I’m writing this from the Seven Figure Agency Intensive conference in Miami, hosted by Josh Nelson and his wife. As you’d expect, there are a lot of the hallway conversations revolve around AI.
Everyone wants the hack. How to automate everything. How to generate thousands of pieces of content at scale and automatically. How to replace people with software.
AI is powerful. We use it. It’s part of our toolkit, but we’re not obsessed with it.
Here’s what I noticed from these discussions with other agency owners…
The agency owners winning are not the ones obsessing over AI.
Some owners won awards for their fast growth or for breaking through revenue thresholds. When they spoke on stage about what changed their trajectory, almost none of them talked about AI, automation, tactics, or clever hacks.
They talked about their team. They talked about their changed mindset.
Some of these agency owners had been stuck at the same revenue level for years. In a few cases, over a decade. But once they changed how they thought about the business and surrounded themselves with other owners who were serious about growth, things accelerated fast. Double, sometimes triple growth in a year.
It wasn’t because of a new funnel. It wasn’t because an AI workflow.
It was about limiting beliefs, discipline, and better people around them.
Meanwhile, most of our industry is racing in the opposite direction. Agencies bragging online about systems that crank out 1,000 pieces of AI content per day. Nobody reads that crap. Even the people creating it don’t read it. It’s lazy and it’s noise.
At our agency, we’re leaning harder into the things that have always worked. Brand. Relationships. Authority. Being a trusted growth partner.
The agencies that win over the next decade won’t be the ones with the cleverest AI prompts. It’ll be the ones that build the strongest teams, best brands, and focus on what their clients actually need. That’s the real leverage.
This newsletter is where I share what I’m learning while building and scaling the Proxa portfolio of marketing agencies. Subscribe to this newsletter at businessofagency.com.
I hope that helps and gives you something to think about.
~ Erik