They just haven’t realised it yet. The model is broken. Utterly, fundamentally broken. You sell time for money, which means you are incentivised to be inefficient. The more hours your team racks up on client work, the more you bill. Your entire business model is predicated on being slow. Think about that. Your success is directly correlated with your inefficiency.
I say this as someone who built and sold a marketing agency for over £10M. We were good at the game. We scaled headcount, won awards, and hit revenue targets. But I saw the ceiling. I saw the rot at the core of the business model. We were selling hours. We were selling people. And in the age of agentic AI, selling people is a losing proposition.
This isn't some abstract future I'm painting. The shift is already happening, and most agencies are blissfully unaware, too busy chasing the next retainer to see the existential threat looming over them.
The SaaS Deluge Has Created an Ocean of Chaos
Remember the promise of SaaS? A tool for everything! Cheaper, faster, better! The reality for most CMOs at brands like BrewDog or Gymshark is a nightmare of subscription fatigue, data silos, and integration hell. The average enterprise now juggles over 110 different SaaS applications. It’s unmanageable.
Clients don’t want another tool. They don’t want a recommendation for the ‘perfect’ MarTech stack. They want a solution. They want an outcome. They are drowning in complexity and craving simplicity. They’ve been sold a disparate collection of hammers, nails, and saws, and what they really need is a house.
This is the chasm that agencies were supposed to bridge. But most have failed. They’ve become glorified resellers, taking a commission for recommending yet another piece of software that creates as many problems as it solves. The value is negligible and, frankly, insulting to the client's intelligence.
Your Reselling Margin is Not a Business Model
Let’s be brutally honest. Recommending HubSpot, tacking on a 15% margin, and calling it