The Founder's Network

Sat down with an agency founder about a year ago and asked him to map out where the last ten clients had come from. He went through them one by one. His old boss from a previous role. A friend's company. Someone he'd met at a conference. A referral from a client he'd known for fifteen years. Another referral from someone he played golf with.

All ten had come through him personally. Every single one.

I asked what would happen to the pipeline if he stepped back for three months. He said it would probably be fine because the team was strong. I asked again, and he went quiet for a bit.

The team was strong. Excellent at delivering. But they had no mechanism for generating new business that didn't start with the founder's phone ringing. No marketing to speak of. No outbound. No structured referral system. No profile for anyone in the agency except him.

This is more common than it should be in agencies with ten to fifty people. The founder built the business on relationships, which is entirely reasonable. But at some point the business needs to generate demand that doesn't depend on one person's address book.

He started doing two things. First, he got three of his senior team visible externally. Speaking at industry events, writing the occasional article, building their own networks in a deliberate way. Second, he formalised the referral process so that happy clients became a repeatable source of introductions rather than an occasional stroke of luck.

About nine months later, roughly 40 per cent of new business was coming through channels that had nothing to do with him. Still early. But it meant the business had a future that wasn't entirely dependent on his diary.