Romans Ivanovs's Linkedin Analytics

Agency death by a thousand assumptions. A while back, we were working with a team that had all the right people. Smart, capable experienced. But they seemed to keep missing deadlines. Not in a chaotic way but just consistently off. Like everything was drifting 10% slower than it should. After the initial audit, it looked like a process problem. When started asking each person what “done” looked like for their piece of work, I got five different answers. And interestingly, no one was wrong. The brief hadn’t been unclear either. It just assumed shared understanding. No one paused to check: “Do we actually mean the same thing here?” Since then, we’ve started treating communication as a part of operational infrastructure. Just like you wouldn’t scale a product without backend systems that hold it up, you can’t scale a team without language and clarity that keeps everything tight. _______ P.S. In hybrid teams (AI + humans), precision in communication matters more not less. Mainly because AI only works with what it's told. And most humans suck at telling it what matters. You say something, the AI does it then you or someone checks and builds on top. Without feedback loops, AI will reinforce your worst assumptions at scale. (And your team will silently hate it.) One of our product objectives this year to help agencies design shared language - on purpose, not by accident.

A founder I know once scaled his agency from £30k to £150k/month in under 18 months. But by month 19… he literally hated it. Too many deliverables, too many custom promises and too many people in Slack, asking for direction. What looked like scale was actually a slow, bloated "death". Because he tried to fix complexity with more complexity. He had an onboarding doc that needed its own onboarding doc. It's both funny and sad. COMPLEXITY IS SEDUCTIVE. It feels like you're maturing the business when really you're just dragging more furniture into an already cluttered room. Most agency bloat isn’t from growth... If you observe carefully it's from fear. Fear of saying no. Fear of narrowing down. Fear of letting go. But the cleanest businesses the ones that scale efficiently and as a result profitably aren’t built by addition. They’re manly built by subtraction. 'Via negativa', my friend. So where are you mistaking complexity for control?

If you struggle to hire the right Strategists or even PMs, it's most likely because: You haven't nailed the definition of success for the role - so you're hiring for a job title, not a set of outcomes. Most agencies say they want a “strategist” or a “PM” but when you dig deeper, what they really want is someone to read their mind, solve problems they haven't articulated and "take things off their plate." This doesn't work that way (if it does, not for long). And the reason you haven’t defined what success looks like? Because you don’t have clarity on what you're actually delivering. And if you don't have that clarity, how the hell are you supposed to make a key hiring decision i.e., fit a person into a "system" that doesn’t exist yet? You’re not hiring a strategist. You’re not hiring a PM. You’re hiring a bandaid for your own lack of operational clarity. I've seen this at 50k mrr 100k mrr 150k mrr 250k mrr In fact MRR/rev doesn't matter here. What matters is 1 - Clarity on what you're delivering - not just the outputs, but the conditions, constraints, dependencies and all the other nuance. 2 - Clarity on how you deliver it - the E2E workflow that gets your client from A to B to C and to Z. Until you’ve nailed these two things, hiring CAN BE A LOT OF guesswork. You’re not hiring people into a machine - you’re hiring them to build the machine with no blueprint. And then you wonder why it doesn’t scale. Do the right thing.