FOR AGENCIES
The agency business is getting harder. We’ve got what it takes for you to survive and prosper.
I help leadership teams at agencies and complex, project-driven organizations cut through the misalignment, coordination overload, and decision bottlenecks that compound with every layer of growth — and that AI is about to make painfully visible.
THE PATTERN WE KEEP SEEING
Your agency is slower than it should be. Here’s why.
Most agency performance problems trace back to two stubborn root causes. They’re not mysteries. They’re measurable. And they’re fixable.
Decision bottlenecks
Too many approvals, unclear ownership, leaders pulled into work that should be resolved two levels down.
Coordination overload
More time managing the work than doing it. Meetings that exist to compensate for missing clarity.
Rework & misalignment
Projects that go sideways because intent got lost between handoffs, or because nobody aligned on what "done" looks like.
WHY THIS IS GETTING URGENT
AI is making it harder faster. Every structural problem in your agency — the rework, the misaligned teams, the decision latency — gets amplified when production becomes cheap and fast. AI isn’t your real problem. Your structure is. The agencies that fix their structure first are the ones that will use AI well. The ones that pour AI into a broken structure just get faster at being chaotic.
Agency Productivity Diagnostic
Get a benchmarked picture of where your agency's productivity drag actually lives — scored against our database of 80+ agencies. A structured, interactive 2.5-hour assessment with your leadership team that produces an 8–20 page findings report and a delivery operations benchmark scorecard.
Do you know your agency's rework rate? Most are between 20–40%. Find out yours — and what to do about it.
Most clients who complete a diagnostic choose one of our Workstream foundation packages or continue with ongoing CEO Advisory.
TRACK RECORD
15 years. 200+ agencies. The results are consistent.
These aren't workshop highs. They're sustained operational outcomes.
Recent Thinking
Tame Collaboration Complexity
In collaborative organizations where teams are matrixed and workers multi-allocated, pod-based structures can increase efficiency by reducing the coordination overhead that drags everyone down.
No, Your Agency Isn't Going Away
AI unbundled the agency model and revealed which parts actually matter. The answer is better than you think — if you understand where judgment lives.
What Makes an Organization Run Fast?
AI may accelerate some things, but that doesn't mean the organization will go faster. Speed is a structural property, not a tooling property.
Jack Skeels
I’ve spent 15 years inside 200+ agencies, figuring out why smart teams get stuck. I founded AgencyAgile, published my methods in MIT Sloan Management Review, and wrote UNMANAGED, which Kirkus called “a bracing, standard-resetting approach to doing management right.”
Before that, I built a 90-person consultancy, served as a researcher at RAND Corporation, and started in industrial engineering and automation. Today, as Better Company, I help agency leaders fix the structural problems that growth creates — and that AI is about to make painfully visible.
ABOUT
The structure you have is the strategy you're running.
If something here resonated with what you're experiencing, I'd like to hear about it. Book a 30-minute conversation, or tell me a bit about your situation below and I'll get back to you personally.
No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about what you're seeing.