BUILDING THE FOUNDATIONS OF VALUE
The Growth System
The system for attracting better work and winning without pitching.
Not all revenue is worth the same to a buyer, so the Growth System shapes the kind that is. Implement it to attract the right opportunities, convert more of them, and develop clients into long-term value. Done well, it leads somewhere most agencies never reach: the point where you win without pitching.
Build the system, then refine it in sprints.
Start here
Better quality invitations to pitch
Where you get invited
Who calls you when they have a brief, and at what level. Conversations that begin with a senior decision-maker are stickier in diligence than the ones that begin with procurement. Buyers know the difference, and they price accordingly.
What good looks like
New business conversations start at senior level, not with procurement. A meaningful share of work comes from inbound or referral, not cold pitching. Your pipeline doesn't depend on the founder.
Honing sales skills
What you win
The shape and quality of the revenue you bring in. Outcome-based work and committed framework income carry a higher multiple than project-by-project time-and-materials. The same revenue line can be worth materially more or materially less, depending on how it was sold.
What good looks like
A growing share of revenue is committed, retained, or outcome-priced. Time-and-materials is the exception, not the default. Pricing decisions hold across the firm without needing the founder to enforce them.
Purposeful account planning
What clients become
The portfolio that emerges from years of winning work. A few anchor relationships, a layer of solid mid-sized accounts, and a tail of smaller clients with room to grow. How concentrated the book is, and how deep the relationships run inside each client, are two of the first things a buyer will model.
What good looks like
No single client above 18% of net revenue, top three below 50%. Relationships sit across multiple contacts in each account, not one. Client tenure is long and renewal is the default.
Removing barriers
What's constraining growth?
The constraints that keep growth dependent on you. New business that needs the founder to close it. Pricing decisions that wait for your sign-off. Sales conversations that can't happen without you in the room. Buyers see these constraints clearly, and they apply a discount for what they think will happen after you step back.
What good looks like
New business runs without the founder doing all the pitching. Commercial decisions get made at the right level, without escalation. The business is visibly less dependent on you this year than it was last year.
Putting the system to work
Easy to implement, effective in practice
The Growth System is best implemented in a planned pathway or by taking the Growth System Diagnostic first, then opting for the Growth Workshop.
We diagnose your current revenue book the way a buyer would, and tell you where value is leaking. The Growth Workshop is a two-day workshop with your team to build your growth system and to surface the gap between how you see your agency and how the market sees it. We give you a 12-24 month plan to reshape the portfolio toward something a buyer will pay more for and your growth team will develop it.
The "how" stays with you: your team can deliver it, or we'll introduce specialist partners who can.
"The workshop was brilliant and my team immediately changed how they were thinking about the part each of them play in our collective growth. We increased the number of our invitations within just four weeks."
Central European Agency
Start with a growth system diagnostic
Completed online and analysed by our experts, you receive a detailed analysis of your agency's approach to growth and what peak value demands. The report gives you concrete actions to improve your growth system.
Frequently asked questions
What does the growth diagnostic actually ask us for, and how long does it take?
Evidence, not opinion. The diagnostic asks for counts, dates and figures over defined periods: pipeline data, win records, client revenue movement. Where you don't measure something, you say so, and that itself is scored. Expect to need real numbers to hand, not just a view.
What do we actually get at the end of the growth diagnostic, and what do we do with it?
A scored, evidenced picture of your growth system across four dimensions: where you get invited, what you win, what clients become, and the constraints holding the system back. It tells you what is suppressing your value, why a buyer would care, and what to fix first.
Who needs to be in the growth workshop, and what is the total time commitment?
As many of your team as possible, but certainly all of your leadership team and their number twos. The owner cannot delegate this. The full programme runs pre-work, a two-day workshop, structured post-work, and six months of follow-on coaching. The workshop is where the system gets diagnosed and decided. The six months is where it becomes real.
We're not planning to sell our agency. Why should we care about buyer confidence?
Because the things that give a buyer confidence are the same things that make an agency strong. Buyers price risk: owner dependency, client concentration, revenue quality. Every risk a buyer would discount is a weakness costing you money and resilience right now, whether you ever sell or not.
If you don't do implementation, who does, and what does it cost?
Hunter Hawes delivers the diagnosis, the strategy and depending on what you buy a six-month coaching programme to get your growth team operating effectively. We focus on what must change and what impact if has on value.
Implementation is ideally handled by your own team. It's the most cost effective for you. But, if they need specific help on how to do things or you lack the capacity, we have specialist partners we introduce, chosen for the specific gap.
The separation is deliberate: your diagnosis should never be shaped by someone selling the cure. We also solve that problem but offering pathway programmes where we get more hands on in a done-with-you approach to consulting.