Agency Operations

AI marketing advice tends to be written for product companies. Traffic funnels, conversion optimization, ad spend efficiency, content volume. These are real concerns, but they do not map cleanly onto how professional services firms actually grow. A fractional CFO practice, an accounting firm, a consultancy, or a legal practice does […]

Marketing automation has been around long enough that most business owners know what it does. You set up a sequence. Leads enter at one end. Emails go out automatically. A CRM gets updated. Useful, broadly adopted, and fairly well understood in terms of what it cannot do. AI workflow automation […]

Running a marketing agency is a better business in concept than it often is in practice. The revenue model looks clean: retainer clients, recurring income, scalable service delivery. The reality is that margins compress as the agency grows, because growth in client count has historically required near-proportional growth in headcount, […]

There is a version of this conversation that happens in nearly every agency at some point. Someone decides the CRM is not working. They evaluate alternatives, migrate data, spend weeks reconfiguring everything, and then discover that the new CRM has the same problem the old one did. The contacts are […]

Most businesses using AI tools have no idea where their data goes. They type a prompt, get an output, and move on. What happens to the business context they just handed to a third-party model is not something they have thought through. For a lot of use cases, that is […]

Content marketing has a volume problem. The research on organic search consistently shows that websites publishing more high-quality content rank better and attract more traffic. That is not a controversial finding. The controversial part is “high-quality” and what happens when you try to produce it at the volume that actually […]

Every AI marketing tool claims to be smart. Most of them are smart in the same way autocomplete is smart. They recognize patterns in language and produce outputs that look plausible. Feed them a brief and they generate content. Feed them a customer list and they segment it. They are […]

Outbound email had a rough decade. Inboxes got smarter about filtering it, recipients got better at ignoring it, and the prevailing wisdom in marketing circles shifted firmly toward inbound. Build content. Earn attention. Let customers come to you. Outbound was something you did when you were desperate or did not […]

There is a ceiling that most marketing agencies hit somewhere between 15 and 25 clients. Below that number, a good team can manage the workload through process and effort. Above it, things start to slip. Emails go out late. Reports are thinner than they should be. Account managers spread across […]