Episode 10: Why agencies struggle with commercial accountability (and how to fix it)

Commercial accountability is the degree to which everyone in your agency understands, owns, and acts in alignment with commercial reality - revenue, margins, efficiency, and value creation. When it works well, there's goal congruence: every person understands their role in helping the agency hit its targets. When it breaks down, you get talented people doing good work that doesn't move the needle.

Why founders start with an advantage

Founders are commercially accountable by default. Their livelihood and future wealth depend on the business performing - and that shapes every decision instinctively. In small agencies, that drive transfers naturally. The team is tight-knit, the founder is present, and commercial thinking rubs off through proximity. Nobody needs a formal framework when the person whose name is on the door is sitting next to you.

Where it starts to break down

The trouble starts around the ten-person mark. More people are doing more different things. The founder is less present. New hires arrive with habits absorbed from previous agencies - which may have had very different commercial cultures, or none at all. The result is dilution. What was once absorbed through proximity now needs to be taught, modelled, and reinforced deliberately.

The founder blind spot

There's a harder truth here too. Many founders lack commercial acumen themselves - excellent at delivery, but weak on business fundamentals. Utilisation reports, timesheeting, margin analysis: either not prioritised or actively avoided.

This creates a serious cultural problem. People take their cues from leadership. If the founder isn't tracking the numbers, the team won't be either. You can't pass down something you don't have yourself.

The training and process gap

Even commercially-minded founders often fail to formalise their instincts. In the early days, osmosis works. As the agency grows and the founder becomes more detached from delivery, that informal education disappears, and nothing replaces it. The result is a common and painful pattern: holding people accountable for processes that were never defined. The reactive approach, letting teams operate on instinct in good times, then cracking down when things go wrong, breeds resentment and confusion in equal measure.

How to fix it

The fix isn't complicated, but it requires intention.

Define your commercial processes clearly before problems arise. Educate your team on how their work connects to agency performance - people who understand the bigger picture make far better decisions autonomously.

Most importantly, model the behaviour yourself. Commercial culture starts at the top. If founders are tracking numbers, talking openly about margins, and making visibly commercial decisions, the team will follow.

The agencies that get this right don't treat commercial accountability as a finance function. They treat it as a leadership responsibility, and they start building it long before they need it.