The 25-Person Agency Trap

Strategy was there all along

Small creative agencies rarely start by designing their organisational structure.

They start with an ambition to make better work. Do things differently and produce work that doesn't look like everything else in the category.

And because the agency is small, strategy becomes part of how people do their jobs.

The founder challenges the client brief and the account director spots the thing the client hasn't quite articulated. The problem is reframed by the creative director and a creative team finds the audience tension while trying to crack the idea.

Nobody necessarily calls this strategy. Although it absolutely is.

For quite a while, that can work extremely well.

Then something changes.

The agency gets good enough to create its own problem

Maybe you start winning bigger clients. Maybe you get invited to pitches where the strategic challenge is a substantial part of the assignment. Maybe clients start asking questions that require more than a creative response. Or maybe there is simply enough work that the handful of people who have always done the strategic thinking can no longer squeeze it in around everything else.

Suddenly, strategy isn't something that happens naturally on top of people's jobs.

There is too much of it.

And now you have an awkward decision to make:

Hire a strategist? Perhaps.

But how much strategy work do you actually have? Nobody knows.

You've never measured it because strategy has been hiding inside account management, creative development, pitch preparation and the founder's head.

A full-time senior strategist is a significant cost to add when you're not even sure you have a full-time job for them.

So perhaps you hire freelancers instead. It solves the immediate capacity problem. And creates another one at the same time:

Every new project starts by buying the context back. The freelancer needs to understand the client, the category, previous work, and the agency's point of view.

What has already been tried. What everybody already knows.

To be very clear: I know many brilliant freelancers.

And they do a tremendous job — especially on pitches.

But the deeper problem with freelancers is that the agency doesn’t add strategic infrastructure. The agency is renting strategic capacity.

This is the trap

The problem isn't that a 25-person agency is too small for strategy. On the contrary.

The agency has probably been doing strategy for years. Even if no one has called it by name.

The problem is that it has reached the point where informal strategy stops scaling.

That creates a strange middle ground. You have enough strategic work to feel the pain.

Not necessarily enough to confidently build a traditional strategy department.

And the people who used to absorb the work already have other jobs.

This is usually where agencies start looking at the problem as a hiring decision.

It might be more useful to look at it as an infrastructure decision.

Before you hire the department, build the conditions

What would happen if the agency made the strategy it already does more explicit?

• A consistent way to interrogate briefs.

• A way to preserve client and category knowledge between projects.

• A structure for developing audiences and positioning.

• A way for account people and creatives to begin strategic work without pretending they suddenly became strategists.

• A way for senior people to improve thinking rather than having to create all of it from scratch.

None of this removes the case for hiring strategists. Quite the opposite.

At some point, you may have enough strategic work that hiring one becomes obvious.

But by then you have done something important.

You have stopped asking: Do we have enough work to hire a strategist?

And started asking: How much strategy are we actually doing already?

You may be surprised by the answer.