Winning more work for your agency

Few founder-led agencies have consistent, filled pipelines that they can rely on to keep the work schedule full. Some months the work rolls in and you are wondering how to deliver it all, others you are counting tumbleweeds until an opportunity lands. Most of us are over-reliant on passive referrals and have very few levers to pull when we need to generate work. New business is always one of the top challenges of agencies I speak to, so no surprise then that it is also one of the areas I work on most frequently with founders.

Is your new business hot and cold?

It might be, if any of the following is true of your agency:

• The work arrives in bursts, and the quiet spells turn up without much warning.
• Most new work comes from referrals, word of mouth, or luck.
• You either had no success with cold outreach or it felt like something you didn’t want to be doing.
• New business only really happens when you push it, so it stalls the moment delivery gets busy.
• You would genuinely rather the work came to you than have to go out and sell.

If that is the shape of it, you are in good company. It is the most common new-business pattern I see in small agencies.

My take on agency new business

The easy answer most people give is to build an outbound engine. Define your ideal client, buy a list, run the sequences, track it through a pipeline with seven stages. For a large agency with people whose whole job is new business, that can work. For a founder-led shop of a handful of people, it usually generates a great deal of activity, a significant cost, very little actual work and maybe even feels “a bit grubby”. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but it is often the wrong tool for this type of business (at least done in the way it is most often sold).

I don’t believe there is one single right channel. What works is the approach that fits you: your strengths, the agency’s capacity, and how you want to be seen. A tactic you dread, or cannot keep up once delivery gets busy, will not get done, however smart it looks on a slide. Most new-business plans fail there, rather than on the actual strategy.

Cold outreach is a good example. It can be exactly the right tool, and used to open a real conversation rather than to sell, it works well. It also takes sustained effort to run, so if it is not something you will keep up, or pay someone to do properly, it earns its reputation for disappointment. The same goes for content, events or partnerships. The channel matters far less than whether you will actually work it.

In the agencies I work with, the wins almost always trace back to warmer routes: a client introduction, a former client returning, a talk that landed, a conversation that started months earlier. Partly that is because warm suits how most small agencies really operate, and partly because agencies get hired reactively, when something changes at the client’s end and they turn to whoever is already in view and already trusted. So a good deal of the work is making sure that when the moment comes, you are the name that springs to mind.

“Word of mouth” is mostly a polite way of admitting we do not know where our business comes from. A good part of the work is simply making that visible, so it becomes something you can influence rather than something you are grateful for and slightly mystified by.

What the data tells us

This is not only my own client experience talking. Through the Agency Loop, the quarterly survey I run with UK agency leaders, the same pattern shows up across a far wider group. Asked to rate their channels, agency leaders put client referrals top by a distance. The activities agencies most often pour money and effort into, notably PR and running their own events, land near the bottom for the benefit they actually return. Most also draw the bulk of their revenue from a handful of retained relationships rather than a constant churn of new logos.

More often than not, then, the effort goes into the channels that give the least back. For most agencies, fixing new business means backing what already works for you and dropping what does not, rather than simply doing more.

What working on this with me looks like

I begin with evidence, not aspiration. We go back through where your work has genuinely come from over the past year or two and find the real pattern, because it is almost always warmer, and narrower, than founders assume. That pattern is what tells us where the effort is worth spending.

From there we settle on an approach you will actually sustain, one that suits your strengths and the agency’s capacity. For most founders that leans warm: turning happy clients and useful non-competing contacts into a real source of introductions rather than a happy accident, and finding low-effort ways to stay in front of the people you would most like to work with. We judge it by the right measure, the conversations and relationships you are building, not a vanity count of leads. Where cold activity earns its keep, we keep it and hold it to real numbers.

Most of this happens across the couple of calls we have each month, with some contact in between, at a pace that survives a busy delivery week. You decide what to run and what to leave. My part is to keep the pressure gentle and constant, so new business keeps ticking over even when you are heads-down, and never collapses back onto you as the only person who can do it.

If that is the pattern you are stuck in, get in touch for an initial conversation. No pitch, just a proper look at where your work really comes from and what would actually move things.

What changes

New business stops being a mix of quiet dread and occasional panic. The peaks and troughs flatten, because warm relationships do not all fall silent in the same week the way a cold campaign does. And winning work stops depending on you finding both the time and the stomach for it. It becomes part of the predictable work of the week. Not something dreaded, put off and panicked over when it’s likely too late already.