Agency margins rarely die of one wound. They bleed out through leaks small enough that no single one justifies a meeting — which is exactly why they persist.
Photo: seniorplanning, CC BY 2.0
1. Unbilled scope (the big one)
The friendly "can we also just…" that never becomes a line item. We've run the numbers before: for most agencies this is the largest single leak, and it's invisible precisely because each instance is small. Fix: check every ask against the SOW at arrival, not at the retro.
2. Chase time
PM hours spent asking "any update on this?" — internally and toward clients. It feels like work; it produces nothing a client would pay for. Fix: automated deadline tracking with escalation, so humans chase only what reminders couldn't move.
3. The status tax
Every "where are we?" answered by hand: open board, translate, type. Twenty minutes, several times a day, across every account. Fix: updates generated from the board.
4. Revision spirals
"Two rounds of revisions" that becomes five because nobody counted. Fix is contractual (count them in the SOW) plus operational: every revision request tracked as a ticket, so round three is visible when it starts.
5. Idle handoffs
Work finished Tuesday that the next person discovers Thursday. Two days of calendar time, gone, on every handoff. Fix: the board state change is the notification — if a human has to announce it, it will sometimes not be announced.
Four of the five leaks are the same disease: information that existed but didn't move. That's not a talent problem, it's tooling — and it's why the ROI numbers on agent adoption look the way they do.
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