Bags of cash

Your agency exists for one reason: to deliver bags of cash to your clients. Everything else is decoration.

In 2007 my CRM agency won Virgin Holidays. A couple of hundred grand to run an email programme. At a certain point we could walk into the room and say: for every pound you put into the top of this machine, twenty-six pounds of revenue comes out of the bottom. The budget doubled, almost overnight. Nobody doubles your budget because they like the work. They do it because you have made the return undeniable.

I think most agencies have forgotten this is the job. You specialise through search or creative or CRM or a vertical, fine, but the underlying transaction is always the same: money in, more money out, provably.

It matters more right now than at any point in my thirty years, because AI has put a blunt question under every agency relationship: what do you do that the client cannot now do themselves in ten minutes? Agencies answering that with efficiency (same work, fewer people, lower price) are racing to the bottom of a market that no longer needs them. The defensible answer is value: use the technology to deliver measurably more revenue to clients, prove it, and charge accordingly.

That reframing, from cost to cash machine, changes your pricing, your proposition and eventually your exit multiple. It is the first conversation I have with any agency board I join.