AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Carrie Rose’s 5 Rules for Scaling an Agency
Guest: Carrie Rose
Guest: Carrie Rose
Carrie Rose, founder of Rise at Seven, has never had a cash flow problem, by design, five rules she set on day one.
On this episode of the Agency Growth Club, she breaks down those rules, the “most expensive lesson” she learned from hiring senior people for the wrong reasons, why she now only hires people who teach her something new, and the Purple Cow theory behind Rise at Seven’s growth.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Rose is candid that avoiding cash flow issues wasn’t luck, it came from five rules she set when she first started Rise at Seven, built around removing fear from the business rather than reacting to it after the fact.
“I hate living in fear. If anything scares me or puts me in a position of fear, I immediately try to solve it.”
Actionable advice:
Rose commits 10% of monthly revenue to “fun activities”, stunts and brand moments like a yacht party in San Diego, deliberately without expecting direct, attributable return. The goal is fame, awareness, word of mouth, and mental availability, not leads in the immediate term.
She’s had internal pushback on this from data-minded hires who find it hard to attribute, her response is that the attribution is the inbound: “the business is famous, we get inbound leads, we have big brands come to us.”
Rose’s most expensive lesson centers on senior hires, and a reframe she credits to a recent realization: what a senior hire has done in their career matters less than how they make you feel day to day.
“When you have an MD, an FD, a business partner, they’re going to make you feel secure, safe, free to go do the things you’re good at. And if you don’t feel those things, you should seriously consider their role in the business.”
She kept people in the business out of personal affection and their years of experience, even while feeling alone, scared, and insecure, until it reached a breaking point. The lesson: emotional impact on the founder is a legitimate hiring and retention criterion, not a soft one to override with credentials.
Actionable advice:
Rose points directly at a pattern covered publicly (she references Business Insider coverage of Rise at Seven’s hires): bringing in people with large personal followings and personal brands, expecting their audience and fame to transfer to the business.
Her regret is specific: many of those hires brought ego rather than commercial results, attaching Rise at Seven’s success to their own brand without doing the underlying work required to sustain it. She distinguishes this from hires who bring genuine relationships and contracts (her example: a CS director who brought real client contracts, not just social following), which she doesn’t regret.
“If they’re not bringing grit, tenacity, creativity, or commercial acumen, then really what are they bringing?”
Actionable advice:
Rose shares two hiring stories that shaped a standing rule. WZ, her social media director, approached her after concluding independently that search and social were converging, the same conclusion Rose had reached in her own domain, and quit his job to join because of that alignment in thinking, not because of a sales pitch.
The second, Carl, is more direct: over dinner, Rose found herself taking notes for the first time in years because he was teaching her things she hadn’t considered, despite not having budget for the hire. She hired him anyway, and describes him as having “completely transformed” the business since.
“I have a rule now since I met Carl: hire people that teach you something new. If they’re not teaching you something new, don’t hire them.”
She extends this into a broader principle using a chess analogy: hire people who play differently from you (different strategic pieces), not people who look and think like you, which she likens to playing checkers. She applies the same logic to her original co-founder, deliberately choosing someone with the opposite skill set and personality to her own.
Actionable advice:
Rose’s clearest lesson from opening in New York: scale changes the playbook. Word-of-mouth spreads easily in the UK; in the US, a single state can be bigger than several European countries combined, which makes brand-awareness spend far less efficient than it was at home.
The bigger shift was realizing Americans prioritize personal relationships and existing connections over brand reputation alone, Rose recounts a call where a prospect asked who her personal connection was at a client company she’d name-dropped, rather than being impressed by the brand name itself. Her response was to invest directly in hiring Americans with existing relationships and networks, rather than leaning on UK brand equity to carry the expansion.
“My ego took a massive hit when I went over to the US. We’d mention some of our biggest clients and they’d say, ‘never heard of them.'”
Actionable advice:
Rose connects the industry’s high staff turnover (she cites an average agency tenure of roughly 18 months) directly to a decline in workplace relationships and connection, contrasting it with her own six years at a previous agency, driven by the relationships she’d built there, not just compensation.
Rise at Seven’s response is to deliberately engineer in-person connection: hosting roundtables where clients from different sectors (she names Emirates, Park Dean Resorts, and Travel Republic) meet and network with each other, facilitated by the agency. Rose frames this as more valuable long-term than doing great work alone, positioning relationship-building as core agency infrastructure, not a nice-to-have.
Rose’s answer reframes what she believed success required. She used to put pressure on herself to know everything about every part of the business, believing that comprehensive knowledge was the source of success.
Over the last 12 months, she instead invested directly in her own mental health and confidence, expecting the business to suffer while she redirected that attention inward. The opposite happened: “My business is the best it’s ever been, because I’m the most confident and happiest I’ve ever been.”
Rose’s strategy team is working two parallel questions. The first, go up or go wide with existing clients: “wide” means cross-selling more services (SEO to content, social, PR) to the same buyer; “up” means moving the conversation to marketing directors or CEOs, who can approve larger commitments like new territories rather than incremental service add-ons. In the last 12 months, existing-client growth added roughly $1.8M in revenue, and Rise at Seven’s biggest US wins came specifically from going up to marketing directors to win entire territories, not from cross-selling services laterally.
The second is a land-and-expand framework applied per territory: identifying the specific “land” product that first brings a client into a market (what the agency is known for there), followed by a distinct set of “expand” products layered in afterward, mapped separately for the UK, US, and other territories rather than applied as one global template.
Rose identifies operations, not creative work, as her hardest-won skill. She argues operations should function as the invisible infrastructure running a company, even though it’s rarely treated with the same weight as client-facing work.
Understanding practical questions (what utilization should the team run at, how to structure a project to hit 80% margin) was hard specifically because she identifies as a creative rather than an operational person, and because agency operations vary significantly by discipline, a web development agency and an SEO agency run fundamentally differently.
Rose shares a reframe from her own coach: after she listed everything wrong in the business that needed fixing, he redirected her to list what was already working instead, then told her to set the broken list aside and double down on the working list “10 times” harder. She credits this shift, away from constant problem-fixing and toward amplifying existing strengths, with real results since adopting it.
Rose’s closing framework, borrowed from advertising: a field of ordinary cows gets ignored, but one purple cow stops traffic. Applied to agencies, she argues that most SEO, social, and digital PR agencies look interchangeable, so Rise at Seven’s explicit goal is to look different, not necessarily “better”, at every touchpoint: stage talks, conference appearances, pitches, and social presence.
The psychological logic she cites: standing out doesn’t just add visibility, it changes how the brain categorizes you. Ten interchangeable agencies split a prospect’s mental “share” roughly evenly; a genuinely differentiated agency gets bucketed separately and can capture a disproportionate share of that mental availability instead.
As CEO, Rose describes her current role less as running day-to-day operations and more as protecting that differentiation over time, actively changing the agency’s approach when competitors start visibly copying it.
It’s a framework for growing existing client revenue: “wide” means cross-selling additional services to the same buyer, while “up” means engaging more senior stakeholders (marketing directors or CEOs) who can approve larger commitments like new territories.
Rose’s costliest lesson involved keeping expensive senior hires around out of personal loyalty and their credentials, even when they made her feel insecure rather than supported, reinforcing that how a senior hire makes you feel day to day is a legitimate hiring criterion.
Carrie Rose attributes this to five rules set from the start: targeting Enterprise clients who pay on time, charging agency-standard (not discounted) rates, invoicing promptly on 12-month retainers, and maintaining four months of operating costs in reserve.
Rose found that hires brought in primarily for their personal brand or following often carried ego into the business without the commercial results, grit, or creativity to match, in contrast to hires who brought genuine client relationships and contracts.
Borrowed from advertising, it argues that standing out by being genuinely different, not incrementally better, captures disproportionate attention and mental availability compared to competitors who all look alike, the framing Rose uses to guide Rise at Seven’s positioning and marketing.
Rose found that UK brand recognition doesn’t transfer to the US market, where personal relationships and existing networks matter more than brand reputation alone, prompting Rise at Seven to prioritize hiring Americans with established local relationships.
With 95% of roles filled within 25 days, our approach is built for pace and backed by a 1 year guarantee. Get access to the systems and frameworks that power elite SFH teams.
