AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Ross Brown on Why “2024 Was Bad for Agencies” Isn’t True
Guest: Ross Brown
Guest: Ross Brown
Ross Brown coaches roughly 12-15 agency owners a month, mostly under $2M in revenue, and pushes back directly on the “2024 was a terrible year for agencies” narrative he’s seen spread on LinkedIn.
On this episode of the Agency Growth Club, he breaks down what actually separates agencies that thrive in a downturn, why niching down too far can cap your growth as easily as niching too wide, and the five-pillar framework he uses to diagnose what’s actually broken in a struggling agency.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Brown pushes back directly on a narrative he’s seen repeated across LinkedIn, that 2024 was broadly a difficult year for agencies. His caveat upfront: his sample is roughly 250-300 agency owners spoken to over 18 months, working closely with 12-15 a month, mostly agencies under $2M in annual revenue, so it’s not a claim about the whole market.
Within that group, though, the picture is clearly more positive than the online narrative suggests: most either held steady versus 2023 or grew, and the majority he’s currently working with intend to grow significantly this year. He’s not alone in this read, several other agency coaches and consultants he’s spoken with describe a similarly brighter picture than what circulates publicly.
Brown’s theory on the disconnect: a lot of the visible struggle and business closures are COVID-era fallout, businesses (often freelance or agency-style) that were set up hastily during the pandemic simply because everything had to go digital, and many of those were never built to survive past year two or three regardless of the broader economy.
Brown’s clearest insight: agencies performing well through tough conditions are almost never doing something clever in the moment, they’re benefiting from preparation done 1-3 years earlier. If you’re already struggling once a downturn hits, he’s direct that it’s genuinely hard to dig out fast, and owners have to accept a slower recovery than they’d like.
The specific preparation that compounds: being sensible with cash and not greedy when times are good, avoiding overhiring or overinvesting during a boom, and not being overly concentrated in a single market or industry (his example: an agency purely focused on travel going into COVID had a uniquely hard time). The common thread across the owners doing well: an attitude of banking strength during good periods specifically to buffer the periods that inevitably follow.
Brown’s first, unglamorous piece of advice: get an actual financial professional, an accountant or a CFO, involved, rather than trying to manage it alone. He frames this the same way as personal finance: build an emergency reserve specifically so a couple of bad months (client loss, slow sales period) doesn’t threaten payroll or force reactive decisions.
He also points to a newer trend he rates highly: fractional CFO services built specifically for agencies, alongside genuinely useful, free financial advice being shared by practitioners on LinkedIn.
Brown flags a pattern he sees constantly with clients who haven’t hit this stage yet: a single client generating 40-50% of total revenue. He’s careful to frame this as not inherently a problem, it’s genuinely great to have a client that valuable, but a real structural stressor, since losing that one relationship creates an outsized cash flow and financial shock.
His advice is proactive diversification well before it becomes urgent: understanding exactly where revenue concentration sits and deliberately building toward a broader client base rather than leaning on one or two large accounts indefinitely.
Actionable advice:
Brown’s positioning views are heavily influenced by David Baker’s work, and his core point cuts against common advice: just as targeting too broad a market caps growth, going too narrow can too. His extreme illustrative example: positioning as “agencies with fewer than 5 employees based in Belfast, Northern Ireland” would leave an almost nonexistent addressable pool.
More realistically, this shows up as stacking multiple narrowing layers, a specific service, for a specific industry, with an additional constraint layered on top, until the addressable market becomes too small to scale into. Brown’s litmus test: a tightly positioned agency isn’t wrong on its own, but if it caps how far you can actually grow, that’s the real problem worth watching for.
Brown identifies two distinct answers. First, for owners themselves: patience. He observes that many owners, especially in their first 2-3 years, chase revenue milestones as fast as possible, while the agencies he’s seen sustain success over 8-12+ years share a willingness to take a genuine 5-10 year view rather than rushing.
Second, more operationally: anything related to people, hiring, management, and helping people thrive under your leadership. Brown is direct that this takes, in his words, a lifetime to truly excel at, there’s no shortcut, and it’s something you learn by actually doing it, not by reading leadership books alone. His practical reasoning: people costs typically represent 75-80%+ of an agency’s total costs, so getting this right (or bringing in someone who can) is inseparable from the business’s actual ability to grow.
Brown’s central point: a healthy pipeline has to be always-on, not something owners switch off once business is going well. He describes a common trap directly: an agency doing well around the $1M mark eases off on sales activity for a few months, then wonders six months later why the pipeline has gone quiet, without connecting it back to the deliberate pause.
His second, less obvious point: when owners ask what’s going wrong with their pipeline, they usually assume it’s a channel problem (not enough paid ads, not enough LinkedIn, not enough events). Brown finds the real issue is more often that they haven’t clearly defined who should actually be in the pipeline in the first place, tying directly back to positioning. A healthy pipeline, in his framing, isn’t just volume, it’s volume of the right people.
Brown’s answer is direct: everything running through the owner. This is genuinely normal and unavoidable up to roughly 5-6 people, the owner is necessarily central at that size. The real nightmare begins when an owner resists the transition past that point, continuing to insist on visibility into everything or wanting things done a specific way, which tips into micromanagement and actively blocks the team’s ability to improve anything.
Brown frames the shift as gradual and genuinely difficult, not a single decision, moving from doing everything yourself to giving real control to others is one of the hardest transitions an owner makes, but it’s a prerequisite for building anything past roughly $2-5M.
Brown’s diagnostic framework covers five components: the Owner, People, Processes, Clients, and Pipeline. All five exist in every agency he works with, but which one needs attention, and how much, varies significantly by owner and by quarter, one owner might be naturally excellent at sales and weak on process, another the reverse.
In practice, Brown works with clients roughly a month at a time, identifying which one or two of the five components is the current priority, a recent restructuring or hiring push for one client, an inconsistent pipeline for another, rather than applying a single fixed playbook across every agency he coaches.
Brown’s clearest, most repeated observation across his client base: most agencies under roughly $1-1.5M are over-complicating their own growth. His pattern: constantly rolling out new services, chasing new markets, or repeatedly changing onboarding and sales processes, rather than sharpening what’s already demonstrably working.
His framing: if you’ve built an agency doing $500K-$600K a year, you’re clearly already doing something genuinely well. The highest-leverage move at that stage is usually simplification and refinement, not reinvention, doubling down on the thing you’re already good at and tightening execution around it, rather than adding complexity in search of a breakthrough.
According to agency coach Ross Brown, who works with 12-15 agency owners a month, most held steady or grew in 2024, contradicting a “doom and gloom” narrative he’s seen spread on LinkedIn. He attributes much of the visible struggle to COVID-era businesses that were never built to last past year two or three.
Yes, according to Ross Brown, who credits much of his positioning thinking to David Baker. Just as targeting too broad a market limits growth, stacking too many narrowing constraints (a specific service, for a specific industry, in a specific region) can shrink the addressable market to the point it caps how far the agency can scale.
Ross Brown flags roughly 40-50% of total revenue from a single client as a meaningful cash flow risk, not inherently a problem, but a structural stressor worth proactively diversifying away from before that client relationship ends unexpectedly.
The Owner, People, Processes, Clients, and Pipeline. All five exist in every agency, but which one needs the most attention varies by owner and shifts quarter to quarter depending on the agency’s current bottleneck.
Total owner-dependency, everything running through one person. This is normal up to roughly 5-6 employees, but becomes an operational nightmare when an owner resists letting go past that point, tipping into micromanagement that blocks the team’s ability to improve.
Ross Brown argues a healthy pipeline has to stay always-on rather than being paused during good periods, and that volume alone isn’t enough, the pipeline also needs to be filled with the right people, which usually traces back to how clearly the agency has defined its ideal client.
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