THE AGENCY GROWTH SUMMIT’26
THE AGENCY GROWTH SUMMIT '26
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Three days of practical agency growth. Browse by day or pillar, switch the schedule to your timezone, save the sessions you want to catch, and add them straight to your calendar.
Speakers
The Programme Pillars
The four pillars follow the shape of an agency P&L and balance sheet: where revenue comes from, what you charge for it, what you keep, why anyone picks you, and what the whole thing is worth if you ever want to sell it.
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The old top of funnel has stopped working.
Cold outreach now lands in a market that has automated its own inbox. Referral flow is lumpy and unforecastable. Pitch teams burn senior hours on processes that increasingly end in "we're keeping this in-house" or no decision at all.
This pillar deals with rebuilding predictable demand: what replaces volume outreach, how to qualify harder without starving the funnel, how to shorten a pitch cycle you don't control, and what a repeatable commercial engine looks like when the founder isn't the one running it.
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Gross margin is where growth quietly dies.
Scope creep, over-servicing and unbilled goodwill never show up in a new-business report. They show up two years later, in a recoverability number nobody wants to open.
This pillar is operational, not theoretical: scoping discipline that survives contact with a client, change control that doesn't damage the relationship, utilisation and rate realisation, and the small number of measures that actually move the margin line.
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Everyone's output looks the same now.
Agencies are being squeezed from two directions at once: clients building in-house capability, and competitors producing work from the same models, with the same prompts, at the same speed. Sameness has become the default outcome of the category.
This pillar asks what is genuinely still scarce: judgement, category knowledge, access, accountability, the relationships nobody can synthesise, and how you build positioning and proof around it, rather than simply asserting it on your website.
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An agency that needs you isn't an asset. It's a job.
Trade buyers, EOT valuations and MBO funders all price the same variable: how much of the business walks out of the door with the founder. Getting out of the sales seat and the delivery seat is the single biggest driver of multiple, and it takes years, not quarters.
This pillar looks at what acquirers are actually paying for in the current market, what an EOT or MBO realistically returns to a founder, and the sequence for making yourself commercially unnecessary.
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