Most agency founders eventually hit the same quiet crossroads. 

The work is good, the clients are happy, and you’re far from “struggling.” But the pipeline isn’t behaving the way it used to. 

Deals feel slower. Opportunities feel thinner. You catch yourself refreshing your inbox like the universe owes you an apology.

A few moments usually give it away:
 • You see 𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 and know they won’t get you to the next stage
 • You watch 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐩 𝐮𝐩 offering everything and blending you into the noise
 • You catch yourself 𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞 just to keep the deal moving

Those forces hit at the same time. More competition, more noise, and fewer dependable paths to demand. 

If you don’t have a strong, deliberate way to create inbound or outbound interest, you end up relying on whatever comes your way. That’s when the ceiling appears. 

You know you can grow, but the path isn’t obvious anymore.


Most people think the answer is more tactics. 

More content, more channels, more anything. They want a shiny SOP. 

But tactics don’t fix the structural reason a pipeline thins out. 


The real issue is that 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 across the business. 

It’s not creating clarity. It’s not giving your buyer a reason to choose you. It’s not steering your team’s decisions. 

And without that, you stay dependent on luck.


This is where my work fits. And no, it’s not the part where I pretend there’s a magic template that fixes everything. 

I help agency founders rebuild the foundation so their business creates its own demand instead of waiting for it. 

Not by giving them a sexier tagline or a shinier message, but by tightening positioning in a way that touches everything: the audience you pursue, the problem you solve, the solution you deliver, and the systems your team runs without you hovering.


When it clicks, you feel it fast:
 • Your pipeline steadies because people finally understand why you’re the obvious choice 
 • Sales cycles shorten because your offer stops trying to be everything to everyone 
 • The business stops leaning on you for every decision and starts moving forward on its own


The Dynamic Agency OS is a coaching program that helps founders break out of dependency mode and build a business that stands on its own two feet. 

If you’re tired of gambling your growth on referrals and trying to differentiate in a saturated market, reach out. 

There’s a far cleaner way to build the next stage of your agency.

Chris DuBois

Taking a tip from David C. Baker today.

I'm off to Mississippi. 

Not because I want to, but because Uncle Sam has told me so. 

Might as well make the most, eh?

At least there's vitamin D there. 



(This is from The Business of Expertise. Read it if you haven't already.)

I help sub-$1M agencies break the referral ceiling and build positioning + marketing engines that create their own demand | Dynamic Agency OS

Agencies: Stop validating your idea by asking people if they'd buy it.

"Would you pay for this?"

There's zero risk in that question. They're not reaching for their wallet. They're not pulling up their bank app.

They're being polite at best and delusional at worst.

Of course they say yes. Saying yes costs nothing. It's the business equivalent of "yeah we should totally grab lunch sometime."

Nobody has ever said "would you buy this?" and gotten the answer "absolutely not, this is the worst idea I've heard since my cousin tried to sell essential oils to firefighters."

They say yes because it's free to say yes.

So try this instead…Actually sell the thing.

Put a price on it. Send a link. Ask for a card number.

That's your validation. Not head nods.

Cash. Actual cash.

Try this:

When someone says "yeah I'd totally buy that," follow up immediately with "awesome, I'll send the invoice."

Watch what happens next.

The smile gets tight. The eyes go somewhere else.

Suddenly they have a question about timelines orr they need to "run it by" a business partner.

Five seconds ago they would have bought it. Now they need to think about it. 

Funny how that works.

The truth is, opinions are free. Commitment costs something.

And the distance between "I'd buy that" and "here's my credit card" is where most bad ideas go to hide.

Stop surveying. Start selling.

The market will tell you everything you need to know the second real money is on the table.

#agencies

PS - Want some from frameworks to help you better market your offer? Come hang out in the Dynamic Agency Community. 

We’ve got something for you.

Agency clients don't convert on landing pages. They convert in conversations.

Your website can build trust. Your content can build authority. 

But the moment someone decides to hand you five grand a month, that happens in a call, a meeting, or a DM thread.

Most agencies are optimizing the wrong thing.

They A/B test button colors like they're NASA and the button is the heat shield. 

They rebuild their pricing page for the fourth time this year and hire someone to fix their "funnel" the same way people buy a new guitar instead of practicing the one they have.

Meanwhile, the agency down the street with a Squarespace site from 2014 and a founder who picks up the phone is closing deals every week.

Your content and website's job is to get the conversation started. That's it.

Once the conversation starts, that's where your actual conversion rate lives. 

Most agency owners have never practiced that part.

They've never mapped the call. Never figured out the exact moment where the prospect stops comparing you to other vendors and starts thinking of you as the person who already gets it.

They just wing it, like a guy who learned to drive by watching other people park. 

Then they blame the leads.

The best agencies I work with run a sales conversation that feels like a consultation. 

By the end of it, the prospect has learned something about their own business they didn't know before they got on the call.

They're not being sold. They're being shown that you already see their problem more clearly than they do.

That's where the conversion happens. 

Not on the page. In the room.

If you're spending more time on your website than on your sales conversations, you are hand-stitching the napkins and microwaving the steak.

#agencies

PS - We're ramping up some events and activities in the Dynamic Agency Community. Come check it out.

My AI tool told me to stop building and go do actual work.

I've been using Claude Code to build a product.

Every day, I’ve been adding something new. Features, automations, etc.

I was three weeks deep into building something that would theoretically help businesses, while not actually talking to any businesses about it.

Then Claude Code, my own AI assistant, generated this line in a response: 

"You should probably be testing this live with clients rather than trying to build anything else."

My computer roasted me. And it was right.

I see this with agency owners constantly.

Someone with four clients will spend two weeks building SOPs for a team they don't have yet.

They'll map out a 47-step onboarding process for a pipeline that doesn't exist.

They'll customize a CRM for leads they haven't generated.

It feels productive. You end the day tired.

You have something to show for it. A Notion board. A Loom walkthrough of your new system.

But you didn't get a client. You didn't send outreach. You didn't have the conversation that actually moves the business forward.

AI is making this worse right now.

Everyone's in build mode. Building automations, building agents, building workflows.

Very few people are delivering anything to actual humans who pay them.


Here's what I've learned from watching this pattern play out across dozens of agencies:

The SOPs write themselves when you have enough clients.

You do the work ten times manually, and by the eleventh time, the process is obvious.

You don't need to architect it in advance. You need reps.

But reps means doing the hard thing.

Picking up the phone. Sending the email that might get ignored. Having the sales conversation where someone says no.

That's the real work.

The constraint you're avoiding is usually the one thing that would change everything.

Even my AI knows that.

#agencies

PS - If you're interested in using AI in your agency, the Dynamic Agency Community has a channel, just for that. Come join us.

There's a pattern I see constantly with agency owners who've been flat for 12-18 months.

They're good at what they do. Their clients are happy. Referrals come in.

But the referrals come in waves.

And between waves, there's no system generating demand.

So they do what feels productive: post more on LinkedIn, try a new lead gen tool, attend some networking events, maybe run a workshop.

None of it compounds. Because all of it is built on top of unclear positioning.

You can't market your way out of a positioning gap. More volume just amplifies the confusion.

The fix is sequential: Niche first. Then positioning. Then offer design. Then go-to-market.

Skip a step and you're building on sand.

I've watched agencies go from stagnant to their best revenue months within 60 days of getting this sequence right.

One went from launch to $1M ARR in nine months.

The difference wasn't effort. They were already working hard. The difference was clarity about who they serve, what they solve, and how they talk about it.

#agency #positioning

PS - Buckle up for the March cohort. 5 spots. 90 days to install the full system.

Link in comments.

Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das shared a survey where 43% of service firm founders said positioning, pricing, and packaging is their #1 concern.

Having coached agencies through this for years, here's what I'd add:

Those three things aren't separate problems. 

They're the same problem at different stages of clarity.

When your positioning is vague, you compete on price. 

When you compete on price, your packaging becomes "whatever the client asks for." 

And when your packaging is custom every time, your margins shrink, your team burns out, and growth feels like a trap.

The fix is sequential:
1/ Positioning first. Who do you serve and what specific problem do you solve better than anyone?
2/ Packaging second. What's the repeatable system you deliver to solve that problem?
3/ Pricing last. Once 1 and 2 are locked, pricing becomes a math problem, not a guessing game.

Most agencies try to fix pricing first. They raise rates or restructure retainers, then wonder why clients still push back.

Clients push back because they don't see differentiated value. And they don't see differentiated value because the positioning never gave them a reason to.

Start at the top. The rest follows.

Building Gia - growth platform for professional service providers

We surveyed founders of professional service firms. 

One question:

"What would you love to pick an expert's brain about?"

43% said the same thing

👉 Positioning, Pricing, and Packaging. 

Not delivery. Not hiring. Not ops, but How they show up in the market.

I'll be honest, I did not expect that.

But the rest of the top 5 was just as telling:

- Lead gen & top of funnel 
- AI & LLM ranking
- GTM strategy & growth 
- Scaling & productizing

Here's what struck me: these aren't "nice to have" growth problems. They're existential.

Positioning determines 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶. Get it wrong and you're competing on price with everyone who sounds like you.

Lead gen determines 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶. Most of the consultants I've spoken with don't have a pipeline problem — they have a pipeline avoidance problem. Big difference.

And AI ranking?  Nearly 3 in 10 founders flagged it — not because they're chasing a trend, but because they're already watching it eat into their referral traffic. Search isn't what it used to be. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "who's the best GTM consultant for SaaS companies," the game is completely different.

The founders who treat positioning, lead gen, and AI visibility as one integrated problem, not three separate ones — are going to have an unfair advantage over the next 18 months.

I'm a fan of being transparent. 

But most agencies have to deal with prospects who refuse to be. 

So, what are the best translations you've uncovered

No alternative text description for this image

Every agency owner has thought: "If I just do great work, the referrals will come."

It's a comforting story.

It's also wrong.

Great work is table stakes.

Your clients aren't walking around networking events scanning the room for someone who needs a marketing agency. They're trying to remember where they parked.

They love your work. They'd recommend you in a heartbeat.

The problem is that nobody has asked them in the last six months.

And they're not going to bring it up unprompted at their kid's soccer game.

"Nice goal, Jayden. Hey, does your dad’s company need a fractional CMO?"

For a referral to happen, three things need to line up at the same time:

1/ Your client needs to be in a conversation.

2/ That conversation needs to involve someone with a problem you solve.

3/ Your client needs to remember you exist in that exact moment.

You're betting your pipeline on a three-way coincidence.

The best agency you've ever worked with probably has clients who adore them and never refer anyone.

Maybe because those clients are accountants who eat lunch at their desk and talk to four people a week.

Meanwhile, a mediocre agency with a client who sits on three boards and golfs every Thursday is swimming in introductions.

Quality doesn't create referrals.

Proximity creates referrals.

Quality just makes sure they stick.

If you want more referrals, stop polishing your deliverables and start mapping who your clients actually talk to.

That's the variable that matters.

And it's the one most agencies have never once asked about.

You've been optimizing the wrong side of the equation.

The work gets you retained. The work does not get you referred.

Your client's calendar does.

#agencies #referrals #positioning

PS - Want to treat referrals as a bonus instead of relying on them? Let’s chat.

Founder of 7 Forms of Respect and CEO of CuriosityBased | Bestselling Author | Keynote Speaker | Award-winning Community Leader

I help employers become learning organizations—where curiosity isn’t just encouraged, it’s practiced every day.

As a Cambridge-trained historian turned organizational development leader, keynote speaker, and consultant, I help teams move beyond training toward learning. My work is for leaders who know to their team to feel safe to practice curiosity, ask tough questions, give each other feedback, and to listen in a way that others feel heard. 

I’m the founder and CEO of CuriosityBased and the author of 7 Forms of Respect: A Guide to Transforming Your Communication and Relationships at Work. Through keynotes, workshops, and strategic advising, I help organizations turn tension into trust and miscommunication into momentum.

My approach is shaped by an unconventional path—from earning my PhD at Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, to running my family’s Vietnamese-language newspaper, to helping global companies and local governments build more curious, connected cultures.

When people work with me, they often say our sessions feel less like training and more like a live conversation that changes how they think.

🏆 Awards include:
Cornerstone Lifetime Achievement Award (NCVAA, 2023) | Female Founders Alliance Champion (2019) | German Marshall Memorial Fellow | Harvard Business School Young American Leaders Program

🎤 Watch my TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb0aQ2gE4tU

📘 Read more: drjuliepham.substack.com

🎥 Explore: @CuriosityBased on YouTube

Let’s talk if you want to empower your team to practice curiosity at work.

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Julie Pham, PhD

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