Lately, I have found myself telling clients to hire in-house instead of hiring my agency. 

Sounds like bad business, right? I'd argue it's the opposite and that much of the industry is still too nervous to say it out loud. 

For years, the agency pitch was simple. Whatever creative or comms work a client needed, we handled it all. That pitch no longer holds. Budgets are shrinking, and technology lets smaller teams do more than ever before. An agency's real value now sits in strategy and judgment, not execution. A lot of the work clients once handed over is better kept in-house.  

The firms that thrive from here will have a sharper scope that sits much further up the value chain. Many agencies resist this because the ad model was built to maximize retainers and billable hours. Big headcounts reflected that. When the model stopped working, the biggest shops cut people in droves, and agency names that had defined the industry for generations died. They were bloated, and it caught up with them. 

I run an independent agency founded 40 years ago by Bob Morrison, and we've stayed deliberately lean since day one. Building the team has always been about finding rare, multi-talented people, not adding numbers. So when the work changed, we didn't have to gut our staff to survive. We changed how we sell instead and lead with candor.  

We don't hand clients a menu and total it up. We find out what the business actually needs, and sometimes the honest answer is less of us. Clients often don’t know whether the fix is a hire, an agency, an automation layer, or a cleaner way to organize the team they have. So we help them decide, then we execute whatever the answer is. We built a practice for exactly this that diagnoses the capacity problem first. Sometimes the answer is to place a person inside a client's team. Sometimes it is to tell them not to hire at all.  

And when we are the right answer, we still do the whole arc, from strategy through the work that comes out of it. That hasn't changed. What's changed is that we no longer assume it's always us. But often, clients do need the expertise of a long-standing agency. Not just strategy, but senior hands whose judgment shapes the work…the kind of expertise software and junior teams cannot replicate. That is the best money a client can spend. 

Here's the part that surprised even me. Being blunt has won us work, not cost it. We talk about what we can offer less and the client far more. Our pitches are conversations about what's shifting in their category, how AI is rewriting their cost structure, how and where they show up online, and where we truly fit. Our steady new business is the proof. Marketers respond to a partner willing to name its own limits. 

So I'll keep telling clients to hire in-house when that's the right answer. It's the surest way I know to earn the work we're actually built for.