FOR AGENCIES
You’ve got new tools. Great. Your agency could still be twice as fast.
AI made production easier. It didn’t fix the coordination failures, the alignment gaps, or the layers between your teams and your clients. We’ve spent 15 years and 200+ agency engagements measuring exactly where that drag lives — and building the methods that fix it.
THE PATTERN WE KEEP SEEING
Your agency is slower than it should be. Here’s why.
Most agency performance problems trace back to two stubborn root causes. They’re not mysteries. They’re measurable. And they’re fixable.
Decision bottlenecks
Too many approvals. Unclear ownership. Your creative director is in six hours of meetings before they can look at the work.
Coordination overload
More time managing the work than doing it. Meetings that exist to compensate for missing clarity about who owns what.
Rework & misalignment
The brief got rewritten three times before production started. The client didn't see the work until it was too late to fix cheaply. Sound familiar?
WHY THIS IS GETTING URGENT
AI made production faster. It didn’t touch the judgment layer.
Most of what slows an agency down isn’t production — it’s the judgment that wraps around it. Understanding what the client actually needs. Aligning on scope before work begins. Catching misalignment before it compounds. Getting the right decision made by the right person without three meetings and a presentation deck.
AI makes the production part cheap and fast. But it can’t scope a project, sense when a client’s words don’t match their intent, or notice that the team is building the wrong thing. The methods we’ve built over 15 years — team-driven scoping, reverse-communication briefings, pod-based structures, redesigned client interaction models — they all do the same thing: shorten the distance between production and judgment.
That distance is now the only thing that determines how fast your agency can move.
Scoping & briefing
AI will generate beautiful scope documents with zero awareness of what it doesn't know. No red cards. No gut sense that something is missing. Our team-driven scoping process is designed to surface exactly what nobody thought to ask about. AI does the opposite.
Pods & structure
Fewer layers between thinkers and clients means faster judgment, faster alignment, faster iteration. The London agency cut span time by 50% and labor costs by 30% — not with better tools, but by redesigning who talks to whom.
Daily coordination
AI doubled communication time while focused work fell 9%. The daily coordination methods we teach — check-ins, day structure, flow protection — are now the last line of defense against the noise.
Client interaction
Every intermediary between your team and your client adds latency to both understanding and alignment. In a world where iteration speed is the competitive advantage, that latency is the dominant cost. We redesign how judgment flows across that boundary.
Agency Productivity Diagnostic
Get a benchmarked picture of where your agency's judgment layer drag actually lives — understanding, alignment, coordination, flow, and communication — scored against our database of 80+ agencies. A structured, interactive 2.5-hour assessment with your leadership team. Results in as little as 10 days.
Do you know your agency's rework rate? Most are between 20–40%. Find out yours — and what to do about it.
Most clients who complete a diagnostic choose one of our Workstream foundation packages or continue with ongoing CEO Advisory.
TRACK RECORD
15 years. 200+ agencies. The results are consistent.
These aren't workshop highs. They're sustained operational outcomes.
Agencies. AI.
And What Comes Next.
Tame Collaboration Complexity
Pod-based structures reduce coordination overhead in matrixed organizations. The model behind 200+ agency transformations.
No, Your Agency Isn't Going Away
AI unbundled the agency model and revealed which parts actually matter. The answer is better than you think — if you understand where judgment lives.
Why AI Makes It More Important to Work Better Together
Tools pull people apart. AI accelerates that. The correct response is tighter human coupling, not better tooling discipline.
The Bottleneck AI Can't Fix
AI makes action cheap. Judgment has always been the bottleneck. Make action cheaper and all you've done is make the bottleneck more visible.
What Makes an Organization Run Fast?
Speed is a structural property, not a tooling property. AI may accelerate some things, but that doesn't mean your agency will go faster.
AI Innovation and the Automation Vortex
AI absorbs anything sufficiently clear and repeatable, expanding the commodity center. The ends — messy reality and true innovation — remain stubbornly human.
Jack Skeels
I’ve spent 15 years inside 200+ agencies, figuring out why smart teams get stuck. I founded AgencyAgile, published my methods in MIT Sloan Management Review, and wrote UNMANAGED, which Kirkus called “a bracing, standard-resetting approach to doing management right.”
Before that, I built a 90-person consultancy, served as a researcher at RAND Corporation, and started in industrial engineering and automation. Today, as Better Company, I help agency leaders fix the structural problems that tools can’t reach.
ABOUT
The structure you have is the strategy you're running.
If something here resonated with what you're experiencing, I'd like to hear about it. Book a 30-minute conversation, or tell me a bit about your situation below and I'll get back to you personally.
No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about what you're seeing.