The Big Agencies Weren’t Made For You — And That’s The Point

Being overlooked is not a disadvantage to overcome. It is information about where you belong.

There is a particular feeling that comes from sitting in a room where the advice being given is not for you. You are nodding along. The person at the front is very confident. And somewhere underneath the nodding is a quiet, embarrassed suspicion that none of this is going to work, because it was designed for a business roughly forty times your size.

A lot of business advice is like this. It is built for organisations with departments. It assumes a budget line, a brand team, a media buy, a person whose entire job is the thing you do on a Thursday evening after everyone has gone home. And when it does not work for you, the implication is always that you have failed to execute — never that the advice was addressed to somebody else.

It was addressed to somebody else.

What the big firms are actually built for

This is not an attack on large agencies. They are extremely good at what they are for, which is serving large clients. That is a real skill and it requires real scale.

But scale has a shape, and the shape has consequences. A large agency needs process, because it has many hands. It needs to make work repeatable, because it cannot rely on one person’s judgement. It needs clients who can absorb a minimum fee that pays for all of that. And so it builds systems that flatten difference, because difference is expensive at volume.

Which means that everything that makes you unusual — the odd origin story, the specific opinion, the fact that your business does not sit tidily in a category — registers to a large agency as friction. Something to be smoothed. Your particularity is a cost to them.

It is the entire product for you.

The overlooked are not a lesser market

I work with tattoo studios and payroll firms and community development trusts and bookkeepers and charities. There is no sector logic to that list at all, and I have stopped trying to invent one.

What they have in common is not what they sell. It is that they have all, at some point, been made to feel like the wrong size or the wrong shape for the help that was on offer. Too small to be taken seriously. Too strange to be understood. Too specific to be worth a proper conversation.

And they are, almost without exception, more interesting to work with than the organisations that were being courted instead. They make decisions in a week rather than a quarter. They know exactly why they exist. When something changes, they change.

Stop apologising for your size

The instinct, when you feel overlooked, is to try to look bigger. To use the plural pronoun when there is only you. To describe a two-person operation in the language of a firm with floors.

It never works, and it costs you the one thing you actually have. Because the people who need you are not looking for a smaller version of a big agency. They are looking for the thing a big agency structurally cannot give them — someone who will look at their specific, awkward, unrepeatable situation and think about it properly.

That is not a consolation prize for not being big. That is the job.

This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.