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Most agency positioning work stops at the messaging layer. In this solocast, Chris introduces the So That Gap — the distance between what your homepage says and the operating decisions underneath — and gives you a diagnostic plus five-gap map to start closing it.
Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
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Chris DuBois 0:00
You've done the positioning work, maybe you ran a brand identity exercise, you hired a consultant, or you just spent like six months arguing with your business partner about what you actually do right? You landed on something, whether it's category, a sentence, a word that you can defend at a conference, you put it on the homepage, you update a LinkedIn banner, right? And you started saying it on sales calls, and nothing changed. Win rates the same. Pricing is the same. The clients that you keep saying yes to are the same clients you said you'd stop taking your team still wired for the old version of the agency. The only thing that's different is that you can articulate what you do better than you used to. If that sounds familiar, you are in good company. I see it almost every week, and it's it's not because the positioning is wrong, it's because the positioning never made it past the homepage. That's what this episode is about. The gap between knowing what you stand for and running an agency that actually runs that way. I call it the so that gap by the end of this episode, you'll have a diagnostic you can run on yourself in about three minutes, a map of the five places this gap shows up, and one starting move that you can make this week. No one was asking for another community, but I made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested. And right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow you can join a dynamic agency dot community and now the so that gap.
Chris DuBois 1:49
It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. Most positioning work stops at the messaging layer. Right? You produce a positioning statement, a value prop, tagline, maybe a brand book, and then you hand that document to a team that's been operating under like some different definition of the business for the last five years. So the team keeps doing what they have always done, the pricing model keeps doing what it's always done, right? Even the sales process is going to continue doing the same thing. And you're left wondering why your new positioning isn't producing new outcomes, but positioning that doesn't change how you hire, price, deliver, sell and operate is just a writing exercise. It's a sentence. It's a nicely worded sentence. But your business doesn't care how nicely worded a sentence is. The Business responds to decisions, and if your decisions haven't changed, then your results won't either the so that gap is the distance between like the sentence and the decisions. Okay, so I'm going to give you the diagnostic right up front, because I want you like running this through your head as I go through the rest of the episode, take your current positioning statement, right, whatever you say when somebody asks like, what you do, then add the word so that to the end of it, and just keep going at least five times, right? So we help professional service firms Build Content engines that drive demand. So that what, right? So that they can stop relying on referrals, okay? So that what? So that their pipeline becomes predictable, right? And just keep going with it until you get to something like so that the the agency can be sold or scaled without the founder being the bottleneck, right? Five layers in, you're, you're not in like marketing language anymore. You're starting to get into operating language. You're, you're talking about founder, extraction, sellability, hiring, leadership. That's the level at which positioning is supposed to drive decisions. Okay, now here's the test, wherever you stalled before you got five layers deep like that's where your positioning hasn't reached your operations yet. If you couldn't get past two layers without sounding like a brochure, your positioning is still in the like messaging stage. It hasn't translated into anything that an operator could act on. So run that for yourself. Now you can pause it. Please do come back. We love having you here, and I'm assuming you're back like if you hit a wall fast, right? You're not alone. Almost everybody does their first couple times. The point isn't to feel bad about it. The point is that we now know where the gap is, so that we can start closing it. Okay, so
Chris DuBois 4:47
once you do know where that gap is, right, the next question is where it actually shows up in the business. And so I think there are five places they're they're pretty predictable, actually, and they all reinforce each other, which is. Uh, part of why this is so hard to fix. Okay, so gap one is hiring. Your positioning says that you do strategy, but like your last three job descriptions, I'll read like it's 2019, back in the pre covid era, right? This is, this is probably the most common one that I see the agency repositions towards, like the higher value work, whether it's strategic senior advisory consulting, but then they hire the same execution tier roles that they were hiring before. So they have account managers who run status calls, project managers who just chase deliverables, specialists who probably just execute against like whatever brief they were handed. But if your positioning promises strategy, the team has to be capable of producing strategy. Right? That's a different hire that's senior people, and fewer of them paid more with just different expectations across the board, right? The the org chart that supports the new positioning looks nothing like the org chart that grew out of the old one. Most agencies don't, don't redesign the org chart when they reposition. They just add a strategy layer on top of the existing execution machine, and then that cost is twofold, right? Because you're you're paying for talent that you can't fully use, and the strategy work gets bottlenecked at one or two people because the rest of the team isn't built to actually carry it. The Epiphany here is that hiring is a positioning artifact, right? If you can't tell me how the next three hires will look different than the last three, your positioning hasn't reached the HR department of your agency, okay, gap two pricing. Your positioning says you sell outcomes, but your invoices still say hours. Pricing is where positioning gets the most visible reality check. You can talk about value all day on a discovery call. Right then you send the scope of work and the scope of work lists, deliverables and hours, and the prospect immediately starts negotiating against the deliverables and hours, like the conversation kind of collapses back to a procurement exercise. The disconnect isn't subtle either, right? The buyer feels that they came to you because you sounded different. The pricing model is now proving that you're not so real positioning shows up in how you charge, outcome based pricing, retainer structures that are are tied to like leverage points in the client's business equity arrangements, right performance fees, the exact like mechanism that you choose matters a lot less than the principle the way that you asked To be paid has to mirror the way you describe your value. The epiphany for this one is that your your pricing model, is your positioning, right? It's not your not your messaging, your pricing model. If somebody handed your invoice to a stranger, would they figure out what you do? If the answer is no, then that gap is open, okay? Gap three, delivery. Your for this one, right? Quick description, your positioning stay specialized. Your delivery process is the same one that worked when you were a generalist. Repositioning often involves choosing, like a sharper service or category, a sharper outcome, right? But the the delivery system underneath was built for variety, discover, design, build, ship, right? Those phases got new labels, but the actual process is the same one that you've been running for years. Specialized work demands a specialized process. The phases should reflect what's actually different about how you operate. Right? The artifacts should be different. The quality bar should be different, even, even your pace should be different, right? If somebody from another agency joined yours tomorrow, they should be able to tell from the delivery process alone what kind of agency this is. Most of the time they can't, right. It's the same thing just with a different label on it. Epiphany for this gap is that the brief right, the kickoff, the working sessions, deliverables and right your acceptance criteria. They are all positioning carriers. Every one of them either reinforces the new direction, or it undermines it. There is no neutral ground here now. Gap four sales. So you pitch the new positioning, and then you negotiate against it. The moment a prospect pushes back. Right? This one is painful because it happens in real time, and you can hear yourself doing it.
Chris DuBois 9:39
It's like, it's incredibly frustrating when you're like, I can listen to sales calls and pick it out when we're talking the client and I were discussing that, how we need to bring up their positioning in a different way, and then you can hear it in their voice when they start to backpedal on some of it. You have the it's when, like, the prospect will say that they want a. A smaller engagement. So you say yes, prospect says they don't. They don't need the strategy phase, right? So you say yes, you're basically looking for any way that you can stay in the conversation. But that's not the way that we want to do this. The the new positioning was supposed to filter out the prospects that you didn't want. Instead, the same prospects are going to keep showing up, and you're going to keep saying yes, because you need that revenue. Each one of those yeses is a vote against your own positioning. So six months in the pipeline looks identical to what it looked like before you reposition, because you've been recreating it, just one yes at a time, a real positioning like it shows up in disqualification, right? You walk away from fits that aren't fit. You raise your minimum, you stop sending proposals to prospects who don't meet the criteria, right? The pain is real, especially that first time you have to do it like you will feel it. But the reward is a pipeline that actually matches the agency you're trying to build, right? The epiphany is that sales is where positioning either gets enforced or it gets compromised. Right? There is no middle. Every deal teaches your team something about what you really stand for. Okay? Gap, five operations, your positioning says one thing, and then your dashboards are still measuring the old thing. This is the gap that's like most frequently overlooked, and it's one that probably also does the most long term damage, right like look at the metrics that you track in your weekly leadership meeting, the KPIs that your team is getting their bonuses on, even the questions that you will ask in a monthly review, the if you have the COO head of ops, look at the agency dashboard that they have built, if your positioning shifted toward outcome work, but your dashboard is still tracking utilization, billable hours, Project margin, right, your operating system is still running the old agency, the new agency runs on different signals. So win rate at the right, ICP, right, average revenue per client, strategic engagement, depth, the how much is the founder out like of work, like tracking numbers like that, right, whatever the new direction is, it has to show up in the numbers that leadership reviews, otherwise, the team optimizes for the legacy metrics, because those are the ones being measured. Right? You can't you can't repeat positioning into the team. You can only make the operating system measure it. The epiphany for this one is that your dashboard is the truest version of your positioning right? The team knows what you really value by what you really track. And we saying that I love is you can't you can't improve what you don't measure. But I always like taking it one level deeper and say you can't measure what you don't define. And so for this one, make sure you have a clear reason for why you have chosen certain metrics and then start tracking them, use them to improve. Okay. Now the part that makes this hard is that these five gaps don't just sit in like isolation, right? They're feeding off each other constantly. So wrong hires force a generalist delivery. Generalist delivery is going to make like outcome pricing impossible to justify, right? All of these things are connected. That's why repositioning so often feels like you're just you're running uphill. You can fix one gap, but the system snaps back because the other four are still pulling in that old direction. So the move like it isn't to like fix all five at once, right? That's that's honestly probably a recipe for for burnout, and just like your team starting to look for other jobs. But the move is to start somewhere small enough to actually finish, and then use the pressure that it creates to open the next gap to get in there and start fixing things. Okay, so here is the one move that I would make this week if I was in your seat. Pick one project in your current pipeline that doesn't fit your positioning, right, that one that's been nagging at you, the one that you're already like half No, is wrong. Disqualify it. Don't take the meeting. Don't send the proposal. If pros is already out. Withdraw it. Right? Refer them to someone else if you can, and just watch what happens. Right? The first thing that will happen is your team will notice. Somebody will ask why. You'll explain that conversation alone moves the positioning from a sentence on the wall to a decision the team can see being made. Right? It's worth
Chris DuBois 14:38
more than any of the all hands you can run. The second thing that'll happen is that you're going to be able to you'll you'll feel pressure on your pipeline from this. And that pressure is information. It tells you exactly which other gap to work on next. If the pressure tells you you can't afford to disqualify then the answer is pricing. If the pressure. Uh, tells you that the team can't fill at the time. Then the answer is delivery or hiring, right? And if it tells you that, like your dashboard looks worse. And then the answer is operations. You don't have to know which gap to attack first, right? The disqualification will tell you that is the entry point, like one project this week, not five. And if you are in a position where, where disqualifying someone in your pipeline would cause you to have to let go of team members, then I make the choice. I'm honest. I probably wouldn't let go the team member. I would take that client on and figure out another path to make this happen. But if, if you see that constantly holding you back, the fact that you just don't have enough revenue, the reason is that you don't have the systems set up with your positioning to be able to attract more clients, right? And so, like you're going to constantly be struggling against the current year. So take that for what it's worth. Don't just go firing people all willy nilly and whatnot. Okay, so start wrapping this up here. Positioning. It's not a sentence, right? It's not a tagline, it's not a deck. It's this set of decisions that you're willing to make over and over in the places that nobody sees right. Positioning has to drive consequence. There has to be something negative that could happen because of this. Because you are making a choice. It's the higher that you don't make right, the deal you walk away from. It's the price that you were actually holding right. That's where positioning lives. It's not on the homepage. It's in the decisions most agencies will stop at the homepage, the number of like I'm using air quotes here, positioning coaches that are really just messaging, coaches who just help you get a headline on your site. And they call that good, right? It is. It's just not going to hold up. As soon as someone starts working with you and they realize that that was just a tagline and you don't actually operate the way they were getting excited about right, everything starts to slip. They're going to give terrible reviews testimonials. They're not going to be sending you more business, right? And you're not going to be able to keep them long enough. So now your marketing engine has to be on point, because you're not going to be able to keep these, these accounts for to, like, increase their lifetime value. Like, you have to think past the your messaging. The messaging should reflect, like, exactly what your positioning is. It is part of your positioning, but it is not enough to just throw that, that headline on a page right the so that gap is the distance between the two, right, how what we're actually saying and how we're operating. The work of closing it is a work of building an agency that actually does what its positioning says it does. Now, if you want a full breakdown, I wrote a long form version of this framework that you can find on substack agency, forward.co, check it out there. But otherwise, that's the episode. Go disqualify something this week, and I will see you next time.
Chris DuBois 18:19
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You
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