A note from May 2027

I’m writing this from May 2027.

Your agency just cleared $1.2M in annual profit, and margin's sitting at 34%.

Your team is 22 people strong and you haven't added a new role in 9 months.

The summer offsite this year is in Lisbon (your idea). You sent the deposit from your phone while you were on a hike.

This is the path you took to get here, written backwards from the finish line:

The 1st thing you did was stop hiring. In May 2026, you had two offer letters sitting on your desk - a senior designer and an account manager - and you paused both for two weeks while you ran a real DLER number across the agency for the first time. The result was 2.1, you'd been carrying roughly $30K a month in cost that wasn't doing anything. You took the offer letters off the desk and spent the next six weeks redistributing work across the team you already had. By the start of August, DLER was at 3.4. Nice work.

The 2nd thing you did was the bottom-twenty client review. September 2026. You hated that conversation when we first ran it on the call - you'd built great relationships with some of those people across multiple years. Eight of the twenty, you raised prices on. Four agreed within twenty-four hours. Three negotiated and you met them in the middle. One walked, and that one was the most relieved you'd felt about losing a client in your entire career - the account had been eating about $7K of margin every month and you'd been carrying him out of guilt for almost two years. The remaining twelve, you either scoped down or parted with by the end of October. Net effect on the P&L by November was an extra $38K a month in margin, plus roughly two full-time equivalents of capacity you didn't have to hire for.

The 3rd one was promoting your operations lead to Head of Delivery and stepping out of the day-to-day. December 2026. You almost didn't do it. You spent two weeks convincing yourself she wasn't ready, and then I asked you on a call to name one specific thing she was missing, and you couldn't. So you promoted her in January and gave yourself permission to be wrong about it. She's been better at the role than you were. You learned something mildly uncomfortable about your own indispensability that month.

And then there's March 2027, a month that you'll remember for a long time. You were at the kitchen counter making your second coffee of the day, and it dawned on you that you hadn't opened Slack since the previous Friday afternoon. Your agency had run for four full working days entirely without you, and the only message waiting on Monday morning was an FYI from your Head of Delivery letting you know a new client had closed late the week before and onboarding had started without your involvement. The message ended with "no action needed, just keeping you in the loop."

The version of you that did all of this could be real.

The first step might just start with replying to this email to tell me where you're sitting today: revenue, team size, whatever is currently making the worst noise in your week.

I read everything and I write back.

Sometimes that's the end of the conversation, and sometimes it's the start of a longer one.

Alternatively, if you know you’re ready to speak with me on a call, you could follow this link and book a Profitability Consult.

Whichever option you choose, you'll walk away with a clearer read on your business than you had this morning.

Hopefully speak with you soon.

Nick