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A FEW THINGS BEFORE WE GET INTO IT
1) New content series launching this week.
We're starting a dedicated series on how to make your agency AI-native — not the theory, but the actual build. What to install, in what order, with real examples from agencies doing it now. If you want to follow along, we're running it across all the usual channels — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X. Pick wherever you already spend time and follow along there. The newsletter will always be the most complete version, but the social content will pull the most useful pieces out week by week.
We partnered with Viktor.com for part 1 of the series, check it out HERE.
2) The Boardroom fall cohort is now closed.
We filled the founding spots and closed applications. If you applied and didn't hear back, expect an email this week.
3) Two Founder Advisory spots opening in September.
This is 1:1. Not a group. Not a course. Direct advisory support — specifically for founders at six figures or in the early seven-figure range who are ready to step into the actual CEO role and need someone in their corner for the decisions that come with that.
If you've been watching what we build here and thinking "I want someone to work through this with me directly" — this is that. Two spots. September start. If you want to be considered, reply to this email or click apply below. I'll be having short conversations with interested founders over the next few weeks.
WHAT WE’RE DIVING INTO TODAY
There's a sentence most agency founders have said out loud at some point — usually to a partner, sometimes to a peer, occasionally to themselves in a parking lot after a particularly long day:
"I need to stop being so in the weeds."
What happens after that sentence, in most cases, is nothing. Or at least nothing structural. The founder means it when they say it. But "stop being in the weeds" is not an action. It doesn't tell you what to do instead. It doesn't tell you how to hand things off. It doesn't tell you what the alternative looks like on a Tuesday afternoon.
So they go back to what they know — delivery, firefighting, being the most useful person in the building — because that's the job they're actually good at and the one that produces immediate, visible results.
The problem isn't motivation. It's that nobody has defined what the CEO job actually looks like in a 10–30 person PR or marketing agency.
That's what this issue is about.
🗓️ THIS WEEK: The CEO Shift
First, let's name what the shift is not:
→ It's not working less — at least not at first
→ It's not delegating everything and stepping back
→ It's not becoming a figurehead while the team runs things
→ It's not a title or an org chart change
The CEO Shift is a change in what you spend your time on. Not your hours — your content. A founder stuck in delivery and a founder operating as CEO can both be working 45 hours a week. The difference is what those 45 hours contain.
Founder stuck in delivery | Founder operating as CEO |
|---|---|
Writing the proposal because no one else does it as well | Reviewing the proposal structure and coaching the person who wrote it |
On every client call because clients expect you specifically | On the client calls that require your relationship or strategic input — not the status calls |
Making the creative direction decisions because you have the best taste | Setting the quality standard so the team can make creative decisions without you |
Responding to the urgent Slack message before anyone else does | Seeing the Slack message and trusting the team to handle it |
Catching errors before they go to clients | Building the review process that catches errors without you in it |
Growing the business reactively — when a referral comes in | Working on business development as a primary scheduled activity |
The CEO Shift doesn't happen because you decide to stop being in delivery. It happens because you build the structures that make delivery not need you — and then actively fill your time with the work that only a CEO can do.
THE SYSTEM: The 5 CEO Roles
In an AI-native agency at the 10–30 person scale, the founder-as-CEO has five distinct jobs. None of them are delivery. All of them are things only you can do — which is why they're the right use of your time.
ROLE 1 Revenue Architect
You decide which offers exist, how they're priced, which clients you want more of, and what the next 12 months of revenue looks like structurally. Not selling — designing the conditions for selling. Not pitching — deciding what gets pitched and who the right buyers are.
What this looks like in practice: a monthly 90-minute review of your offer stack, client mix, and pipeline. Decisions about which service lines to invest in and which to wind down. Thinking about pricing architecture — not just rates, but how you bundle, position, and tier your work.
ROLE 2 Talent Architect
You decide who's on the team, what each role actually owns, how performance is evaluated, and who's on a growth path vs. a plateau. Not managing day-to-day — designing the team structure and then trusting it.
What this looks like in practice: quarterly role reviews, not daily check-ins. Clear accountability maps so you're not the decision point for every ambiguous situation. Investing in the development of your team's most important people — not because you're their manager, but because their ceiling is the business's ceiling.
ROLE 3 Client Portfolio Manager
You look at your client roster strategically — not as a list of accounts to service, but as a portfolio to manage. Which clients should you grow? Which should you restructure? Which have run their course and are holding the agency back from taking on better work?
What this looks like in practice: a monthly 30-minute client portfolio review. Not a status meeting — a strategic look at which relationships are contributing to where you want the agency to go and which aren't. The conversations that come from this review are CEO conversations, not account manager conversations.
ROLE 4 Systems and AI Strategist
You design how the work gets done — not do the work. You decide which workflows get AI-native-ified and in what sequence. You set the standards that the team and the systems apply. You're the architect of the operating system, not a participant in it.
This is the role that AI-native agencies have clearest and most traditional agencies have least. The founder who is also designing the AI infrastructure of the business is doing CEO work — because they're building the machine that multiplies everything else.
ROLE 5 Strategic Visionary
You hold the 2–3 year direction. Where is the agency positioned in three years? What does the market look like and how are you differentiated in it? What are the strategic bets worth making now that pay off later? These are decisions nobody else in your building is equipped or authorized to make.
What this looks like in practice: quarterly strategic reviews, not just quarterly financial reviews. Reading and thinking about your market — not consuming content, but synthesizing what it means for your agency's direction. Having the conversations (peer groups, advisors, smart clients) that generate strategic input you can't generate alone.
The CEO Operating Rhythm Template maps exactly what each of these five roles looks like in a real agency week — with a time allocation guide and a before/after comparison of how the week changes when you make the shift.
→ Access [HERE]
The CEO Shift is the hardest transition most founders make — not because the work is complicated, but because making it alone, without a sounding board for the specific decisions that come up, is genuinely difficult.
Two Founder Advisory spots are opening in September for six-figure and early seven-figure founders who want 1:1 support navigating exactly this transition. If that sounds like where you are, reach out: [link]
→ Express interest in Founder Advisory: [HERE]
⚡THE ACTION: The CEO Time Audit - 5 Days
Before you can make the CEO Shift, you need to see clearly where you are right now. This week's action is a time audit — simple, five days, no tools required beyond a notes app on your phone.
Score yourself. Three or more is the threshold for action. Five or more means you should have raised rates six months ago.
The audit:
Every hour this week, take 60 seconds to note what you just spent your time on. At the end of each day, sort every block into one of three categories:
→ DELIVERY — doing client work, writing, designing, researching, executing anything that's ultimately for a client
→ MANAGEMENT — supervising, approving, reviewing, answering team questions, being in meetings that are about current work
→ CEO — revenue architecture, talent design, portfolio management, systems strategy, strategic thinking
At the end of five days: what's the percentage split?
Most founders who run this audit for the first time find something like: 65–75% delivery, 20–25% management, 5–10% CEO. Some find the CEO category is effectively zero.
That number — the CEO percentage — is your starting point. The CEO Shift isn't about getting to 100% CEO work. It's about shifting the balance deliberately over 6–12 months until CEO work is the majority of how you spend your time, not the minority.
The CEO Operating Rhythm Template (access HERE) gives you the target to move toward — what the week looks like when the balance is right.
If your audit shows 70%+ delivery and you've been trying to change that for more than a year without success — the problem isn't discipline. It's structure.
The Founder Advisory is for exactly this: a founder who knows what needs to change and needs someone in their corner, with real-time access, as the structural changes get made. Two spots in September.
→ Express interest: [HERE]
🤖 AI CORNER: Build a CEO Intelligence Brief with Claude
One of the most concrete CEO activities — and one of the easiest to install — is a weekly strategic intelligence brief. Not a news summary. A curated, synthesized read on what's moving in your market, what's happening with your competitors, and what you should be thinking about strategically this week.
Most founders skip this entirely because it takes too long to do manually. Here's how to do it in 15 minutes with Claude:
PRMOPT:
"You are my strategic intelligence analyst. Every week I want a 5-section brief that helps me think like a CEO rather than a delivery operator. Here is the context about my agency:
Agency type: [PR / marketing / creative]
Primary client sectors: [e.g. B2B tech, consumer brands]
Revenue range: [e.g. $500K-$2M ARR]
Current strategic priorities: [e.g. AI adoption, niche specialization, pricing increase, team restructure]
Competitors I track: [agency names or types]
Each week, give me:
1. ONE market signal worth paying attention to(industry shift, client behavior change, competitor move)
2. ONE question I should be asking about my business that I probably haven't asked this week
3. ONE decision I've been avoiding that has a cost
4. ONE thing agencies at my revenue level typically get wrong — that I should check I'm not doing
5. ONE concrete CEO action that would move the business forward if I did it this week
Keep each section to 3-4 sentences. Be direct. I don't need context-setting — just the signal and the implication."
🛠️ TOOLS OF THE WEEK
Your voice. Every platform. No writing required.
You ghost your own socials by Wednesday. SureThing learns your voice and ships native posts to LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and TikTok, without you writing a thing.
This week's picks are oriented around CEO-level thinking — research, knowledge management, and operating at a higher altitude than delivery.
Perplexity perplexity.ai
AI research engine that searches the web and synthesizes answers with citations — far better than Google for strategic research questions that need a synthesized answer, not a list of links. For the CEO-level activities in this issue: market intelligence, competitor research, industry trend synthesis. The Pro version adds real-time search across Wolfram Alpha, Reddit, and academic sources. Free tier is genuinely useful; Pro is $20/month.
Mem mem.ai
Self-organizing AI knowledge base that connects your notes automatically without manual tagging or filing. Write anything — a client observation, a strategic thought, a competitor note — and Mem surfaces related content when it's relevant. For founders building the CEO intelligence function: captures the institutional knowledge that currently lives in your head and makes it retrievable. Stronger than Notion for unstructured, fast-capture thinking. Paid from $14.99/month.
Superhuman superhuman.com
Email rebuilt for speed — keyboard-first, AI-powered triage, split inbox, and a social graph that surfaces who matters in your inbox. For founders making the CEO Shift, email is often the biggest time drain that's not delivery but also isn't CEO work. Superhuman compresses email processing time significantly, which returns hours to the week that can go to the five CEO roles. Starts at $30/month. Worth a trial if email is genuinely eating your time.
Coda coda.io
Doc + spreadsheet + database hybrid that's better than Notion for building structured strategic planning documents — OKR trackers, strategic roadmaps, board decks, and quarterly reviews that connect to live data. For agencies formalizing their CEO rhythm: a Coda doc that holds your annual goals, quarterly priorities, client portfolio review, and team org structure in one connected place. Free tier available; paid from $12/month per maker.
AI meeting transcription that integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams — records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings automatically. Different from Granola (which works without a call platform) and Fathom (which is stronger on sales calls) — Otter is designed for teams who want a shared, searchable record of all internal meetings. For agencies formalizing CEO-level meetings (strategic reviews, leadership calls, board conversations), Otter creates a permanent searchable record. Free tier: 300 minutes/month; paid from $16.99/month.
📊 BY THE NUMBERS
The number that should bother you
If your most important long-term decisions — who to hire, how to price, where to position, which AI systems to build — are being made in the margins of a week that's mostly delivery, they're being made poorly. Not because you're not smart enough to make them well, but because strategic decisions made between client deliverables and team check-ins don't get the depth they require.
11%.
That's the average percentage of time agency founders at the $500K–$2M revenue range spend on what they'd call strategic or CEO-level work — based on time audit data from founders who've gone through operational assessments. The rest is split between delivery (roughly 60%) and management (roughly 29%).
For context: research on high-growth professional services firms consistently shows founders who spend 30%+ of their time on strategic activities grow 2–3x faster than those spending less than 15%. Not because strategy is magic — because the decisions that compound (pricing, positioning, talent, systems) only get made if someone is making them.
🔗In Case You Missed It…
AUDIT: Agency AI Value Audit: See if your agency is really AI-native
GUIDE w. prompts: Higgsfield MCP + Flutterflow MCP guides (including what the heck is an MCP) 7 minute read
GUIDE w. prompts: Client Onboarding: The Automation Workflow 9 minute read
GUIDE w. prompts: Claude Managed Agents Build Spec 13 minute read
Take the Operational Debt Scorecard Quiz and see where you’re leaving money on the table
TEMPLATE: Delegation Systems Pack
TOOLKIT: Price Ceiling Toolkit: Part 1 (Pricing Audit Worksheet) and Part 2 (Price Increase SOP with conversation scripts for all three client tiers)
📣 BEFORE YOU GO
Two things:
The CEO Operating Rhythm Template is the free companion to this issue — what the five CEO roles look like mapped across a real agency week, with a before/after comparison and a time allocation guide. Access: [here]
And if you're a six-figure or early seven-figure founder ready to make the CEO Shift with direct advisory support — two spots are opening in September. Reach out to express interest: HERE or reply to this email.
See you next week.
Work smart. Enjoy life harder.
Erin James Murphy
Founder, Agency Owner Lab
When you're ready, here's how we can work together:
→ Agency AI Adoption Assessment + Engagement — Custom AI strategy for your agency. Plus option to add 3 months of fractional ops support to make sure adoption sticks. [Apply here]
→ Agency Growth Roadmap — Operational audit + systems strategy. [Apply here]
→ Founder Advisory — Your advisor. Your business partner. For the founder who uses AI for strategy but wants a real human to strategize with. Quarterly commitments. [Apply Here]
→ Implementation Sprints — done-for-you systems builds, Standalone or paired with another program. [Book a Systems Audit]
→ Agency OS Lab (Community Membership) — SOPs, Claude installs, tool stacks. $97/month. [Join the waitlist here]