The Agency Model

Hi, 

I have been thinking a lot about the agency model recently. I may have talked about it in the past, but I think I have new thoughts surrounding the issue that at least changed my perspective on the topic. 

For starters I have been thinking about the main reasons that a business would need to hire an agency, and here are what I think the three most common are:  

• Someone who knows better

• Someone who is cheaper than a W2 

• Someone to blame

I am sure that there are very few situations where it is a single one of these reasons, but I am sure that if you forced someone to boil it down, you would see one version of these three motivations. 

Now let’s talk about the model. 

The traditional agency model is as follows: 

This is a well-documented thing. I wish I was the first person to talk about this process, but something I don’t see as readily available is why does the junior account manager suck? 

The junior account manager is given the most powerful learning curve you could ever ask for:

• In-depth training on how to do the function (ads, email, branding, etc.)

• Access to several businesses on a pretty intimate level where they can see decision making and the cause and effect of those businesses

• Meet with teams every week who are successful enough to hire agencies. 

Honestly, if I was talking to a 21 year old college graduate who wanted to get into entrepreneurship, marketing, strategy, this is the exact type of opportunity I would point them to. 

So why do they suck? 

It’s because they haven’t put it together yet.

They don’t have enough practical experience to understand all of the dynamics inside of a business. They have the skills, but don’t know why they matter.

The lack of context is the issue, not the domain expertise. 

Today’s newsletter is long winded, but I have one more quick story. 

In May, I started a new job, one of the biggest parts of the job was to run Meta ads. I know a lot about Meta ads, but I haven’t actually built a campaign in about 4 years. 

I called around to everyone I know who works with Meta ads, scrounged up a best practices list for 2025 from those calls, and then started to spend. 

I started very small. Slowly built out an overall strategy for the entire eComm business, and slotted in ads into that strategy. 

We had marginal success in May and June, but it was mostly off the back of building out email campaigns and flows. The store grew about 200% through emails and some ad budget. 

In July, the owners of the company asked me to try and scale aggressively while protecting ad spend. I took my strategy and put a couple more 0s behind the ad budget, and it worked. 

The store’s revenue grew 730% when compared to April while maintaining a 4.1 ROAS. 

I have no doubt that a senior ad buyer would’ve come in and looked at my campaigns and had a lot of comments, but that wasn’t my concern. 

My concern was how can I use this thing to help grow the entire business. The business context was the reason I was able to grow it so quickly, not just an understanding of one of the levers.

I was successful because I know eCommerce businesses, not because I can place a good ad.  

If you find yourself working with a freelancer or agency, don’t settle for function specific understanding, that is assumed. Hire based on your trust that they will understand your business and help you make the best decisions for your entire business, not just their function. 

Stop hiring skilled button pushers, start hiring business consultants who can do a function. 

I could probably talk about this all day, if you want to talk with me about it let me know :) 

Kyle