The Marketing Agency Business Model Is Outdated. Here’s What Replaces It. written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
I’ve spent 30+ years working with small businesses and the people who advise them. I wrote Duct Tape Marketing in 2006 because I watched too many owners buy random tactics from agencies that never asked what the strategy was. And for most of those 30 years, the agency business model itself held up fine. You sold your time, you marked up execution, you kept clients on retainer for the doing.
That model is breaking. Now, in front of us, for reasons anyone running an agency or consulting practice can feel in their pipeline.
Clients believe AI can do the work. Some of them are trying it themselves and producing chaos at machine speed, but the belief alone is enough to compress what they’ll pay for execution. Retainers built on posts and ads get questioned in every budget meeting. Proposals take longer to win. And the advisor doing everything custom, for anyone who’ll pay, is getting squeezed hardest.
What clients will pay for now is marketing leadership: strategy, judgment, and a systematic way to bring AI into their business without adding to the noise.
Here’s what I want you to hear before anything else: the problem is the model, and the model can be replaced. Over the past few years we’ve been rebuilding practices with independent consultants and agency owners one at a time, and the same 9 shifts show up in every rebuild. This post maps all nine.
For each one I’ll give you the quote we hear from advisors before the shift. These are real. I’ve spoken with thousands of consultants and agency owners over the years, and these sentences came right out of their mouths. If a few of them sting, that’s the point.
I also walked through all nine on a solo episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, if you’d rather listen.
Shift 1: From invisible generalist to owned point of view
“I sound like every other agency out there, and I do not have a unique method to stand on.”
Pull up your website and a competitor’s side by side. If you can swap the logos and nobody would notice, you’re pricing against everyone, which means you’re pricing on nothing.
The new model starts with a message only you deliver and a named framework you own. When you walk into a room with a point of view and a method with a name on it, you stop competing on hourly rates and start getting hired for how you think.
Here’s what that sounds like in practice. A prospect says they need a website. You say sure, we build websites, and every client starts with a strategy engagement first, because that’s the only way the website earns its keep. Strategy before tactics is a point of view, and it’s still shockingly rare in small business marketing.
This shift comes first because it’s the domino. Premium pricing and lead flow are downstream of having something only you say.
Make one move this week: write the sentence you’d want a prospect to repeat about you after you leave the room. If it could describe any agency in your town, keep writing.
Shift 2: From custom everything to productized flagship offer
“I am exhausted from writing custom proposals and starting from scratch for every new client.”
Custom everything is why your margins are unpredictable, your delivery is chaos, and every sale takes 3 meetings and a 12-page proposal. It feels like service. Your P&L knows better.
The new model runs on one flagship engagement, sold the same way, delivered the same way, every time. Same steps, same deliverables, same cadence. In our world it’s a 7-step strategy engagement, and advisors who adopt it tell us the change shows up in their language first. “I can do that” becomes “this is my process.”
The pushback I hear is that productized means cookie cutter. It’s the opposite in practice: a repeatable framework is what produces custom work you can teach, delegate, and hire against. We’ve licensed this methodology to over 400 agencies and consultants, and that pattern holds every time.
Make one move this week: look at your last 5 engagements and circle what they had in common. That overlap is your flagship offer trying to get out.
Shift 3: From pricing effort to pricing outcomes
“I am working myself to death but hitting a ceiling because I am trading time for money.”
Hourly pricing caps your income at your calendar. There are only so many hours, so the only way to grow is to work more of them, and you’re already working all of them.
Advisors running the new model sell value-based packages: strategy engagements at $7,500 to $15,000, retainers at $5,000 to $15,000 a month. The number matters less than what makes it possible. Confidence to price on outcomes comes from shift 2. You can’t quote with conviction on something you rebuild from scratch every time, and you can quote all day on a process you’ve run 30 times.
Make one move this week: calculate what your best client actually paid you per hour last quarter, including the unbilled ones. That number is usually the push people need.
Shift 4: From execution retainers to leadership engagements
“Clients treat me like a vendor, question my tactics, and cancel when budgets get tight.”
Be honest about what your retainer buys. If the answer is “we’ll do your posts and ads,” you’re selling the exact thing AI is eating, and your clients know it.
The durable version of recurring revenue is a leadership engagement: you run the client’s marketing system, you sit at their leadership table, and you own outcomes instead of deliverables. These engagements run 12 to 24 months, and they survive budget season for a simple reason. You can commoditize a deliverable. You can’t commoditize a seat at the table.
In our own practice, clients stay 3, 4, 5 years. One has been with us over a decade. That kind of retention follows the leadership seat.
Make one move this week: in your next client review, spend the first 10 minutes on their revenue goals before you show a single metric. Watch how the conversation changes.
Shift 5: From referrals-and-hope to a lead system
“I have no idea where my next client is coming from if my word of mouth dries up.”
Most advisors sell lead generation for a living and don’t have it for themselves. The cobbler’s kids go barefoot, and in this business the cobbler also lies awake wondering where Q3 revenue comes from.
The new model installs a real system: strategic partners, speaking, content, outbound, each built as a repeatable process instead of a burst of activity when the pipeline gets scary. Referrals still come. They’re just no longer the plan.
One channel I’d leave off the list: cold email. Check your own inbox and count the agencies promising you leads this week. A client won on a cold pitch rarely understands what it means to hire a trusted advisor, and they’ll treat you accordingly. Build channels you own.
Make one move this week: count the clients you signed in the past year that came from anything other than word of mouth. If the number is zero, you have your assignment.
Shift 6: From selling to advising
“I hate feeling like a salesperson, and I spend too much time doing proposal theater.”
If you dread selling, you’re probably selling wrong. Pitching and proposal theater feel awful because they cast you as a vendor auditioning for work.
In the new model, the sales process is the service in miniature. You run a paid or structured strategy session, you diagnose, you prescribe. The prospect experiences being advised by you before they ever sign, and the engagement sells itself because they’ve already felt what working with you is like. Advisors who make this shift tell us proposals mostly disappear from their practice.
Make one move this week: take the proposal you’re working on right now and ask what would happen if you presented it live as a diagnosis instead of emailing it as a document.
Shift 7: From doing the work to running the system
“If I step away for a week, the whole business stops because everything lives in my head.”
That quote is the one I’d put on a billboard, because it describes most consulting practices I meet. The owner is the product and the quality control, which means the owner can never stop.
The new model puts delivery on rails: SOPs, templates, delegation, with the owner doing the thinking instead of the producing. Practices structured this way run at 60 to 70 percent margin, and the founder gets their calendar back. It’s also what makes the business worth something. A practice that runs through one person’s head is a job with invoices, and any buyer will price it that way.
Make one move this week: document one recurring deliverable well enough that someone else could produce the first draft. Just one.
Shift 8: From dabbling in AI to installing it
“Clients think AI can do my job for free, and I am losing my margins trying to keep up.”
Here’s the reframe that changes this whole conversation: your clients’ belief in AI is your next engagement.
Because they’re right that AI changes the work, and they’re wrong that they can manage it themselves. What small businesses produce with unmanaged AI is random acts of marketing at machine speed. Somebody has to install AI properly inside a business: embedded in defined workstreams, with governance and human review, part of the plumbing of the marketing system and tied back to strategy. That somebody should be you, and it may be the most in-demand engagement you sell this decade.
The credibility test is whether you’ve done it in your own practice first. That’s also where your margin comes back.
Make one move this week: pick one delivery workflow in your own practice and rebuild it with AI in the loop, with a defined review step. Sell what you learn.
Shift 9: From alone to in a network
“I am trying to figure out every problem by myself, and the grind is incredibly lonely.”
This one never makes the official list of business problems, and it might be the most expensive one on it. Every client challenge solved alone at 11pm. Every pricing decision made with no data but your own nerve.
Advisors in a network running the same model share what’s working, compare real numbers, and refer overflow to each other. The 100+ agencies and consultants in our network meet monthly, train quarterly, and share a partner network for implementation gaps. The practical value is speed: someone in the network solved your problem last quarter. The personal value is that the grind stops being lonely, and I’ve watched that alone keep good advisors in the game.
Make one move this week: find one advisor running a practice like yours and compare notes for 30 minutes. No agenda beyond what’s working.
The order matters
Don’t try all nine at once, and don’t start with the one that sounds most fun. The sequence is the strategy:
Message before offer. Offer before price. Price before leads. Leads before delivery. Delivery before scale.
It’s Strategy First logic applied to your own business. An advisor who builds a lead system before nailing their point of view fills a pipeline with prospects who see no reason to pay a premium. An advisor who chases margin before productizing delivery just documents chaos faster.
Start with the earliest shift you haven’t made. The rest get easier in order.
Where are you against the 9 shifts?
Most advisors read a list like this and recognize themselves in 3 or 4 of the quotes. The useful question is which shifts are capping your practice right now, because that’s where the next 90 days of work should go.
We built a short assessment that scores you against all 9 shifts and shows you which ones to tackle first. Nine questions, about 5 minutes, and you’ll see your 3 lowest scores immediately.
Take the 9 Shifts Assessment at dtm.world/shifts →
Rather talk it through first? Grab a time with Sara Nay, our CEO, at dtm.world/chat. If you’ve taken the assessment, she’ll have your scores in front of her.
FAQ
Is the agency business model really dying?
Execution-based retainers are getting compressed, and that pressure is real and measurable in how clients negotiate. Advisory work, strategy, and system leadership are getting more demand. So the honest answer is that a specific version of the agency model is dying: the one that depends on marking up execution work clients now believe AI can do.
What is a leadership engagement?
A recurring engagement where you run the client’s marketing system and own outcomes, typically for 12 to 24 months. Think fractional CMO plus an installed operating system, rather than a bundle of deliverables. Clients keep them through budget cuts because the engagement is tied to revenue, and because you’re in the leadership conversation where those decisions get made.
Do these shifts apply to solo consultants or agencies with teams?
Both. The shifts describe the model, and the model works at either scale. We’ve watched solo advisors use them to build calm, premium practices and agency owners use them to move a whole team off the execution treadmill.
How long does it take to make these shifts?
Longer than a weekend, shorter than you’d fear. With a proven framework and everything already built, advisors we work with remake the core of their model in about 90 days. Doing it alone from scratch takes longer, mostly because you’re inventing every asset before you can use it.
Won’t AI just replace marketing consultants too?
AI replaces tasks. Judgment about which tasks matter, in what order, tied to what strategy, still has to come from a person. The advisors at risk are the ones whose whole offer is execution. The advisors in demand are the ones who install and govern the system, including the AI in it.