At my last agency, we scaled to $17M in annual revenue almost entirely through sales partners and live events. That was our growth engine — and for years, it worked brilliantly.
Where we struggled was digital. The irony of a paid advertising agency not being able to use paid advertising to win clients wasn’t lost on me. Despite helping countless businesses grow through search and social campaigns, we couldn’t replicate that success for ourselves.
Sure, we picked up leads here and there. Some even became great clients. But was it a scalable, predictable lead engine? Not even close. One month we’d land five leads and two new customers, the next month — nothing. And while our close rate was strong when we finally got someone qualified, the problem was obvious: there just weren’t enough leads coming through the door.
It’s a common conundrum for agencies and entrepreneurs alike — being excellent at driving growth for others, but struggling to do it for yourself. Now that I’m starting this new chapter as an independent consultant, I’ve been reflecting on what we got wrong — and more importantly, what I’d do differently if I could go back in time.
Why Our Growth Model Was Broken
In hindsight, the reason we struggled wasn’t that we lacked talent or results for clients — it was that our own growth model was full of holes. We were so focused on serving, pitching, and delivering that we never built the infrastructure to market ourselves the way we did for others. Three gaps stood out more than anything else:
- Inadequate growth support – There were no systems, no outbound motion, and no one dedicated to keeping the pipeline moving—it was all ad hoc.
- Limited Brand Awareness – Outside of referrals and events, nobody knew we existed.
- No content engine – We never built a consistent way to get our message out. Content was always an afterthought, pieced together when we had time, instead of a system that drove awareness and demand.
These weren’t small missteps — they were blind spots that shaped everything about how we grew. They explain why our pipeline was so unpredictable, why every sale took so much work, and why scaling digitally always felt like pushing a boulder uphill.
1. Lack of Dedicated Growth Leadership
Most entrepreneurs and owners I know don’t have every channel optimized. In fact, I’d wager most rely almost entirely on one or two. And honestly, that’s fine — the power law of growth applies. 90% of results come from 10% of inputs. You don’t need to crush SEO, PPC, email, and social all at once. You just need to pick the right channel for your business and go all in. I’ve seen multi-million dollar businesses built on a single channel. The real question is: which one should you bet on?
For us at the agency, that channel was live events. We thrived there — or rather, my Managing Director, Jack Porter-Smith, did. Jack is a brilliant, gifted speaker, and our growth engine was built around that. We went all in on events… until the pandemic shut them down overnight.
By then, we’d already grown the agency to multi-millions in yearly revenue, so naturally we thought: we’ve got this. We were smart, capable, and had EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) as our framework. What could go wrong?
Turns out, a lot. What followed were years of wasted time, money, and effort. Jack and I were advertising experts, not growth strategists — and those are two very different skillsets when it comes to steering a company’s future. Were we capable? Absolutely. But 90% of our attention was on running the business and serving our clients.
Looking back, we weren’t unique. This is the same trap I see a lot of entrepreneurs fall into: I got us this far, so clearly I know what I’m doing. And sure, you do — until you don’t. Revenue plateaus. Profits dip. The playbook that worked five years ago doesn’t anymore. You’re willing to invest, but you don’t know where. So you spread your bets thin, hoping one channel sticks, all while the ship slowly takes on water.
If I could go back to the start of the pandemic, I’d put my ego aside and push for one thing: a dedicated growth leader who actually knew what they were doing.
If we’d hired a growth consultant back then, we could’ve avoided years of wasted time and money. So much of our effort went into things that, in hindsight, moved the needle almost nowhere. We burned months trying to source vendors — only to end up with partners who overpromised, underdelivered, and ultimately set us back. We hired freelancers here and there to patch holes, but without a bigger strategy tying it all together, it was just noise.
We even tried to teach ourselves. Countless hours reading, listening, testing, debating, convincing ourselves that if we just kept at it, we’d figure it out. But the reality is, we weren’t growth strategists — and by trying to wear that hat, we distracted ourselves from what we actually did best: running world-class advertising for clients.
Meanwhile, we poured money into campaigns without a proper funnel. We fussed over website UX when there wasn’t any traffic to optimize in the first place. We cycled through various UVPs, target audiences or offers, but could never really get the product-market fit right. Every misstep compounded into more lost time, more frustration, and more cash burned.
An experienced growth consultant could’ve cut through all of that. They would’ve given us clarity on our UVP, audience, and offer; focus on the one or two plays worth betting on; connections to the right vendors; and a roadmap we could actually execute against.
Instead of trying to duct-tape growth together, we would’ve had a system. Instead of months of trial and error, we could’ve been up and running in weeks.
The impact of that would’ve been huge. We could’ve replaced live events with a scalable growth engine far sooner. Our revenue wouldn’t have stalled, our margins wouldn’t have dipped, and our team wouldn’t have lost momentum. More importantly, we would’ve been making decisions from a place of confidence instead of desperation.
Looking back, that’s the real cost: not just the money wasted, but the years of opportunity lost. The irony is, the cost of not hiring the right help was far greater than the cost would’ve been to bring them in.
2. Limited Reach & Brand Awareness
Looking back, one of our biggest issues was brand awareness. People simply didn’t know who we were. We were running lead gen campaigns on Google with some Meta remarketing layered on top — a completely bottom-funnel strategy. High-intent clicks only, almost zero effort spent on actually building awareness.
The funny thing is, at the time I didn’t even believe in brand awareness campaigns. Like many of my clients, I saw them as a waste of money. I was a performance marketer — my world was results now, not results later.
It wasn’t until years later, when I came across Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, that my thinking completely shifted. The fundamentals are simple but profound:
Brands grow by increasing market penetration — more buyers = more growth
Mental and physical availability drive growth — being easy to think of and being easy to buy
Advertising works by creating memory links — continuous advertising keeps brands top-of-mind
The problem was, none of this was on my radar back then. We were obsessed with performance metrics — leads, CPLs, ROAS — and ignored the bigger picture. The truth is, there just weren’t enough people searching for us, because we hadn’t done the work to make ourselves known.
And the economics made it worse. Google Ads CPCs in the agency space are brutal. At $15 per click, a $10K budget might bring in only a few hundred visitors. Compare that to Meta, where $1 clicks could’ve delivered 10,000 visitors — far more opportunities to introduce ourselves, build familiarity, and plant seeds with tomorrow’s buyers. Instead, we funneled almost all our spend into in-market clicks. High intent, yes, but a tiny pool. Which meant when someone saw our ad, it was most likely the first time they’d ever even heard of us. No brand equity, no recognition, no memory links. Just another agency competing in a crowded auction.
Brand awareness isn’t about fluffy “feel-good” campaigns. It’s about market penetration. It’s about showing up often enough, in enough places, that when someone is ready to buy, your name is the one they already recognize. We didn’t get that. We assumed results were purely a function of performance media, when in reality performance is built on the back of awareness.
By ignoring that, we put ourselves in a trap: limited reach meant limited pipeline. We kept trying to optimize the bottom of the funnel — better landing pages, sharper ad copy, retargeting sequences — when the real issue was that the top of the funnel was basically empty. You can’t scale what doesn’t exist.
In hindsight, this was one of the biggest blind spots holding us back. We weren’t invisible because we were bad at what we did. We were invisible because we refused to invest in being seen. The irony here is that this was actually something that was completely in our wheel house — running top of funnel ad campaigns. We just didn’t have the foresight or intelligence to make the decision. If I could go back and do things differently now, I would allocate an additional 10k/month to top-of-funnel advertising to run in conjunction with our lead gen efforts.
3. No Content Engine
One of the most overlooked areas was content. We tried to invest, but we put our resources in the wrong places. With no in-house team, content always ended up on the back burner. Jack would handle writing, I’d handle design — but between serving clients, managing the team, and running the business, our own marketing never made it to the top of the list.
When we did outsource, it was usually just to fill immediate needs — hiring a designer for one-off graphics, or handing piecemeal projects to freelancers. But without a clear target audience or strategy, the work had no direction. We were trying to speak to everyone, and in the process, spoke to no one.
I used to believe that if we just found the right branding or design agency, everything would click. We’d look polished and professional, and clients would start pouring in. That belief cost us over $50K in a rebrand and new website — which didn’t bring in a single customer. It was a painful wake-up call. We thought better design would create demand, but all it did was make us look nicer to the same tiny pool of people who already knew us. The problem wasn’t our logo or our website. The problem was that nobody outside our referral network even knew we existed.
The truth is, we overcomplicated what should’ve been simple. Instead of obsessing over how we looked, we should have built a content engine. Our strength was getting in front of people and speaking — and when live events disappeared, the digital equivalent was sitting right in front of us: LinkedIn and Instagram. If we’d invested that same $50K into building a content engine, the story would’ve been different. Imagine two years of consistent video on LinkedIn and Instagram — us speaking directly to the market, boosting posts to expand reach, refining the content based on analytics. The compounding effect would’ve been enormous. Instead of waiting for people to stumble across us at the bottom of the funnel, we would’ve been in front of them week after week, building familiarity and trust long before they were ready to buy.
We didn’t need to look perfect. We needed to show up consistently.
The Bottom Line
When you step back, it’s clear these weren’t isolated problems — they were connected threads that, together, wove the ceiling we kept hitting. Without dedicated growth support, we had no real systems or structure to generate demand. Everything was ad hoc, reactive, and dependent on chance. Without brand awareness, we were invisible to the market — so even when we showed up in front of someone through a Google ad, they were seeing us for the very first time, with no memory or trust to build on. And without a content engine, we had no way to consistently show up in the spaces where our audience spent their time. No way to build familiarity. No way to stay top of mind.
The result was predictable: inconsistent leads, long sales cycles, and a pipeline that was constantly stop-and-go. We could close when we had the opportunity, but the opportunities were few and far between. And the frustrating part is, we weren’t failing because of lack of talent or expertise — we were failing because the foundation for growth was never really built.
Looking back, I can see now how each missing piece compounded the others. No growth systems meant no consistency. No brand awareness meant no familiarity. No content engine meant no visibility. Together, it created a loop where we were always chasing growth instead of compounding it. That’s the real lesson: if you don’t build the fundamentals, you’ll spend years running in place, no matter how good you are at the craft itself.
