Last Thursday, I hosted my first-ever exclusive mastermind event at my home, bringing together 20 leading agency owners across the UK. It was a vision I’d had since I bought the house—to create a space for incredible people to connect, grow, and create amazing memories.

Rather than telling you how amazing it was, just read the feedback from people that attended:

Article content There were people in the room who had multimillion pounds exits.

Leaders who employed 50+ staff.

And upcoming founders who had impressively scaled to 7+ figures in revenue in under 2 years.

I personally learnt an F ton from these people.

Here are the 6 biggest takeaways I learnt from the event.

1: The Hardest Identity Shift: Getting Out of Client Fulfilment

This is the major bottleneck for almost any agency owner sub-£1 million in revenue.

It’s an identity shift and a mental reframing everyone has to go through.

For me, stepping out of client work—which I haven’t been heavily involved in for at least two and a half years —was the hardest but best thing I ever did to grow the agency and improve my quality of life.

Many agency owners in the room were facing the same mental limitation, and clouding their judgment.

You just have to let go at some point. If you are fearing letting go, you either don’t trust your team or you don’t trust the business you’ve built.

You need competent staff who can carry on the work when you’re not involved.

Constantly being roped back into client work will grind you down and kill your passion.

This is the major challenge facing most owners trying to mature and grow.

2: Project Managers are Not COO’s

Many agency owners, myself included at one point, look for a COO or Head of Operations to help get out of service delivery.

The mistake is thinking that someone who is simply organised or a good project manager will naturally transition into an operations manager or COO.

A COO is a leadership position. It requires more than just ticking boxes on a spreadsheet; it involves tracking leading and lagging indicators and putting processes in place to improve them.

Several people at the event had tried this route, and it didn’t work out, leading them to get frustrated and pulled back into service delivery.

Honestly, if you’re sub-£1 million, I don’t think you need a COO. A Head of Service Delivery might be an alternative, depending on your service and margins.

Finding good operations specialists is incredibly difficult, hence why so many try to train people internally who already know the company well.

3: Channel Diversification Kills Momentum

We talked a lot about leads and sales channels.

What was fascinating was how different operators had built their businesses off different strategies.

Some people had nailed META.

Others had cracked content.

Lots of people leveraged referrals.

But the one thing that seemed to hold everybody back, was the perceived need to diversify their marketing channels to bring in new leads.

If you’re sub <1million in revenue, you absolutely do not - you need focus.

Only once you’ve hit a ceiling on channel growth should you start to diversify, and even then it’s questionable whether this is the right move for most.

4: Leaner Teams are Back in Fashion

The old law of scaling an agency was to throw labour at every problem.

Difficult but well-paying client? Add more bodies on the account.

Errors being missed? Hire QA.

Account managers struggling to get reports out on time? Get somebody in focused exclusively on reporting.

AI is changing this - fast.

While client expectations are increasing, the opportunity for agencies to protect and enhance margins have also increased.

Marketing is such a massive problem to solve for nearly all businesses that fear about the states of our industry are largely overstated. But what is absolutely not, is the expectation to do more with less resources, while leaning more heavily into technology.

The lack of people proatively hiring in the room but who are instead looking to improve processes and efficiency was fascinating.

5: Culture is about Performance, not Perks

Friday night pizza and 20% off apparel vouchers isn’t culture - it’s a perk.

Sure, your team may like these. But it’s not going to necessarily incentivise them to perform.

And worst of all, it may be attracting the wrong type of person to your company.

If you want to build REAL culture, focus on combining financial incentives to performance in work.

People want to feel as though they’re bringing value to clients and their employers and becoming the best version of themselves.

If you can tie this to financial upside, you’ve got a strong base to build upon.

6: Optimise for Cash Flow, Not Just Exit

Speak to an agency owner who’s been working in this game for 5+ years and the sentiment seems to be the same: all withered by client work, exhausted, with dreams of a grandiose exit.

But if you look at the valuations for most agencies, I question whether this is the right move for most of us.

All industries are hard. Speak to anybody who works in retail, hospitality, finance.

I’ve never heard anybody glowingly talk about those industries as though they’re an easy route to riches.

Why should an agency be any different?

We need to learn to be more grateful for the incredible business models we all have. Mostly location-dependent, highly autonomous, technology leveraged businesses with strong margins that spin off great cashflow.

I’ve never dreamed of a big exit, because this business subsidises a very good quality of life for me and my family.

Maybe we need a perspective shift, not a new industry (which many don’t even have a contingency plan for - something Dom was keen to point out on his panel).