The Path to a 100-Person Agency

Synopsis

The UK advertising and marketing market is large — £42.6 billion in total spend — but the portion accessible to independent branding and marketing agencies is substantially smaller once media buying is stripped out. Within that addressable fee pool, global holding companies dominate the largest accounts. Yet independent agencies have consistently found ways to scale to 100 or more people, not by competing head-to-head with networks, but by building positions the networks cannot easily replicate.

This article maps that opportunity from the ground up. It draws on an analysis of over 100 UK agencies that achieved significant scale during their independent phase, across 13 sectors and 11 specialisms. The research identifies three distinct growth architectures — vertical-biased upstream specialists, audience-biased upstream specialists, and downstream channel specialists — each with documented examples of reaching 100+ people in the UK. It also identifies the market conditions currently in play that have historically created windows for well-positioned independent agencies to accelerate. The article is intended for owners of established independent agencies — those who have built a seven-figure business and are working out how to reach eight figures — who want to approach that question with the same rigour that a large company CEO would bring to a strategic planning exercise.

Opening: From Seven Figures to Eight — A Different Kind of Problem

Getting an agency to seven figures is genuinely hard. Most people who start agencies never manage it. You survived the project feast-and-famine of the early years, built a team you trust, developed a body of work you are proud of, and found enough clients who value what you do to sustain something real.

You also have no shortage of ideas about what to do next. That creative, entrepreneurial instinct is precisely what built the business. It generates hypotheses constantly: a new sector to target, a new service to offer, a new positioning to test, a new market to enter.

The problem is not the ideas. It is the absence of a framework to evaluate them against.

Without that framework, each initiative competes on the basis of intuition and enthusiasm rather than evidence. Some create a burst of activity. None compound into the sustained uplift you are looking for. The experiments multiply. The team follows each new direction with diminishing energy. The founding partners become stretched across too many fronts.

This is a familiar pattern at the seven-figure level, and it is not a failure of ambition or effort. It is a structural problem — the natural consequence of an entrepreneurial operating model meeting the complexity of a business that has grown beyond its original design.

Large company chief executives solve this differently. They invest in market analysis before committing resources. They map competitive dynamics, identify structural opportunities, and build conviction from data before placing bets. They run disciplined experiments with clear success criteria, and they narrow down aggressively on the basis of evidence. This approach feels like a luxury when you are building from zero. When you are running a team of twenty or thirty people, it starts to become a necessity.

That is what this article is designed to support. It does not offer tactics or inspiration. It offers a structured view of how the UK branding and marketing agency market actually works, what the data from over a hundred agencies reveals about the paths to scale, and what is happening in the market right now that historically would have created an advantageous window for well-positioned independents.

The goal is to help you build conviction from evidence — and then commit to it.

Section 1: Where Global Networks Leave Gaps

The headline number misleads

The UK advertising and marketing market generated £42.6 billion in total spend in 2024, according to the AA/WARC Expenditure Report. That figure grows by around 10% year on year and is widely cited.

For an independent agency owner, it is almost entirely the wrong number to focus on.

Approximately 75 to 80 per cent of UK ad spend is media spend: the cost of buying television airtime, programmatic display inventory, search placements, and social media reach. That money flows through agencies in many cases, but it does not represent fees earned for thinking, creating, or advising. The actual fee pool for branding and marketing services — the portion that pays for strategy, creative, and communications work — is considerably smaller. Our estimate, stripping out media buying costs, is in the region of £8 to £12 billion.¹

Even within that fee pool, the global holding companies dominate. The Omnicom and Interpublic Group merger — expected to close in 2025 — will create a combined entity with revenues of £19.7 billion and over 100,000 staff globally.² WPP, Publicis, Havas, and Dentsu account for a further significant share. Against this backdrop, the top 50 UK independent agencies generated aggregate gross income of £2.23 billion in the most recent survey year.³

This is not cause for pessimism. It is cause for precision about where the opportunity actually sits.

The network floor — and the gap it creates

Global holding companies operate at scale, and that scale comes with fixed costs: management layers, global infrastructure, compliance functions, and minimum margins required to service the network. In practice, these costs mean that any client relationship generating less than approximately £500,000 per year in fees is uneconomical to service through a major network.

This creates a well-documented opportunity band for independent agencies: clients spending between roughly £500,000 and £5 million per year in agency fees. Large enough to be substantive professional services relationships; small enough that a network would typically not prioritise them.

The more significant shift: the hybrid model

The more interesting and more recent development is that the independent opportunity no longer sits only below the network floor.

Enterprise clients — those well above the £500,000 threshold — are increasingly appointing both a global network and one or more specialist independents simultaneously. The network holds the principal retainer and media account. The independent wins a specific brief where the network lacks credible depth. These are not competing appointments. They are complementary ones.

The pattern is visible in recent UK enterprise appointments. Unilever appointed Buttermilk for creator marketing in 2025, alongside its existing network agency relationships. Sky appointed PrettyGreen for social campaigns. Costa Coffee appointed Circle Agency for brand experience activation. In each case, the independent won because it had genuine specialist depth that the network could not match on that specific brief.

The opportunity for independents is not to replace the global network. It is to become the specialist the network cannot be.

This distinction matters strategically. It changes the target client profile, the pitch approach, and the nature of the competitive threat. A well-positioned independent does not need to win the whole account. It needs to be the most credible answer to one specific brief.

The Omnicom and IPG merger adds a near-term structural dimension to this. Consolidation at this scale creates client conflicts requiring roster reviews, senior talent displacement as teams are restructured, and a gap in the mid-market as the merged entity concentrates on its largest accounts. History suggests that major holding company mergers open a two to three year window during which well-positioned independents can make meaningful gains.⁴

Section 2: What a Scaled Agency Actually Looks Like

The financial profile of scale

The Moore Kingston Smith Annual Survey of UK Marketing Services Companies provides the most consistent benchmark data on agency financial performance. The 2025 survey reveals a clear and consistent gap between group-owned agencies — those within network or PE structures — and independent agencies.

Fee income per head averaged £130,072 at group-owned agencies against £100,926 at independent agencies in 2024.³ That is a 29 per cent premium in revenue productivity. At the size where this gap opens up, it is not a marginal difference — it is the difference between a business that generates surplus capital and one that does not.

The margin picture tells a similar story. High-performing agencies — defined as top-quartile for both revenue growth and operating profit — achieved a margin threshold of 18.2 per cent. The industry average operating profit margin was 10.2 per cent.³

These numbers are not benchmarks to aspire toward vaguely. They are a description of what a different business model — one built on specialist positioning, recurring client relationships, and pricing power derived from genuine expertise — actually produces financially.

How the financial gap opens

The mechanism is compounding rather than linear. Specialist positioning commands higher fees. Higher fees fund better hires. Better hires deepen the expertise that justified the premium. Deeper expertise attracts stronger clients, who tend to extend relationships and commission broader scopes of work. Broader scopes generate recurring revenue. Recurring revenue produces more consistent margins.

Each element of that sequence reinforces the next. The agencies that broke through to 100 people did not do so by doing more of what they were already doing. They did so by reaching a position where the compounding effect kicked in — where sector or audience depth was deep enough to justify premium pricing, and premium pricing was sufficient to fund the next hire that deepened the moat further.

The funding landscape

Private equity investment has become the standard mechanism for funding the transition from high-performing independent to scaled agency. 56 per cent of the top 50 UK independent agencies are now PE-backed, compared to just 22 per cent in 2012.³

This shift should not be read as a sign that agency economics have deteriorated. It reflects that PE minority investment has become the mainstream path for funding the next phase of growth once organic headroom runs out. The typical structure — a minority stake that provides growth capital without surrendering management control — allows founders to accelerate expansion into new offices or capabilities while retaining operational independence.

Multiple exit routes exist beyond this. Employee ownership trusts, full independence maintained through retained earnings, and network acquisition at meaningful multiples are all documented outcomes for agencies that built genuine specialist positions. BrandOpus converted to an Employee Ownership Trust in 2021. Bulletproof has maintained full independence for over 25 years. JKR took a minority PE stake from Growth Capital Partners in 2019 to fund continued expansion. These are all legitimate outcomes. The right one depends on what the founders want from the business.

Section 3: The Research — Illuminating the Proven Paths

How the research was constructed

We mapped the growth trajectories of over 100 UK agencies that achieved significant scale. The analysis focuses on what propelled each agency into scale during its independent phase. Many of these agencies have since been acquired and have expanded into multiple specialisms under network or PE ownership. What matters for this research is the positioning and model that created the foundation — not what the agency became afterwards.

The framework covers 13 sectors and 11 specialisms, producing 143 combinations in total. For each combination, we asked a specific question: has a UK agency reached 100 or more people here, independently, on the strength of this positioning?

What the heatmap shows

The heatmap makes the answer visible. The majority of combinations have no documented example. A small number have one or two. Fewer still have a consistent cluster of agencies that reached scale through the same positioning.

This is significant. It means that the pattern of scale is not evenly distributed across the market. It concentrates in specific intersections of sector and specialism — intersections that share identifiable structural characteristics.

Important: the heatmap does not prescribe a formula. Every growth story has its own nuances, ingenuity, and founding circumstances. What the research reveals is where larger market forces and client spending patterns have historically supported independent scale — and, equally, where many agencies have tried for many years without producing a systematic pattern of sizeable businesses.

Section 4: What the Patterns Reveal

The heatmap does not produce a uniform picture. Examined closely, four patterns emerge with sufficient consistency to be useful.

Pattern one: Scale ran through enterprise clients

We found no documented examples of an independent UK agency reaching 100 people by focusing primarily on mid-market businesses.

This is a meaningful finding, because the mid-market is where many independent agencies concentrate their new business activity. Mid-market clients have smaller budgets, typically want a broader range of services than a specialist can efficiently provide, and tend to be more price-sensitive. Both characteristics are structural challenges for an independent specialist.

The agencies that scaled worked with large companies — often ones where global networks were also present on different parts of the account. The independent won a specific mandate, not the whole relationship. The brief was large enough to justify the expertise, and the client was sophisticated enough to value it.

This does not mean mid-market clients have no role. They are often where the specialism is first developed and proven. But scaling required moving up the client tier, not across it.

Pattern two: Specialisation was near-universal on the path to scale

The agencies that reached 100 or more people consistently built around a specific positioning — a sector, a channel, a specific audience type, or a defined part of the value chain. Agencies that remained generalist plateaued.

This is not a coincidence. Specialist positioning does several things simultaneously: it commands higher fees than generalist alternatives; it creates genuine switching costs as the agency's knowledge of the client's world becomes embedded; it builds a reputation within a specific community that makes new business more efficient; and it provides a clear basis for senior hiring. Generalist agencies compete on execution and relationships. Specialist agencies compete on knowledge — and knowledge compounds in ways that execution does not.

Pattern three: Many sectors cannot support a large independent specialist

Some sectors attract significant agency activity without producing documented examples of independent agencies reaching 100 people as sector specialists. Property, sports, education, and gaming all show this pattern. Strong creative communities exist. Talented agencies work in these sectors. But no consistent pattern of sizeable independent specialists has emerged.

The reasons vary by sector, but they share common characteristics: client budgets are smaller or more cyclical; brief types lack the volume and repeatability that supports a large team; or the client relationship dynamic favours generalist agencies over specialists.

The heatmap makes this visible. For anyone considering a deliberate sector bet, the absence of scaled examples in a given area is important information — not a reason to dismiss the opportunity entirely, but a signal that the structural conditions may be working against you.

Pattern four: Pure brand identity, as a standalone offering, rarely produced large agencies

Brand identity is often where agencies begin. It is a natural foundation — clients need it, founders are often trained in it, and the brief type is well understood.

But the agencies that reached significant scale consistently moved beyond it. Those that became vertical specialists used brand identity as the entry point for deeper sector consulting — adding brand architecture, portfolio strategy, and commercial counsel that sits upstream of the identity work itself. Those that became channel specialists built implementation capabilities downstream. In almost every documented case, the scaling mechanism involved extending the value chain, not perfecting the identity offering in isolation.

Pure brand identity work, delivered without upstream strategic depth or downstream implementation capability, topped out earlier and more consistently than any other specialism in the dataset. This matters for agencies whose core offer is currently identity-led.

Section 5: The Three Growth Architectures

Across the agencies that reached 100 or more people independently, three distinct growth architectures emerge. Each rewards different founder strengths and different market positions. The failure mode in each is the same: pursuing an architecture without the depth of commitment required to make the specialist position work.

Architecture one: The vertical-biased upstream specialist

An agency that builds institutional knowledge in a specific industry sector — deep enough that clients regard it not as experienced, but as genuinely expert. The moat is the knowledge itself. Regulatory understanding, accumulated client history, sector fluency that takes years to build and cannot be replicated quickly. The knowledge lives in the agency's processes, methodologies, and people — not just in the founder. That is what makes it scalable.

This architecture is most commonly observed in creative and communications specialisms. FMCG and consumer goods produced the clearest and most consistent pattern. JKR has approximately 649 people across London, New York, and Shanghai. Bulletproof reached around 344 people across eight global studios without any external investment. Design Bridge grew to approximately 400 people across studios in London, Amsterdam, New York, and Singapore before its acquisition by WPP in 2017. Elmwood, founded in Leeds in 1977, operates with around 200 people and remains independently owned. Epoch Design, a Bristol-based independent B Corp founded in 1992, has reached 100 to 120 people on the strength of FMCG brand and packaging expertise, counting seven of the ten largest FMCG companies in the world among its clients.⁵

Healthcare and pharmaceutical communications demonstrates the same architecture in a different sector. Havas Lynx grew from a small Manchester studio specialising in healthcare communications to over 400 people before its acquisition by Havas in 2012, building the moat on regulatory knowledge and scientific understanding rather than consumer insight and retail dynamics.⁶

Technology corporate communications produced a third cluster. Gyro International, founded in London and built around technology and enterprise clients, grew to 600 people across 17 global offices before its acquisition by Dentsu Aegis Network in 2016.⁷ In tech-focused corporate communications, MHP Group has grown to 220 people and Headland to 217, both operating as independents.

The common mechanism across all these verticals is the same. Deep sector knowledge commands premium fees. Premium fees fund specialist hiring. Specialist hiring deepens the moat. A deepened moat attracts international clients — and international clients create the natural demand for a second studio, which is typically the inflection point that changes the growth trajectory from linear to compounding.

These agencies consistently sold downstream into implementation as they scaled — packaging production, communications delivery, campaign execution — creating significant revenue volume on top of the strategic and creative fees. The upstream positioning justified the premium; the downstream implementation created the scale.

Architecture two: The audience-biased upstream specialist

Sector-agnostic, but deeply expert in a specific audience type. Consumers, investors, employees, a particular demographic or cultural community. The moat is built on audience insight and a methodology that clients cannot easily replicate internally. The positioning is: we understand this audience more deeply than anyone else — and that understanding is proprietary, systematic, and transferable across client sectors.

Corporate communications agencies that specialise in investor and stakeholder audiences are the most established expression of this architecture. Emperor, with 230 people and employee ownership, specialises in annual reporting, ESG communications, and investor relations across FTSE companies spanning all sectors.⁸ Radley Yeldar, founded in 1986, operates with approximately 200 people in the same space. Portland Communications has around 150 people focused on corporate affairs and stakeholder communications. The client base is cross-sector by design — the specialism is the audience, not the vertical — and that cross-sector positioning did not limit scale. It enabled it.

A more recent and rapidly developing expression of the same architecture is the influencer and creator marketing agency with proprietary audience access. We Are Social has approximately 200 people in the UK, with a client base spanning Adidas, Heineken, and Manchester City — genuinely diverse sectors, connected by expertise in social and cultural audiences. Buttermilk, founded in 2016 and now at approximately 129 people across London, Miami, and Dubai, has built a positioning around community-first creator marketing, with proprietary relationships across creator networks in luxury, consumer goods, and fashion.⁹

The structural logic in both cases is identical to Architecture one. Audience expertise commands premium fees. Those fees fund the research, methodologies, and specialist hires that deepen the expertise. Deeper expertise attracts clients across sectors who want access to that specific audience insight. And like Architecture one, the scaled examples in this group consistently extended downstream into implementation — communications delivery, content production, campaign execution — to create the revenue volume that supports a large team.

Architecture three: The downstream channel specialist

An agency that built deep expertise in a specific channel or format — performance marketing, brand experience, influencer, social-first content — and scaled on the structural growth of that channel.

The channel specialists that scaled did not do so on execution alone. The consistent pattern across documented examples is that the agencies which reached 100 or more people added a strategic and cultural layer above the execution capability — a layer that justified premium pricing and created switching costs that a pure production agency could not generate.

Amplify, built around brand experience and events, framed its positioning around cultural intelligence — understanding the intersection of brands and culture — rather than around production capability. By 2024 it reported group turnover of £77 million with a 28.3 per cent year-on-year increase, with offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, and Sydney.¹⁰ The cultural positioning is not a marketing device. It is the basis on which work is won and priced at levels a production-led shop could not sustain.

The Imagination Group, founded in London in 1968, provides a five-decade longitudinal example. Its most recent accounts show £164.5 million in turnover, 392 employees, and £20.3 million in cash reserves across 13 studios worldwide. Clients including Ford, LVMH, HSBC, and Visa represent relationships of extraordinary tenure — Ford has been a client for over 40 years.¹¹ The model embeds bespoke workflows and institutional knowledge into client relationships, creating switching costs that compound over time and have sustained full independence through multiple economic cycles.

Goat Agency provides the most instructive recent example of the channel specialist trajectory in influencer marketing. Founded in 2015 by Arron Shepherd, Nick Cooke, and Harry Hugo, the agency grew from four people to 112 by the time Inflexion Private Equity took a minority stake in March 2021. In the two years that followed, EBITDA and US revenues both tripled. WPP acquired the business through GroupM in March 2023, at which point the agency had over 150 people. The subsequent merger with GroupM's INCA unit created a combined entity of over 350 people.¹²

Performance marketing produced the largest examples in the dataset, and the furthest from the creative heartland: Brainlabs (over 1,000 people, PE-backed by Falfurrias Capital), Croud (over 600, PE-backed by ECI Partners), and Jellyfish (2,100 people before its S4 Capital acquisition).¹³

An important structural shift is underway in this architecture. Channel knowledge alone is becoming insufficient to build a durable position — the channel mechanics are learnable, which means competition on execution compresses margins over time. The agencies building the most defensible positions in this architecture are combining channel depth with audience ownership: proprietary creator networks with predictable demographic reach, deep cultural fluency with specific consumer communities, owned data on audience behaviour. Pure channel expertise is table stakes. Audience ownership is the moat.

Section 6: The Conditions That Create Winners — What to Watch in 2026

Why market timing matters

FMCG packaging specialists scaled on the back of globalisation. As brands expanded from domestic markets to international portfolio management in the 1990s and 2000s, the agencies that had built the deepest expertise in brand design and packaging found that the same global clients who valued their work in the UK needed it replicated in Amsterdam, New York, and Singapore. The agencies that followed their clients into new markets grew significantly larger than those that did not.

Healthcare communications specialists scaled on pharmaceutical deregulation and the global clinical trial boom of the same era. Corporate communications agencies scaled on the privatisation waves of the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently on the rise of ESG disclosure requirements that created volume demand for stakeholder and investor communications.

In each case, a structural shift in the market created conditions where a specific type of specialist expertise became substantially more valuable. Agencies already positioned in that space captured a disproportionate share of the resulting demand.

Three structural shifts are active in the UK market in 2026.

Shift one: New food advertising rules are redirecting brand investment

Restrictions on advertising of high-fat, salt, and sugar products — taking effect in 2026 for online channels — are creating a material change in where major food and drink brands allocate their marketing budgets.¹⁴ Product-level promotional advertising is constrained. Investment in long-term brand building — the kind of upstream work that builds brand associations and emotional equity rather than driving immediate purchase — becomes more attractive by comparison.

This is a structural shift in budget flows, not a temporary adjustment. The agencies well positioned to capture it are those with strong credentials in brand strategy, brand identity, and longer-term brand communications — precisely the upstream specialisms that the vertical architecture is built on.

Shift two: AI is forcing a messaging reckoning across multiple industries

Industries experiencing rapid AI-driven disruption — software, professional services, financial services, education — are under significant pressure to articulate their value proposition in a world where their core offering is changing quickly. The brands that navigate this well need genuine strategic depth: the ability to reframe positioning, rebuild messaging architecture, and communicate clearly through a period of structural uncertainty.

This creates demand for agencies with upstream strategic capabilities, not just creative execution. It also creates urgency. The window in which a brand can define its position in an AI-disrupted landscape is not indefinite — the categories are moving fast, and early positioning decisions will be difficult to revise.

For agencies with strong strategic credentials and the ability to work across sectors, this is a meaningful opportunity. For agencies whose pricing power sits primarily in production, it is a headwind.

Shift three: Deglobalisation is creating demand for local relevance

The policy environment — trade tensions, regulatory divergence, shifting supply chains — is creating pressure on global brands to demonstrate local relevance in specific markets in ways that a centralised global brief cannot deliver.

British consumers, British cultural references, British market dynamics: these have become more commercially significant for brands that previously treated the UK as one node in a global communications template. Agencies with genuine depth in UK consumer culture and market context are in a structurally stronger position than they were five years ago — not because they made strategic decisions to get there, but because the market moved to value what they already had.

For independents already positioned in UK-specific consumer or cultural insight, this is a tailwind worth understanding and leaning into deliberately.

Section 7: Finding Your Path — The Honest Audit

Start with your own evidence

The market map and the three growth architectures are useful frames. But the actual path has to be built from your own data. What your business has charged, won, retained, and delivered at its best is the most reliable signal available about where your genuine competitive advantage sits.

A structured way to surface that signal is to review the last three years of work through four lenses simultaneously.

Fee rates and margins by sector and service type. Where has pricing been strongest? Where have write-offs been lowest? The data almost always reveals concentrations the team has not consciously registered. If you have consistently charged more for a specific type of brief than any other, that is worth understanding.

Client lifetime value by segment. Which engagements led to extended relationships, expanded scopes, and referrals? Long-tenure clients are not just commercially valuable — they are evidence that the agency is delivering something the client cannot easily replace.

Close rate by brief type. Where does the agency win most consistently? High close rates in a specific category are a reliable signal of genuine competitive advantage. Low close rates in a category you are actively pursuing is a signal worth paying attention to.

Team energy. Which types of work generate genuine engagement from your best people? The alignment between what the team finds meaningful and what the market rewards well is the foundation of a durable position. Misalignment — strong commercial performance in areas the team finds draining — is a warning sign for sustainability.

The intersection of all four is where your positioning should be built. In most agencies at the seven-figure level, this intersection is considerably more specific than the agency's current official positioning suggests.

The Positioning Stress Test

Once you have mapped the intersection, the following questions help test whether it is a position with genuine structural potential.

No agency scores positively on every question. The purpose is not to find a perfect position — it is to identify the one or two constraints that are most limiting, so that energy and investment can be directed at the right problem.

From audit to architecture

Once you have identified your strongest intersection through the commercial audit, the next question is which of the three growth architectures it most naturally fits.

If your strongest performance is in a specific industry sector, the vertical-biased upstream specialist architecture is the natural direction. The strategic task is to deepen the sector knowledge until it is genuinely institutional — embedded in methodology and team capability, not dependent on founder relationships.

If your strongest performance cuts across sectors but concentrates on a specific audience type — a demographic, a stakeholder group, a cultural community — the audience-biased architecture is the more natural fit. The task is to make the audience insight proprietary: systematic, replicable, and defensible.

If your strongest performance is in a specific channel or format, the downstream specialist architecture applies. The task — given the structural shift towards audience ownership described above — is to identify what proprietary access to a specific audience you can build alongside the channel expertise. Channel knowledge alone is insufficient to sustain a premium position as the market matures.

In each case, the final check is whether the heatmap shows this path as a proven one. If your strongest intersection aligns with a part of the map where multiple agencies have scaled independently, you have evidence of structural support. If it aligns with a part of the map where many agencies have tried for many years without producing a consistent pattern of scale, that is important information — not a reason to abandon the path, but a reason to understand what is different about your position before committing resources.

Closing: Narrow Down, Then Commit

The agencies that scaled did not do so by doing more of what they were already doing. They made a deliberate commitment to a specific market intersection and then built the depth that turned a preference into a specialism and a specialism into a moat.

The experiments are not wrong. They are premature if they are not anchored in a structural thesis.

There is also a less-discussed cost to extended experimentation that is worth naming directly. When a sizeable team follows multiple strategic directions over an extended period, the consequence is not simply wasted resource. The skill profile that the team develops, and the work that energises them, comes to reflect everything the agency has tried rather than anything it has committed to. This makes the next strategic choice harder — the team is broadly capable but not deeply specialist in anything. The options narrow as the experimentation extends.

The task for the next twelve months is not to find the perfect answer. It is to identify two or three genuine strategic bets — grounded in your own commercial data and in what the market evidence shows is structurally possible — and to narrow down aggressively on the basis of what the evidence returns.

That process requires a clear view of the market, an honest read of your own data, and the discipline to commit to a position before it feels entirely certain. That last part is the hardest. The agency owners who built to 100 people were not certain when they committed. They were more structured than their competitors in how they evaluated the bet — and more willing to follow the evidence once they had made it.

Moat first. Scale follows.