There are two ways to grow an agency, and almost every owner I talk to only knows about one of them.
Picture a market square with forty stalls in it, and you’re running one. You can go after a bigger share of the people already walking through. That means better signage, a louder pitch, and a sharper reason to stop at yours instead of the one next to it. Or you can go after getting more people into the square at all, which lifts every stall in it, yours included.
Nearly everyone runs the first play exclusively, and a lot of owners have never seriously considered that the second one is available to them.
A bigger market with you visible inside it beats a small market you dominate, and the second play is the one almost nobody is running.
What the competitive frame costs you
The default view is that the other agencies in your space are taking food off your table. It’s an easy view to hold, because it’s occasionally true and it feels appropriately serious.
The cost shows up in what it stops you from doing. You don’t share what’s working, so you don’t get anything back. You don’t refer the client who isn’t a fit for you, so nobody refers you the one who is. You don’t go on the podcast because it’s adjacent to a competitor, and you skip the panel because somebody else in your category is on it. Each of those is a small, reasonable decision. Together they add up to an agency that only ever appears in rooms it built and paid for itself.
Meanwhile what’s capping your growth usually has nothing to do with the agency down the street. For most sub-$1M agencies, the problem is awareness. Not enough of the right buyers know this category exists, or understand what it’s worth, or think it applies to a company their size. Those buyers were never in the square to begin with, so no amount of better signage reaches them.
Why this is strategy rather than generosity
I run the second play, and I want to be clear that I don’t run it because I’m nice about it.
Promoting the market is a growth channel. When more agency owners understand that positioning is the thing capping them, more of them go looking for help with it. I’m one of the places they can find it. Every hour spent making the category legible pays me back, and it pays back everybody else working in the category too.
Owners hear “grow the market” and translate it instantly into “help my competitors,” and stop there. The translation is so automatic that most people don’t notice they’ve made it. The honest answer is yes, it does help them. It also compounds hardest for whoever is most visible while it’s happening, and visibility is the one variable in that sentence you control. Which leaves you picking between a bigger market you’re visible in and a defined slice of one nobody has heard of.
What it looks like in practice
The version I run looks like this.
Our summit programming has no pitching in it. Lots of short lightning sessions, other experts on stage, and deliberately not a one-man show. That format costs me the obvious thing, which is the captive audience and the close at the end. What it buys is a room agency owners want to be in. They come back, they bring people, and the category gets a little more legible every time we run it.
The community works the same way, and the metric I care about there is probably the clearest example of the whole idea. I don’t care about how many conversations we’re having in the community. I care that when you have a question, you can ask it and the right person is there to answer it for you. Ideally you post and get an answer in minutes, so you’re never stuck.
Notice what that metric gives up. Engagement volume is the number every community platform puts in front of you, and it’s the one that looks best in a screenshot. Speed to insight is harder to show off and it’s the thing members actually feel. It also means the answer often shouldn’t come from me. Somebody asks about paid media, and there’s a person in there who lives in it. The best outcome is that they answer before I’ve seen the post.
An agency owner running a one-man show would find that unbearable. Being the person with the answer is what the job feels like from the inside. You give up being the smartest person in your own room, and you get a room worth being in.
Why explaining the category pays the person explaining it
The mechanism here is worth understanding, because “grow the market” sounds like charity until you see how the payback works.
Buyers form their frame from whoever explains the category to them first, and that frame carries the explainer’s assumptions inside it. If you’re the one who taught an owner that their pipeline problem is really a positioning problem, then the criteria they shop with are your criteria. They’ll go evaluate other options, and they’ll evaluate them against a standard you set. That advantage doesn’t transfer when somebody outspends you, because it isn’t attached to a channel.
There’s a newer version of this that matters more every quarter. When someone asks an AI assistant about a category now, the answer gets assembled out of whoever wrote the clearest explanation of it. The shops producing careful category explanations are the ones showing up inside those answers, and the shops producing another list of services aren’t in the running. Explaining the market is turning into the way you get found in it.
Which means you don’t need the biggest audience in your space. You need to be the one who made the thing make sense.
“If I give it all away, what’s left to sell?”
Somebody is reading this with that exact objection, so let’s take it head on.
Knowing what to do and having the time, the team, and the judgment to do it are two different purchases. The owner who reads your explanation and executes it themselves was never going to hire you. You didn’t lose that sale, because it wasn’t available. The owner who reads the same piece and understands how much is involved is precisely the person who picks up the phone. They call already convinced, because you proved the thing rather than claiming it.
And some of them go try it themselves and do it badly. They come back a year later having learned the expensive way. By then they’re pre-sold in a way no pitch of yours would have managed.
The one case where the objection holds: if your entire offer is the information itself, protect it. Courses and paid communities sell the knowing, so giving away the knowing is giving away the product. That model works, and it isn’t the one most agencies are running. Be honest about which one you’re in before you decide this doesn’t apply to you.
Where the competitive frame is right
I’d be selling you something if I said this works everywhere.
When the market is fixed, it’s fixed. If you and two other shops are the only ones who can service a particular RFP, that’s zero-sum. Treating it like a shared market is just losing politely. Same when you’re bidding against a specific named competitor for a specific named account. Compete, and win it.
The positive-sum play works when the category is under-penetrated, which most agency niches are by a wide margin. The test is rough but it holds up. If your best prospects are doing this work badly in-house, or not at all, the market has room and your problem is awareness. That’s a channel question rather than a competitive one. If your best prospects are already paying a direct competitor and you’d have to take the account, the market is tight and the competitive frame fits.
Most owners assume they’re in the second situation. Very few of them are, and the assumption is worth checking before it costs you another year of behaving like it’s true.
What to do about it this week
Pick one thing you’ve avoided doing because a competitor would benefit.
The referral you didn’t make because the client was a decent fit and you didn’t want to strengthen somebody. The post explaining how you do the thing, which you’ve kept vague because you don’t want the shop across town copying it. They will copy it, they’ll do it worse, and the buyer who reads it will remember who explained it. The event you skipped because of who else was speaking.
Do that one. Then watch what comes back over the following quarter, and be honest about whether the thing you were protecting was ever really at risk.
If you’re already running this way, referring work you can’t take and teaching what you know without holding the good parts back, hell yeah. That’s harder than it looks and it takes longer to pay off than anybody tells you. It does pay off.
And if reading this made you defensive, that’s worth sitting with too. Defensiveness tends to point straight at whatever you’re protecting, and it’s worth finding out whether that thing matters more to you than the growth does. Sometimes it will, and that’s a fine answer.
If you want a room where that’s the default posture, come find us in the Dynamic Agency Community.