Growing Agencies & Sizing the Market

TL;DR

• We had the pleasure of interviewing some amazing agency owners about their growth stories. Check out the full recording here​
• Our agency market sizing brief is now available to help leaders and product companies better understand the size and makeup of this industry.
• We launched a new agency partner directory that allows agency leaders to easily compare partner programs offered by vendors.
• The latest 3Q26 Agency Pulse went out to Delphi members earlier this week, and it looks like overall outlooks are flat, but the pipeline momentum we saw growth throughout the first half of the year has cooled.
• If you’d like help improving your agency’s growth, check out our Growth Review Service, or grab a spot on our calendar to discuss the details.

Interviews With Leaders Who’ve Been There

​

We joined Carl Smith from The Bureau for a conversation with four agency leaders:

• Andi Graham, CEO and Managing Partner at Big Sea
• Ernesto Tagwerker, Founder and CTO at Ombu Labs
• Nora Lahl, COO and Partner at Lightburn
• Sebastian Chedal, Founder and CEO at Fountain City

This interview panel adds deeper operating detail like: what it feels like to stop accepting work that once paid the bills, split a role that has existed for years, or discover that the specialization that drove growth is losing value.

Sizing the Agency Market

We get a lot of questions about how many agencies there are and what kind of research would help them. We put together a high-level market sizing brief that can help brands understand how important digital agencies are.

​

Growing With Partners

We sourced and verified 556 partner programs across common agency solution stacks and compiled them into an easily searchable reference guide. You can sort through them via our web tool, or download the guide that lists them all.

As pipeline outlooks cool, many leaders are looking for ways to improve their second-half performance. We published a full Growth Guide on how to fix growth long-term, but sometimes a few quick wins can make a meaningful difference. Partner programs, while small relative to bringing in new clients, are one of the easiest ways to add additional high-margin revenue to an agency. Most can be activated with a single call and a few emails, and when you’re already recommending and implementing the vendor’s solution, they can add a few points of margin to an agency’s bottom line for things you’re already doing.

Agency Leader Sales Pipelines

Agency sales pipeline outlooks cooled. Every quarter, we survey a select group of agency leaders to understand how their sales pipelines and outlooks are changing. This time, while the overall outlook remained flat, there was a distinct drop in our pipeline outlook index after it grew in the first and second quarters.

We help agency leaders diagnose what’s broken, prioritize the gaps, and identify best practices to fix their growth issues.

If you’d like help improving your agency’s growth, check out our Growth Review Service, or grab a spot on our calendar to discuss the details.