Next-Generation Leadership Consulting for Agencies | Save up to 30% in Operational Costs | Implement a Strong Vision in Under 3 Months | Founder @ REMODE |

Your revenue is growing.

Your leadership team isn't keeping pace.

You promoted them because they were exceptional at their job. 

But being good at a job and leading a team are completely different skills — and nobody taught them the difference.

So now they come to you for every decision. They micromanage or they disappear. 

Meetings go nowhere. Deadlines slip. And you — the founder — are still the one holding everything together.

You don't have time to train them. But you also can't keep doing everything yourself.

This is the leadership ceiling.

 And it's the real reason you can't scale past where you are.

I'm Leon. I've spent 26 years building leaders.

From managing cross-cultural organizations of 3,500 people to spending the last 8 years coaching founders of 7 and 8-figure brands — I've seen this same bottleneck across every industry, every stage of growth.
It's not a people problem. It's a leadership readiness problem.

Through REMODE, I work 1:1 with your 2–4 mid-level managers over 90 days and turn them from task-doers into leaders you can fully trust and delegate to.

Not through a course. Not through a framework on a slide deck. Through direct confrontation, deep reflection, and relentless repetition — until the identity shift from task-doer to leader is real and permanent.

The result is simple: 5+ hours back on your plate per week, per leader. 

A team that takes work off your desk instead of adding to it. 

A business you can finally step back from.

The math on weak leadership is brutal.

For a €10M brand, misaligned leadership costs €830K–€1.57M per year — in lost sales output, wasted payroll, and your best people walking out the door because of their manager.

REMODE for three leaders costs ~€27K. The ROI in year one: 15–30x.

This isn't an expense. It's the highest-leverage investment you can make.

Brands I've worked with in the past 18 months: €30M+ manicure brand · €20M+ skincare brand · €20M+ sleep brand · €10M+ supplements brand · €10M+ media agency.

80% of my clients extend beyond the initial 90 days. That number tells you everything you need to know.

This is for you if you have 10–50 employees, 2–4 managers who need to step up, and revenue that's growing faster than your leadership team can handle.

If you're ready to stop being the ceiling of your own company — let's talk.

Book a free 30-minute strategy call below. 

No commitment. Just clarity on exactly where your leadership gaps are and what it would take to fix them.

Leon van der Laan

Co-Founder @ Big Growth Group | Helping B2B leaders build content-led Growth Engines.

“They provided invaluable advice to Magnet Monster during our key scaling phase. We were able to attain Klaviyo Elite Status (reserved for the top 0.2% of agencies worldwide) and significantly improve profit margins."
— Adam Kitchen, CEO of Magnet Monster (Retention Agency)

“Romans & Kristina don’t bullsh*t you. They cut straight to what’s broken and how to fix it. It’s uncomfortable, but it works.”
— Bogdan Zabolotnov, COO Growthub (Creative Ad Agency)


So... you’ve built a strong $1-5M digital agency.

The team is in place and revenue is growing. But under the surface, things are starting to feel, let's say somewhat heavier.

Delivery is getting bloated, margins are tighter than they should be and projects take too many people, too many steps, and too much time.

“The big problem”

The problem isn’t bad people or even bad processes. It’s an agency business that was never re-architected after $1M.

The business was built for growth, not efficient scale. Ops grew reactively, not strategically. The business has grown but leadership hasn’t levelled up to match it.

How we fix it:

We fix ops and delivery inefficiencies to unlock $1M+/year in profit and turn your agency into a scalable asset.

Real results our clients see:

- $250k-1M+/year in recovered margin over 12+ months
- 20–40% reduction in over-servicing
- Teams that deliver without founder input
- Increased EBITA
- A delivery model that’s scalable, repeatable, and exit-ready

Who we work with

Agency founders doing $500K–5M in revenue who want to:

- Scale cleanly
- Fix profit leaks
- Step out of ops
- Or prep for a future exit

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’re in the same stage... successful enough to grow, but too central to scale.

Run our Agency Scale Readiness Assessment. It exposes the exact reasons founders stay trapped in delivery and shows how to deconstrain growth.

Used by 55+ agency owners to step out of the day-to-day and add $150K–$750K in yearly profit: 

https://assessment.biggrowthgroup.com/

Romans Ivanovs

Next Agency Dinner. Dubai. 03.03.

25 seats confirmed.

3 more available.

DM to apply.

Big Growth Group x AgenCFO.

Joey de Wit
Elyse de Wit
Kristina Radeva

You built a $1-5M agency business. We make it run without you.

AI agency transformation at $356k/mo, 70% GP, 0% team churn.

We sat down with Mike Kolev, CEO and co-owner of Carbon Box Media to ask him about how they:

- Use AI where it actually matters (80% of efforts do not impact the revenue)
- Operating through hypergrowth
- Acquisition systems: volume game, vendors, ads, outreach
- Where agencies should start with AI 
- Future of agencies + adoption rate discussion

Links in the comment section 👇

Good agency talent is fu**ing rare.

Retention and performance agencies both struggle big time. Almost every other client we work with needs help with hiring.

Or do they?

Maybe the real problem is a weak pool of talent.

Maybe recruiters promise too much... and this agency folks can't stand them because of it (no offence, but the amount of negative feedback I receive about recruiters is off the charts). 

Maybe it's a training problem.

Or maybe founders just don't know how to attract quality talent??

To date we've assisted 55+ agencies with:

1. assessing their existing teams
2. getting the right talent in

I'm not a recruiter but I know a thing or two about building high-performance agency teams.

So tomorrow I'm publishing a newsletter on:

→ What actually attracts high-quality talent (and what doesn't)
→ Autonomy matters. But not the way you think.
→ What does NOT attract high-quality talent
→ What NOT to do (the £1-5M agency mistakes I see constantly)
→ The 3 biggest levers to actually solve this
→ Community-based hiring (is this even a thing?)

Thanks to Josh Hill for vibing on this topic.

Subscribe here:

→ RemoveTheFounder.ai

The agency model is transforming at speed I've never seen before. I'm not sure everyone inside it realises how fast the walls are moving.

Observations:

1. The future belongs AI-native agencies. Full stop. Incumbents optimising around human workflows will face a structural cost and speed disadvantage they won't be able to overcome.

2. To build (or transform into) an AI-native agency, you must first build a unified data layer. This requires extracting delivery, operations, and finance from documents and human memory into queryable databases. Only then do AI systems become effective.

3. Paid media, retention, creative as well as operations behind the delivery are now accelerating at speed which is frankly overwhelming. One senior person can do what required teams, but this creates more volume to manage, test, and optimise.

4. AI bots and co-pilots are collapsing traditional org charts.

5. Basic automation (Zapier chains, simple scripts) is now table stakes.

6. Agentic systems enable hyper-personalisation at scale, but someone has to orchestrate the logic, guardrails, and measurement.

7. Ruthless operational excellence is not longer a preference. 

8. Agency operators with AI/technical capabilities are rare hybrid. Founders who can recruit and retain this combination will have a decisive advantage.


P.S. At Big Growth Group we're changing the playbook for agency operations, delivery and scaling systems. A lot of new updates coming soon.

If you're not on X then you don't know the amount of OpenClaw money-making advice that is blown up over the past 2 weeks. People sell pre-configured AI agents, tutorials, security protocols and other agentic stuff for eCom, agencies, content creation, etc.

Most of it is noise imo.

What I'm trying to pay attention to is product development.

Naval Ravikant published a pod this week (highly recommend) talking about how product dev is changing: "Just like now anybody can make a video or anyone can make a podcast, anyone can now make an application".

Marketing agencies and consultancies must start building their own applications.

Since 2 weeks ago I'm using claude code. Thanks to Fernando C. and Hosun Chung for inspiration guys. Yesterday, I learned how to copy any landing page design in 10 minutes without writing a single piece of copy.

At Big Growth Group we've started doing two things:

1. Productising our knowledge into AI tools (leading by example).
2. Helping agencies become AI-native.

I'll talk more about both in-depth once we have something tangible to show.

Sam G. Winsbury: “You need more authority on LinkedIn”

I’m confident we nailed the brief.

Joe Marston 🚀, founder of Soar With Us & For You | TikTok Growth Agency is joining the Agency Dinner a guest speaker.

His agency is now one of the most recognised DTC players in the UK with an 8-figure valuation and on track for £10M revenue this year.

We’ll run a relaxed fireside chat covering:

•⁠ ⁠His journey building the agency
•⁠ ⁠Scaling lessons
•⁠ ⁠Where he thinks the agency space is heading next 🌶️

Looking forward to hosting everyone on the 3rd of March.

You built a $1-5M agency business. We make it run without you (with systems and AI).

We're launching a NEW NEWSLETTER: RemoveTheFounder.ai. Here's why: 

1. The agency playbook is being rewritten. AI creates a structural shift in how agencies create value. This newsletter is where I'll share how we turn agencies into AI-native ones. 

2. The biggest problem for $1-5M agency founders is getting out of day-to-day execution. We specialise in the exact mechanics of extracting founders from execution. I'll continue sharing real cases and highly practical frameworks.

3. Operations, delivery workflows, founder-bottlnecks, hiring, leadership, account management, data workflows: we break down how to modularise, systematise, and use operational strategy to deconstrain your agency business so it can scale.

4. Real stories from agencies becoming AI-native (we already have a few in the pipeline).

5. The endgame is optionality. 

Systems that create true leverage so you can sell it, scale it or just take Tuesdays off.

Your call.

RemoveTheFounder.ai

Recorded an absolutely mind blowing conversation with Fernando C. and Hosun Chung about how they went from 50+ team to a lean and fully AI-native agency!!!

If there's anyone who's truly building for the future it's these guys!

Out soon. 😎 

Fun fact:

they generated 3 billion views for their clients and 1 billion for themselves with content marketing on X.

Here's a real use case from our client portfolio: two retention agencies, both doing $1M+.

One team spends 10 hours building 5 flows (strategy and copy only) every detail reviewed twice. The team is genuinely talented. Standards are non-negotiable. They'd rather lose a client than ship something average.

The other spends 1.5 hours on the same output (again strategy and copy only). Growth-oriented, moves fast, focused on scaling.

The first one charges $7.5k-12.5k retainer. Retains most clients 4+ years but plateaued for sometime now.

The later, charges $4.5-7.5k. Churns clients past 6 months more than they'd like to admit... however grew 200% last year.

Neither of them is "wrong".

In fact, both founders are acting completely rationally given what they believe.

And both have a blind spot shaped entirely by what they value.

The excellence founder has built something clients genuinely respect... but the business still orbits him. His obsession with quality and personal relationship with the team has become somewhat of a ceiling.

The growth founder is moving fast but hasn't built the foundation yet. Systems are work in progress. And without talent density and maturity to back up the speed, churn prevents stable growth.

Two founders.

Two different values.

Two different blind spots they can't quite see yet because those blind spots are hiding inside the thing they're most proud of.

The obvious conclusion when you see these two side by side is "just combine them - get systems AND quality AND then growth, etc."

But it's not that simple.

Telling the excellence founder to delegate more is telling him to compromise who he is.

Same with asking the growth founder to slow down and invest in talent density. 

The real work is sometimes much harder than copying a playbook. That's why some of the agency advice doesn't work, by the way. It's trying to change what someone does without touching why they do it.

So start examining the very thing that made you successful... and ask whether it's still serving you.

taplio

The Battle

Leon van der Laan

Romans Ivanovs

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taplio

The Battle

Leon van der Laan

Romans Ivanovs

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Romans Ivanovs's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreRomans Ivanovs's LinkedIn Performance