Podcast: The Handbook.

A few months ago Harv Nagra from Scoro had me on his podcast 'The Handbook'. We had a great chat centred around what "running your agency like it's sale-ready" actually looks like in practice - and yes, that includes Governance again.

I recently re-listened to it and thought I'd expand on what we covered and add some additional thoughts for the newsletter.

Hope you enjoy!

Most independent agencies only think about governance when they're preparing for an exit - which is usually years too late. A governance mindset is really just stepping back from the firefighting and asking:

• Are we clear on where we're going?
• Can this business run without the founder?
• Are we measuring the right things?

You don't need a formal board to benefit from that thinking. You just need the right lens - and a mechanism to pull yourself out of the day-to-day.

Exactly what that mechanism is looks different for everyone. It ranges from a formal board through to a single advisor or a peer board. I talked about this at length in the last newsletter (let me know if you'd like it re-sent).

The real point is to widen your field of view - and stop letting the business depend on heroics.

Five key focus areas

1. Purpose & Strategy

When we talked about strategy in the conversation, it was very deliberately not about lofty vision decks or slides that get wheeled out once a year and then forgotten. At a board level, strategy was framed much more practically as answering a small set of fundamental questions:

• What are we building?
• Why are we building it that way?
• Who are we building it for?
• And how are we going to win?

A big part of this was the idea of negative space (not an original thought - shoutout Porter). Clarity on strategy doesn't just tell you what to pursue - it tells you what to actively say no to. Without that clarity, agencies end up stuck in indecision, debating big choices because they haven't committed to whether they're building "A" or "B". That lack of commitment is what causes drift.

Strategy, in this framing, becomes a decision-making filter. When opportunities come in, when clients ask for something adjacent, or when the business feels pulled in multiple directions, strategy should remove ambiguity rather than create it. If it's not clear whether something fits, that's usually a signal the strategy itself isn't clear enough.

2. Culture & Leadership

Culture was very clearly separated from perks, rituals, or social activities. It was described as how people behave when no one is watching - the decisions they make day-to-day, especially in the absence of leadership.

In founder-led agencies, culture often mirrors the founder's behaviour, whether intentionally or not. What leaders tolerate, overlook, or quietly endorse becomes the standard the rest of the organisation follows. That applies just as much to small compromises - late work, rushed delivery, inconsistent standards - as it does to more obviously toxic behaviour.

The conversation leaned on a governance principle that "the fish rots from the head", not as an accusation, but as a reminder that culture and leadership are inseparable. You can't separate values from behaviour. If what leaders say matters doesn't match what they personally model, confusion and inconsistency follow - and over time that erodes trust and performance.

3. Capability

Capability was discussed through the lens of resilience. If a business relies on individuals repeatedly performing heroics to keep things afloat, that's a signal the organisation isn't structurally sound.

From an operational perspective, capability shows up in several places: whether people clearly understand what they're responsible for, whether systems support work flowing without constant manual intervention, and whether management has genuine visibility into what's happening across delivery.

Org design came up here as well. An org chart that exists purely because "it's always been that way" can quietly create friction — both internally and for clients. Clients don't care how an agency is structured; they care about outcomes. If internal complexity leaks into the client experience, that's a capability problem the agency needs to solve, not something clients should have to navigate.

4. Risk

Risk was framed as one of the most consistently neglected areas in agencies - not because leaders don't know risks exist, but because they're rarely structured, prioritised, or actively managed until something goes wrong.

Even light structure makes a difference. Using a simple risk matrix - plotting likelihood against impact - helps move risk management out of vague, late-night worrying and into something tangible that can be reviewed and revisited.

The examples discussed ranged from cybersecurity and AI, to key-person risk, cash flow, client concentration, and workplace policies. The point wasn't to solve everything personally, but to identify where risks exist and then decide how to reduce either their likelihood or their impact - sometimes by bringing in external help rather than absorbing the burden internally.

5. Performance

Performance was the most confronting part of the discussion. When more than half of agencies report limited visibility into project profitability, it highlights a structural blind spot rather than individual failure.

The core argument was simple: you can't build a profitable agency without running profitable projects, and you can't run profitable projects if you're not measuring both revenue and cost inputs at a granular level. Waiting until year-end to find out whether the business worked financially is too late to change the outcome.

From a governance and ops perspective, this means focusing on metrics that genuinely reflect how the business operates - profitability by client, healthy (not maximised) utilisation, pipeline health rather than inflated pipeline value, retention and depth of client relationships, and progress against strategic priorities.

Performance, in this framing, isn't about pressure or shame. It's about visibility - giving leadership the information they need early enough to make better decisions.