I'm an entrepreneur at heart. Back in 2018 I acquired equity in a marketing agency and took over operations. We scaled it into a household name in the B2B technology marketing space, I helped the original founder step back from the day-to-day, and in early 2023 we sold the agency. After the sale I connected with a new team to acquire several other agencies, and we scaled that portfolio quickly, hitting the Inc. 5000 and refining what the agencies of tomorrow actually look like.

Today I partner with professional-service firms that want the same outcome I helped build: a founder-light, profit-heavy business that can scale or sell on their terms. So I sit a little to the side of the typical agency conversation. There are amazing marketers and technologists in this world, and I live in that part of it too, but where I'm really passionate is the glue that keeps the whole thing together.

When you're starting an agency, or when you're in scaling mode, the things that hold you back usually aren't some secret marketing recipe you haven't found yet. It's how to make the first right hire, how to structure the thing in the first place, how to build a delivery system, how to stop doing everything yourself. There's a handful of critical operational decisions made early on that have really big multiples down the road, and that's exactly where I like to step in.

It starts with a question I ask in almost every call. Someone will come in asking what the first hire should be, and my first question back is, well, what are you actually trying to do? Because some founders just love their craft. If they love it and want to stay in a strategic role doing the work, the hires they make look totally different. You're not handing off the client relationship or the strategy, you're getting people to take on a lot of the work around it.

So the first piece is identifying clearly for yourself what you're trying to build, what role you want to have in it, and where your skills and passions intersect. Your business should serve you. If it doesn't, you've just built yourself a job, and it'll be just as bad as before you took the entrepreneurship route: no vacations, underpaid, the same problems you were trying to escape.

The second piece is structure. Those first couple of hires are critical, and they need to make sense for the business, not just match your vision. Sales is usually the last thing to come off the founder's plate, especially with a consultative sale, because it's hard to have someone sell something they don't know inside and out. So if it's not sales, then what comes first, a VA, a content creator, a developer? It depends on the agency. But it always starts with what you want and what your piece in it looks like.

It's changing dramatically, and there are two primary forces behind it. One is AI, and one is globalization. The agency my partner and I built wouldn't be profitable today, because the market is so different. The hires would be different, and the margins we ran would just get crushed.

The old default of hiring people from your own town and building something local doesn't really work the same way anymore. There's an enormous amount of talented people across the world, and a lot of founders either don't think about that or tried it years ago, defaulted to some country, plugged a person in, didn't get the quality, got burned, and decided it doesn't work. But some of the best people I've ever worked with don't live where I do. The best developer I've worked with was in Serbia, two of the best designers were in Serbia and Argentina. The work is excellent, the rates let you treat them well and improve margins at the same time.

Those two forces are also changing the deliverable itself. In a year, I don't think people will be selling blogs as a line item. They'll be selling a content system. Part AI, part manual process and checks, with expertise baked into the system itself. That was impossible a couple of years ago, you couldn't do it at scale, and I think it becomes the new default.

The instinct is to think you're building yourself out of a job, and in a narrow sense that's true. If you're an agency just writing blogs all day, you're heading into a hyper-commoditized market that AI is positioned perfectly to eat. But that's one line item. The real question is what problems these companies run into next.

Take an SEO-driven organization. You don't just write a blog and post it. You build a system that creates content at scale, and the hard part isn't the prompt, even a fancy multi-step one. The hard part is the expertise input: how do you format it, how do you create business processes to produce that input regularly, who's feeding it in, and how do you bake the actual SEO strategy into the system so it keeps evolving as things change. Then on the output side you don't just post one blog, you break it into a hundred different things across your distribution strategy.

So the focus shifts from making blogs to managing the data on the front end, optimizing the outputs for quality, and owning the distribution. The bigger the problem you tackle, the more you get paid for solving it. A quick way to make a decent blog is a small problem. Figuring out how to really leverage AI across an organization's marketing is a much bigger problem, with bigger impact and bigger pain, and that's where the work is.