Your agency still sells through you. A ten-day audit shows how much, and the one thing to change first.
A fixed-scope diagnostic for founder-led agencies. Ten working days, a written read your team owns, and a fee that credits toward the work that follows.
Fixed fee, quoted up front. Creditable against the work that follows. Yours to keep either way.
Where growth gets stuck on one person
Founder-led agencies tend to stall the same way. The work is good and the clients are happy, and almost every meaningful deal still traces back to the founder. When the founder is heads-down on delivery, the pipeline goes quiet. Most owners can feel this. Few can see exactly how deep it runs, or which single change would loosen it.
Founder-dependent pipeline.
Every meaningful deal traces back to the founder's relationships. When the founder is on delivery, new business slows.
The reactive ceiling.
Work arrives through referral and inbound. With no engine for proactive selling, growth caps at the size of the founder's network.
Concentration risk.
A handful of accounts carry the business. Comfortable, until one of them leaves.
Stalled expansion.
New markets, new service lines, and brand equity stay on the someday list, because no one owns the selling that would fund them.
A paid read, not a sales call
The founder-dependency audit is a fixed-scope diagnostic of how much your agency's selling depends on you, and the single change that would reduce that the most over the next ninety days. It is built from your own numbers and a short set of interviews, not from opinion or best-practice slides. It is paid, it is delivered in writing, and it is yours to keep whether or not anything follows. The point is not more advice. It is the proof of where the dependency sits, a number against it, and one prioritized move.
What lands on the table
A founder-dependency score.
How dependent your growth is on you, scored across the parts of selling that trap it.
The one binding constraint.
The single thing most responsible for keeping growth tied to you, named in plain language with the evidence behind it.
What the dependency costs.
A grounded estimate, built from your own numbers, of the revenue and risk riding on you today.
A short list of quick wins.
Changes you can make inside thirty days that reduce the dependency now.
A ninety-day plan.
What to build, in priority order, with owners, to move from selling that needs you to selling that does not.
One working asset.
A real, usable piece built during the ten days, for example an account-scoring sheet on your actual accounts. Proof of the standard, not a mockup.
A live walkthrough.
Ninety minutes with you and your leadership to walk the read, pressure-test it, and agree the priorities.
Everything is written and yours to keep. None of it is a slide deck.
Ten working days, three phases
Phase one, evidence.
Days one to four.
We work from your pipeline, your recent wins and losses, your top accounts, and a few short interviews to see where selling actually depends on you.
Phase two, synthesis.
Days five to seven.
We score the dependency, find the one constraint that matters most, and put a number on what it costs. A short checkpoint with you confirms the direction before anything is finalized.
Phase three, decision.
Days eight to ten.
We deliver the written read, the ninety-day plan, and the working asset, and walk you and your leadership through all of it.
One principal runs the whole engagement, remotely. Fixed scope, fixed fee, fixed timeline.
The fee, and why the first invoice is not wasted
The audit is a fixed fee, quoted up front. No hourly billing, and nothing to negotiate mid-way. If you go on to a build engagement within thirty days, the full fee credits against it. If you do not, the read, the plan, the score, and the asset are yours, with no further obligation on either side. The plan is yours either way. You can run it in-house or take it to another builder.
Where the lines are
- Not a free discovery call. It is a paid deliverable, which is why it goes deeper and the access is better.
- Not a full marketing or go-to-market audit. The lens is founder-dependency. Other functions are read only where they bear on it.
- Not a workflow or automation project. No process maps, no tooling. That is a different engagement.
- Not a promise of leads or meetings. We diagnose the system and the plan. Volume depends on your market and reputation, which the audit reads honestly rather than promising.
- Not a slide deck. The read is a written document.
- Not a coach's call series or a seat on your org chart. We build the selling function, we do not rent it back to you.
Calibrated for a specific kind of agency
For founder-led agencies, roughly one million to fifteen million dollars in revenue, where you or a small group close most of the meaningful work. Strongest fit is creative, brand, design, content, and adjacent professional services, in any market.
It is not for pre-revenue agencies, performance-media shops looking for a media buyer, or owners who want a coach rather than a builder.
One path, three ways forward
Run the ninety-day plan yourself, with us available for check-ins. Bring us in for the build, where we stand up the selling function and the audit fee credits against it. Or move to a retainer for ongoing pipeline origination, account intelligence, and brand-true content. The aim is a function your team can run without us.
Who runs it
Sebastian Shimomichi runs SSA and takes a small number of engagements at a time, by design, so each one gets real attention. The work spans five markets, the United States, the UK and Ireland, the UAE and KSA, Singapore and Hong Kong, and Japan, with delivery available in Japanese.
What founders usually ask
A first conversation is free and direct
Tell us where the agency is trying to go and what is currently broken about how new business comes in. You will get an honest read within two business days on whether the audit is the right next step.