the client needs next.

Often they've even been told growth is part of their job, but they haven't been given the tools, the structure or the support to actually do it. Which isn't fair on them, and it doesn't work.

Because turning a delivery team into a commercially minded one takes more than a memo. It needs three things working together:

• Skills: training, coaching and the confidence to ask better questions, spot opportunities and have commercial conversations.
• Structure: growth targets people can actually see, an account plan per key client, and a quarterly rhythm of reviewing what's working and what's not. A living strategy, not a document you revisit once a year.
• Culture: growth on the agenda regularly, wins celebrated publicly, and the whole agency in the room for planning, not just client services. When growth is everyone's business, it stops depending on any one person.

Miss any one of those and it falls over. Skills without structure fizzles out. Structure without culture becomes a spreadsheet nobody looks at.

So here's my challenge for you this week

Audit where your team actually spends their time. Are they delivering or developing? Do they know each client's priorities beyond the current project? Are they identifying opportunities, or waiting to be told?

The gap between those answers is your starting point.

Because the agencies that grow from here won't be the ones whose founders have the best contact book.

They'll be the ones where the people closest to the client are trusted, and equipped, to lead the growth.

Jo x