Ken Novak’s Post

I get asked a lot about why I decided to focus my company, No Single Individual, on strategy services for agencies. Especially by people who know me and know how much I naturally gravitate towards (and get distracted by) variety, novelty and new experiences. 🐿 (For any #myersbriggs fans, I'm a strong #ENFP.) I'm not going to lie. Focusing on one discipline (strategy/planning) and one client target (advertising / marketing agencies) has been difficult. It often has felt like I was giving up something by tightening our suite of services & ideal client profile. And my journey to running a business that excels *because* of its focus has been a long one. 1️⃣ As a solo freelancer, I found the variety most exciting, particularly when it came to the services I offered. I'm a proud #generalist, so I got gigs doing my bread and butter (creative strategy, B2B marketing, activation planning) but I also wrote roasts for retirement parties, planned events and authored whitepapers. New tasks everyday = a happy me. 2️⃣ When I first founded No Single Individual (formerly Co Conspirators), we narrowed our offerings (from the "kitchen sink" to strategy and marketing teams), but we worked with lots of different types of clients - from agencies and consulting enterprises to startups and nonprofits. While this kind of diversification was critical to getting started - and making enough revenue to support our further growth - it soon became counter-productive. After all, who were we to tell our clients to have a differentiated brand and clear objectives when we couldn't do the same thing for ourselves? 3️⃣ After our first year, I made the decision to narrow our focal point. Going forward, we would focus on offering curated strategy teams to #advertising and marketing #agencies. No longer would our agency clients have to worry that we would "serve two bosses" and consistently go after their accounts. And now we could focus our messaging, pricing, ways of working, and talent for the way agencies operate. So...did it work? 📈 We've grown revenue 50% yoy since the pivot. 📅 Our sales cycle has become significantly more predictable, as we know now why / when agencies approach us and how long it typically takes between initial meeting and signed agreement. 💜 Countless agencies tell us they "love the model" and are happy we're designed for the way they work. And here's the best part. By working with amazing agencies every day, we still get the opportunity for variety–from different types of creatives to the types of accounts we come in to support. Focus has been a personal and professional challenge for me, but it's been worth the work! 💪

The biggest mistake I've seen brands make when choosing between an agency and consultant isn't what you think... It's treating it as a one-time, all-or-nothing decision. Here's what actually matters 👇 1️⃣ Talent Relationship Ownership ↳ Many agencies "own" creator relationships ↳ Most consultants help you build direct relationships ↳ CRUCIAL: This affects everything from future campaigns to payment terms ↳ TIP: Get this in writing before you sign 2️⃣ Scaling vs Testing ↳ Launching 100 creator posts next month? Agency infrastructure helps ↳ Testing a new vertical or content type? Consultant flexibility shines ↳ KEY: Match the partner to the initiative, not your company stage 3️⃣ The "Who Does The Work" Reality ↳ That amazing agency lead? Likely managing 10+ accounts ↳ That seasoned consultant? Might outsource critical pieces ↳ ALWAYS ask: "Who will be doing the day-to-day work?" 4️⃣ Cost Considerations ↳ Agencies: Higher overhead, but valuable if you need multiple skill sets ↳ Consultants: Generally lower fees, but multiple specialists can add up ↳ TIP: Map out ALL your needs before deciding - sometimes a mix is best 5️⃣ Campaign Control ↳ Agencies excel at running established playbooks ↳ Consultants adapt faster to feedback ↳ ASK: How much customization do you need? 💭 The real winner? Brands that mix and match based on initiatives. We've seen startups use agencies for their main creator program while hiring consultants for new market testing. And Fortune 500s working with specialist consultants for strategic campaigns while using agencies for ongoing content. What matters is matching the partner type to your specific initiative's needs. What's your experience mixing agencies and consultants? #InfluencerMarketing #CreatorEconomy

There are many agencies doing great work, and every agency does things differently. It can be difficult to know who to partner with. Here are a few things that matter to us—see if they matter to you: ➤ We’re all about relationships. Our clients are our partners. They aren’t numbers; they aren’t just another client; they aren’t anonymous. We know our clients well—and we even begin to learn much about their personal stories as well. We love spending time with our clients at their locations or events and at our events, which happen every quarter—a networking event that brings everyone together. ➤ We are also loyal to our clients, which means that we don’t take on a competitor as a client. Yes, we have turned down bigger clients than the ones we’ve already committed to, which makes us feel great. We know that in marketing, we can’t honestly help one business succeed without using data from or reducing the strategy of another business. We’re not here for that, but we’re 100% here for our clients. ➤ We’re not here to make you a cutesy logo, a pretty website, or post and ghost for you on social. We are intentional in how we think and create, and our work is exceptional. We’re strategic, collaborative, technical, and creative. We’re here to make your mark bigger and better. We’re here to reconnect you with your audience in a bigger and better way. We’re here to move the needle. We’re here long-term to help you through hurdles, slow economic times, and the hamster wheel of doing the same thing over and over again. We help fix what isn’t working and elevate what is. We can help transform or pivot your focus, structure, culture, processes, products, marketing, brand position, and more. We’ll celebrate with you in the small and big wins. We won’t settle for mediocre. We’re here for your growth, inside and out. ➤ We aren’t a cookie-cutter agency. This means that you pay a bit more to have a tailored strategy and deliverable that isn’t shared with anyone. We believe that knowing your audience, understanding your business, solving your problems, and meeting your goals takes intentional discussion and strategy. Do you align with any of these? I'd love to know. \\\ Did you enjoy this? 🔁 Repost it for others to enjoy. 🔥Want to achieve greater growth? Feel free to DM me.

Differentiation vs. Marketable Differentiation: The Key to Agency Growth. Being different isn’t enough. Agencies pushing for growth or expanding into new markets need more than just differentiation—they need marketable differentiation. What’s the difference? Differentiation focuses on what makes you unique—your processes, your creative approach, or your expertise. It’s about you. Marketable Differentiation focuses on your clients—why they should care, how your uniqueness solves their specific problems, and why they can’t live without you. Here’s why this matters: When entering a new market or scaling, agencies often face entrenched competitors and crowded spaces. Marketable differentiation ensures your positioning isn’t just unique but resonates deeply with your ideal clients. It’s the difference between being noticed and being chosen. How to Build Marketable Differentiation Know Your Market: Understand your target clients' unmet needs, pain points, and aspirations. Define Your “Black Box”: What unique expertise or process do you offer that delivers measurable results and can’t be easily replicated? Focus on Outcomes: Position your agency around the results you achieve, not just the services you provide. Create Entry Points: Offer programs to showcase your expertise with low risk to the client. For example: Differentiation: “We’re a creative agency specializing in digital-first campaigns.” Marketable Differentiation: “We help CPG brands drive e-commerce growth with digital-first campaigns that increase customer acquisition and retention by 30%.” See the difference? One speaks to your services; the other speaks to the client’s success. As agencies look to grow, the question isn’t just, “What makes you different?” but, “Why should your clients care?” That’s the foundation of growth, trust, and long-term success. How are you defining your marketable differentiation?

The traditional agency model is fundamentally flawed. Here's why: Agencies often overpromise their capabilities to secure clients. You pay an upfront fee to initiate work. They assign too many people to your project, spreading their resources thin across multiple projects. You lack clarity on project ownership and progress. Communication starts to deteriorate. Agencies often get 60% of the way there and lose interest. They shift their focus to acquiring new clients ("top of funnel"). Projects start to fizzle and barely make it over the finish line. You're spending too much on Google Ads for low-quality leads. The client ends up extremely dissatisfied. While not every agency operates this way, unfortunately, many do. However, there is a better approach: individuals acting as their own brand. Here's how we do things differently: We consider all factors that impact the founder-led content engine’s results. We collaborate directly with the CEO to establish them as a thought leader in the B2B marketing space. We use LinkedIn to build you authority through compelling a strategic narrative. We use the founder-led content engine to empower your marketing, sales, and product teams. We offer month-to-month contracts because we believe in our approach. Our CEO has over 5 years of marketing experience and remains actively involved in the projects. Our mindset: be looked at as an extension of your team > external vendor

As agencies grow, they get SLOW. They get bloated and fragile. Here are the 4 things you need to do to avoid this: 1️⃣ Productise: Ensure your offering is processed and delivered like a product. Have a 'menu' of options your agency offers and don't veer off track. This ensures you are efficient, fast and predictably profitable. You also get WORLD CLASS at the 'thing' you do because you keep doing it over and over again, iterating the process. - 2️⃣ Specialise: Don't be everything to everyone. Be the BEST CHOICE for THAT THING for THAT SOMEONE. If you're the marketing agency for care homes, you will get chosen by care homes over generalist agencies. Your marketing, selling, delivery and results will be congruent and COMPOUND like crazy. Leaving generalist agencies scrambling around trying to get traction. - 3️⃣ Insource highest leverage tasks: The highest leverage task in any agency is SELLING and STRATEGY. This is your agency DNA, this is what will make your agency succeed or fail. Sure, the deliverables matter. But you can have the best deliverables in the world, without a SOLID STRATEGY or without GOOD SALES, they are worth nothing. - 4️⃣ Outsource deliverables: If you are doing all of your deliverables inhouse like a traditional agency, you are essentially setting up lots of mini businesses within your business. SEO agencies who do link building inhouse for example, need to hire a chief link builder, outreach team and content writers. They'll need to manage all the moving parts. Get all the software. Scale it up as the clients grow. Lots of moving parts and headaches. The minimalist agency focuses on the highest leverage tasks. STRATEGY & SELLING. They outsource the deliverables to specialists and stay LEAN and MINIMALIST. - Do these 4 things whilst constantly assessing your operation as it grows and your agency will stay super lean as it grows 📈

80% of the time, when a founder tells me they were 'burned' by a bad marketing agency, it was actually their own fault. 🔥 Does this sound familiar? -- Founder has a marketing problem and looks for outside help. -- They find an agency that seems to have the right experience, with referrals, good clients, and convincing testimonials. 👍 -- Founder hires the agency. -- Three months later, the agency is fired, and the founder complains about a terrible experience. 😤 Here’s what founders don’t understand about outsourcing marketing work: 🔸 If you know exactly what needs to be done but lack bandwidth, you can tell the agency what to do—and your chances of success are higher. 🔸 If you DON'T know what needs to be done and rely entirely on the agency, your chances of success drop dramatically. 📉 Here are 3 steps to improve your next agency engagement: 1. Recognize your risks If you can’t instruct the agency on exactly what you want and how it should be done, the risk of failure rises significantly. 2. Build in safety stops and guardrails Don’t let the agency do a lot of work or spend a lot of money until the initial work is validated: 🔹 Don’t generate tons of leads until the results from the first few are clear. 🔹 Don’t design lots of creatives until the first set is approved by all stakeholders. 🔹 Don’t SEO optimize 200 webpages until you’ve measured the change from 20. 3. Be clear on communication and deliverables Set expectations on how, when, and what the agency should communicate with you: 🔹 If you want daily updates, tell them upfront. 🔹 If you want to be informed if a campaign isn’t hitting X% ROAS, say so. For deliverables, be specific about what you really expect: 🔹 A lead gen agency will give you leads—but do you expect revenue? 🔹 A social media agency will give you posts—but do you expect website traffic? Unsure whether your agency is delivering, or how to onboard an agency? DM me for a chat.

Agency owners are often addicted to speed. One of the most commonly cited differences between agency and brand life is the pace. Look at the job ads agencies put out: most say the agency is a “fast-paced environment”. Many agency staffers say the pace is something they enjoy. These people tend to progress quickly in an agency. Some people do not enjoy pace: these people are often the ones who end up leave bad reviews. The truth is that we as agency leaders are addicted to pace. We perpetuate it. We may have founded our own agencies because we worked at a company that didn’t keep us busy enough. So we find opportunities to make our employees speed up too, often unaware that many of our people do not get off on it like we do…and that it actually slows down our operations. For example, it’s not often that an agency leader is standing over an employee’s desk, metaphorically whipping them to get their current tasks done faster…typically we’re just giving them more tasks because we want to see more things getting done across the business. Some people will volunteer to do extra things that will take the business forward - we should be giving those people more responsibilities and the associated rewards. But if we let most of our people get on with the task at hand, more of the important things would get out of the door quicker.

We’ve seen too many businesses get burned by marketing agencies that overpromise, underdeliver, and lock clients into long-term contracts. We’ve heard it all: CEOs and CMOs frustrated by agencies that tie them down with rigid agreements, draining their budget while offering little room for flexibility. These contracts prioritize the agency's bottom line, not yours. The biggest issue is that most agencies don’t take the time to understand your brand. They’re focused on quick wins and vanity metrics, leaving you with inconsistent messaging and poor performance. And if it’s not working? Too bad—you’re stuck in a contract. Traditional agencies use long-term contracts to secure their revenue, not necessarily to align with your goals. They’re more interested in locking you in than driving real, sustainable growth. At ChannelCore, we do things differently: 1. No Long-Term Contracts: We offer flexible subscription-based service packages. 2. Brand-First Approach: We start by understanding your brand DNA to ensure every strategy aligns with your vision. 3. Transparent Communication: You get regular updates and real-time reporting, so you always know where your budget is going. 4. Strategic KPIs: We set meaningful metrics that align with your long-term vision, not just short-term gains. KPIs that matter to your business. 5. Scalable Solutions: We're focused on sustainable growth that drives profitability—not just vanity metrics. Clients who switch to ChannelCore see a 40% boost in engagement and stronger brand alignment within their first quarter, all while enjoying the flexibility of our subscription model. Don’t get trapped by long-term contracts that don’t serve your business. Your brand deserves an agency that prioritizes alignment, transparency, and growth. Ready to break free from outdated agency models? Let’s redefine how marketing should work for you. 🚀 Visit channelcore.com to learn more or send us a DM.

AT Agency Maximus we have operated companies from 30 to 300 million with P & L responsibilities. We are not "creatives" in the corner. Our solution begins with a deep immersion in  understanding your business and its unique selling  proposition. We scrutinize the inception of your  business idea, your journey till date and the latent  potential within your business that might be  underutilized.   - We do not hires college kids. We train each one of our people in a 13 week grad level course THEY pay for before they are allowed to meet your company. Once, together we have acquired in-depth understanding of your business we consider media and creatives. Your business growth requires deep customer avatar psychology, versatile marketing  strategies, language and visual techniques,  relentless offer making and sales expansion  avenues.  - We don't believe in one-size-fits-all approach.  - Agency Maximus focuses not just on attracting  and converting customers, but also on training them to become advocates for your brand. This has a  multiplied effect - not only does your customer base  grow, but acquisition costs also go down,  increasing your rate of growth and cash flow. We help you transform your business structure  from a defacto pyramid to an inverted triangle. This  innovative structure allows for efficient customer  handling, better management of repetitive tasks, and  effective distribution of responsibilities, freeing the  business owner to focus on strategic decision making. - Our seasoned team crafts compelling stories about  your products or services that encapsulate the  benefits in a simplified yet persuasive form. These  narratives help consumers visualize your product in  their hands and understand how it will improve their  lives.  - Our comprehensive approach to marketing and advertising - right from crafting the right  message to identifying the viable audience to testing the adverts - we ensure your products or  services reach and resonate with a broad spectrum  of potential customers.  - We stand out from traditional ad agencies because we don't hand off your project to a team that doesn't  have our level of expertise. Instead, our top  management stays involved with every project at  each stage, adding personal touch and ensuring  effective execution.  - We have a vast library of commercial content and  proven success stories across diverse industries.  Not only does this make us adept at forecasting and  meeting potential challenges, but it also enables us  to understand which strategies are most likely to  bring about success for your unique business  model.  - With our unique methodology and commitment to  ethical advertising, we ensure that our collaborative  efforts bring long-lasting success, ensuring that the business not only grows rapidly but also leaves a  positive impact on the world. We train your customers to become your advertising channel because the best cost of acquisition is FREE. Visit us.