With thousands of agencies competing for the same clients and budgets under pressure, it is easy to blame the market when growth slows.
But Chris Attewell, former CEO of Search Laboratory who now runs Realise Advisory, argues the real issue often starts internally. Kicking off the first Prolific Agency Labs guest column, Attewell sets out what agencies really need to grow.
The agency market is incredibly competitive – the general consensus is that there are around 25,000 agencies in the UK.
Despite most agencies investing significant time and effort into creating a proposition that they believe makes them stand out from the crowd, very few agencies are truly different and the reality is that the agencies you’re competing with do pretty much the same things that you do, and employ people as smart as the people you have.
Most will have ‘unique’ frameworks and processes similar to yours and are probably now leveraging the same tech and AI as you.
With so much competition and lack of differentiation, it’s difficult for agencies to consistently achieve year-on-year growth even when times are good and the market is buoyant, let alone during the inevitable slower times.
READ MORE: Why the AI search panic may be missing the point for brands and agencies
The past few years have been particularly tough. A once in a lifetime global pandemic, multiple conflicts and ongoing political unrest have led to economic uncertainty and rising business costs.
According to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, marketing budgets remained at under 8% of revenue for the second consecutive year, down from over 9% in 2022 and 2023. Pre-Covid it was consistently over 10% of revenue. A common narrative over the past few years is that projects and budgets are taking longer to be approved, and investment decisions are being put on hold. Definitely a challenging time for clients and agencies alike.
And yet many agencies do consistently grow year on year, even during downturns, and significantly outperform the market. This raises the question of what they’re doing differently.
Three things growing agencies have in common
In my experience, the agencies that consistently achieve a high rate of growth have 3 things in common:
Firstly, they set ambitious targets for growing revenue every year. Ambitious doesn’t necessarily mean aggressive – not everyone wants to double in size every year and that’s fine, but they’re actively stretching themselves every year and they’re certainly not happy to stand still.
Secondly, they’ve made it clear to everyone in the company that they’re ambitious and want to grow, and have instilled a ‘growth mindset’ across the agency. Everyone understands and is fully bought into the importance of growing existing client revenue and constantly bringing on board new clients, and every individual is clear about the role they need to play and is excited about making it happen.
Finally, they set targets for the amount of new revenue they need to win each month and hold themselves accountable every single month for hitting them. Growth and new business numbers are front and centre in weekly / monthly / quarterly management meetings.
Senior leaders are constantly looking at how many qualified leads have been generated, how many meetings with prospects are in the calendar and how much new work has been added to the pipeline. Decisive action is quickly taken if the pipeline starts to look light or targets aren’t being achieved.
I appreciate that this is a very top-level and quite simplistic view of what’s needed to grow an agency’s revenue.
It’s always achievable if you have the right mentality
My argument isn’t that the process of growing an agency is easy. Consistently generating the quantity and quality of leads needed to grow is hard and requires a solid growth strategy that is well-executed, not to mention a significant level of ongoing investment in sales and marketing campaigns and / or people.
Your agency needs a clear and compelling value proposition that resonates with your ICP, you need marketing assets that showcase your experience and expertise, and you need to be great at pitching and convincing people that you’re the right people to help them achieve whatever goals they’ve set. The process of generating new revenue and growing an agency is multi-faceted, complex, expensive and time-consuming.
I’ve run an agency, managed sales and marketing teams, and spent a lot of my working life as a new business salesperson with a personal target. I know firsthand how much work it takes to consistently grow a business.
My point is this: it’s really hard to grow an agency, especially when the market isn’t great, but it’s always achievable if you have the right mentality. If you don’t have the right mentality, and you’re not doing those 3 fundamental things – setting ambitious targets, instilling a growth mindset across your business, and holding yourself accountable for achieving targets – you’re going to struggle to grow and you put yourself at risk of going backwards, especially when the market turns from good to bad.
Yes the market has been pretty tough in recent years, but it’s been the same for everyone and lots of agencies have still managed to grow. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard agency leaders tell me that the market is tough and they’re struggling to grow. If you’re an agency leader, you’re responsible for the success of your business regardless of market conditions and you need the right mindset to make that happen. If you’re not growing it’s not the market that’s the problem, it’s you.
Chris Attewell is a board advisor, growth consultant and non-executive director, helping leaders in the marketing sector to grow successful business by sharing the experience he’s gained over the past 25 years, including helping grow Search Laboratory into one of the UK’s largest independent digital marketing agencies with over 150 staff across offices in Leeds and Austin, Texas, and ultimately leading the company to its acquisition by Havas Media Network in 2022 during his time as CEO.
