Revgen at digital agencies is broken.
We have been studying this space for over a decade now, and for most shops, revgen runs on a mix of strategy, luck, and personal heroics from leadership.
Over the years, we found that the agencies making the fastest, most sustainable gains were the ones treating revgen as an integrated system rather than a set of disconnected departments, a shift that led to significant breakthroughs in growth and client retention.
Today, we’re publishing the 2026 Digital Agency Growth Guide to help agency teams fix what’s broken and grow their shops more reliably. It's the playbook for agencies that want to build something better, drawn from 10+ years of our research and consulting with thousands of digital agencies.
The wrong kind of flywheel
When revgen is passive, the failure modes reinforce one another, and this creates exactly the wrong kind of flywheel. One that works against growth rather than with it.
- Feast-or-famine pipelines leave no time to really fix anything.
- Misaligned functions blame each other instead of strengthening each other.
- Undifferentiated positioning turns every pitch into a negotiation about price.
- Referrals get handled passively, so the most effective growth channel an agency has goes to waste.
On their own, any one of these would slow growth, but when they make each other worse, reliable growth can seem like an impossible pipedream.
An integrated revgen system
A growing group of agencies has stopped running revgen as four disconnected departments and started running it as one system.
They put someone in charge of growth.
They sharpen positioning until the pitch lands on its own.
They elevate account management to peer status with sales and marketing, build a real referral engine, and wire AI into the work instead of bolting it on.
They’re essentially building an operating system that the strategy and execution can layer on top of, and they’re being rewarded for their efforts.
Pulling away from the pack
In 2025, the fastest agencies grew 34%. Average agencies grew 8%. The slowest declined 15%. A 49-point spread inside a single year isn't normal variance in a mature professional services industry. It’s the difference between agencies that have made deliberate choices to grow and those that let the market dictate their path.
Expert advice
We brought in additional industry experts to share their perspectives and knowledge on agency growth.
David C. Baker wrote the foreword, and the full report contains insights from Chris DuBois, Karl Sakas, and Dan Englander.
Who it's for
Agency leaders who have outgrown founder-led revgen and want a reliable system in its place.
Most growth stalls when shops reach 30 to 50 employees. The founder has too much on their plate to continue to personally drive revenue, but the system that's supposed to replace them hasn't been built yet.
Even larger agencies can have gaps in their revgen systems, since many have grown organically without deliberately designing an integrated revgen system.
We designed this guide for agency teams of almost any size who are interested in more reliable growth.
What's in the guide
A practical map for leaders and teams, from data on the typical agency to the systems that the fastest-growing shops use to pull ahead:
- The four functions of an agency, and the four functions inside revgen
- Benchmarks on the typical agency: growth, pricing, service mix, headcount, and contractor reliance
- Why revgen is broken, and how AI makes each failure mode worse
- Strategy and positioning: specialization and selling against the problem space
- How agencies actually grow, and how that shifts with client size and sales complexity
- The integrated revgen system that ties sales, marketing, bizdev, and account management together
- Growing through account management: LTV and CAC, retention, client tiering, and comp
- The referral engine: its sources and the Ideal Referrer Profile
- AI inside revgen: where it's working and where sales lags
- Implementation: the prerequisites and the pitfalls to avoid
The full guide is free, and there's a partial web version you can explore before downloading it.
