Where your retention and growth are actually leaking. Where the room to grow is hiding.

A thirty- to sixty-day engagement that audits how your agency wins, keeps, and grows accounts and hands you a prioritized roadmap your leadership team can act on. Built for agencies of fifty to three hundred people who can feel the operating model straining and want a peer-level read on it before deciding what to change.

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What the diagnostic audits

01How the agency wins
02How the agency keeps
03How the agency grows

When this fires

The diagnostic is most useful in three states, and they usually overlap.

State one

Revenue is compressing and the team is not sure where the leak is. Win rates look fine, the pipeline looks fine, but the trailing twelve months are softer than they should be. The team has theories. Pricing. The client mix. The senior bench. None of them carry the conviction needed to act.

State two

A few of your largest accounts have softened at the same time. The renewal conversation that used to be a formality is suddenly a real conversation, and the people closest to the work cannot tell whether it is a few accounts or the start of a pattern.

State three

The agency has grown past the operating model that got it to where it is. Account team shapes that worked at one hundred fifty people are straining at two hundred fifty. The seam between sales and delivery has gotten sloppy. Senior people are stretched across more accounts than they can credibly hold.

If two of those three are happening at once, the diagnostic is built for you.

What the diagnostic covers

Five threads, each looked at as its own question and as part of the whole.

Thread 01How the agency wins.Proposal quality, deal cadence, where senior strategists show up in pursuits, where pricing is leaving money on the table, where the pitch loses on something other than fit.
Thread 02How the agency keeps.Account team structure, the senior coverage model, the relationship between the account lead and the client decision-maker, retention drivers and the early signals when an account is going wrong.
Thread 03How the agency grows.Where expansion conversations live (or do not), how the account plan moves, how success on an account translates (or fails to translate) into scope growth, where AI is now making capability claims that the team is not yet pricing into.
Thread 04The seam between sales and delivery.Where the handoff loses information, where pricing assumptions diverge from delivery assumptions, where the proposal-to-renewal lifecycle has been built by accretion rather than design.
Thread 05The operating model holding it all up.Utilization patterns, senior bench depth, margin shape by service line, capacity assumptions versus what the team is actually carrying. Margin and capacity sit inside this thread because in practice they are the same conversation as the retention question.

Where AI is changing the picture on any of these threads, we name it directly. Not as a separate AI workstream, but as the lens that now has to be applied to every operating question.

What you get out of it

A prioritized roadmap your leadership team can act on.

Not a slide deck full of frameworks. Not a hundred-page report that becomes a shelfware artifact. A short, opinionated document that names what to change, in what order, and what to leave alone, with each move sized for effort and ranked for impact.

The roadmap reads in two passes. The first pass is for the leadership team in one sitting, with enough to decide what to do next. The second pass is for the operators who will execute the changes, with enough specificity to start.

Where we have a strong view, the roadmap carries it. Where the right call depends on a judgment only you can make, the roadmap surfaces the tradeoff and recommends rather than dictates.

How the engagement runs

Thirty to sixty days, calendar-paced. Two to three structured working sessions with the leadership team, a defined set of operator interviews across account, sales, and delivery, and a controlled look at the numbers we need to see. A working draft of the roadmap lands at the midpoint for reaction, final at the close.

Duration

Thirty to sixty daysCalendar-paced

Sessions

Two to threeStructured working sessions with the leadership team

Draft

At the midpointWorking draft for reaction; final at the close

Fee

$50,000 to $75,000Fixed, scoped in the discovery conversation

Fixed scope. Fixed timeline. One operator on the engagement. Fixed fee, $50,000 to $75,000, scoped in the discovery conversation. The value of a cross-disciplinary read is in the seat-stacking, and the seat-stacking is in one operator.

Why we sit well in this work

The retention and growth question hides inside the operating model, inside the deal motion, and inside the margin shape, all at once. A pure agency consultant has the agency seat but not the finance seat. A pure finance consultant has the margin lens but not the relationship lens. A pure sales consultant has the deal seat and nothing else.

The cross-disciplinary read is what makes the roadmap actionable rather than partial. We can sit with your CFO on the margin question, with you on the deal pattern, and with a senior delivery lead on the operating-model strain, and stay credible across all three rooms.

If this is the engagement you want to be having, start a conversation.