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Agency Advisory Services

Expert advisory to help agency founders grow with clarity, better decisions, and sustainable performance.

Book a Discovery Call with Gareth
Gareth Healey, marketing agency advisor and founder of Agents of Change

What Agency Advisory Is

All advisory work is delivered directly by me, Gareth.

I work with agency founders as a retained advisor.

This is not consultancy, coaching, mentorship, or non executive director work. It is ongoing commercial advisory focused on improving decision quality, business structure, and long term performance.

I work with founders over time, not on isolated projects or occasional conversations. The focus is on strengthening the whole agency, not fixing isolated issues.

Agency advisor Gareth Healey presenting the Standout Agency System to a client. The screen shows a yellow and black circular diagram featuring the core pillars: Profit, Growth, and Control, surrounded by operational sectors like Technology, Sales, Team, Ambition, Numbers, Development, Operations, and Uniqueness.

I help you:

  • make better commercial decisions

  • see blind spots you are too close to recognise

  • challenge assumptions that feel true but are untested

  • bring structure to ambition, growth, and complexity

  • reduce founder dependence by strengthening the business system

This work spans strategy, numbers, team, operations, positioning, and ambition.

I sit outside your agency, but inside your thinking

What Agency Advisory Is Not

Many ex agency owners default to familiar labels. Coach. Consultant. Mentor. NXD.

I don’t.

Despite running my own £12M agency for 15 years, my work is not built on reliving my own agency story or offering confidence based on experience alone. I’ve been an agency advisor for 8 years and have learnt more in that time than I did when managing my own agency. My work as an advisor is built on structured judgement, commercial reality, and a clear operating system for agencies.

If you are looking for borrowed certainty or reassurance, this will feel uncomfortable. That is deliberate.

To avoid confusion, this work is not:

Coaching: This is not mindset work or non directive support. I am sceptical, challenging, and opinionated. Reassurance comes from working with me (not directly from me at every meeting).

Mentorship: This is typically informal, experience led, and relationship based. It relies on personal perspective and advice when asked. My work is structured, commercial, and system focused. I’m not here to share war stories or act as a sounding board on demand.

Non Executive Director: People use this label without truly understanding what it means. I only ever work at board level and often attend board meetings. However, I am not a statutory NED / NXD and do not hold fiduciary or governance responsibility. My role is to challenge thinking, improve decision quality, and strengthen commercial judgement, not to provide legal oversight or solely represent the interests of shareholders.

Fractional leadership: I do not run your business for you. If you’re looking for tactics alone, validation, or someone to tell you what you want to hear, we will not be a good fit.

That’s where I come in.

How Agency Advisory Works

Agency advisor Gareth Healey reviewing data on a laptop during a private consulting session with an agency founder. Gareth is smiling and wearing a navy button-down shirt in a bright, modern office with green plants in the background.

My agency advisory suits founders who:

  • Want clarity, not comfort

  • Are open to being challenged

  • Care about long term performance, not short term fixes

I am here to:

  • Question important decisions before they are finalised

  • Challenge the stories founders tell themselves

  • Apply structure and discipline where emotion creeps i

You remain accountable for decisions and execution.

My role is to improve the quality of your decision-making. If that feels demanding, it should.

Ways We Can Work Together

My Agency Advisory work takes two forms.

In both cases, the role is the same. I act as an independent agency advisor focused on improving decision quality, commercial structure, and long term performance.

What changes is the format and intensity of the relationship, not the standard.

1. Retained Agency Advisory (One to One)

This is direct, ongoing advisory work with individual agency founders and their senior teams.

I work closely with you over time, challenging decisions, pressure testing thinking, and helping you apply structure across the whole agency. Strategy, numbers, team, operations, positioning, and ambition.

This is the highest intensity form of the work and suits founders who want deep, personalised challenge and accountability.

Agency advisor Gareth Healey seated at a round black table with a laptop, listening intently to a female agency founder who is taking notes in a yellow notebook. A yellow mug is visible on the table.

2. Group Agency Advisory Programmes

I also deliver structured group advisory programmes for agency founders.

These programmes apply the same commercial discipline and systems thinking in a group environment. Founders benefit from shared challenge, exposure to patterns across multiple agencies, and structured decision frameworks.

My colleague, Callum, supports with training on AI adoption and integration.

This format suits founders who want strong structure and challenge, but do not require – or are not ready for – full one to one advisory.

Agency advisor Gareth Healey and AI lead Callum Healey in a boardroom workshop with a group of marketing agency founders and team members. The group is seated around a long wooden table with laptops and notebooks.

Which format is right for you?

Why "STANDOUT Agency"?

If you’re curious about the ideas that underpin my advisory approach – and want a no-nonsense read on how agencies win or stall – my book STANDOUT or Die is a great place to start.

It will also help you understand whether my philosophy and approach align with how you believe agencies should grow, because without that alignment, advisory rarely works.

Discover The Book

FAQs

Agency advisory is retained, ongoing support for agency founders focused on improving commercial decision-making, business structure, and long-term performance. It is not a project, a report, or a one-off consultation. Gareth works with you over time – challenging your thinking, pressure-testing your decisions, and helping you build a stronger, more profitable agency.

Coaching focuses on mindset and personal development. Mentorship is informal and experience-led. Advisory is neither. Gareth’s work is structured, commercially focused, and system-driven. He is sceptical, challenging, and opinionated – not a sounding board on demand. If you want reassurance, this isn’t it. If you want better decisions and a stronger business, it is.

Consultants run projects, deliver recommendations, and disappear. Gareth doesn’t. He works with founders over time, staying involved in the decisions that matter – not handing over a document and moving on. The difference is accountability and continuity.

Gareth challenges assumptions, identifies blind spots, applies structure to complexity, and improves the quality of decisions across strategy, numbers, team, operations, positioning, and ambition. He sits outside your agency but inside your thinking – independent enough to be honest, close enough to understand the business.

There are two formats. Retained one-to-one advisory is direct, ongoing work with individual founders – the highest intensity format, with deep personalised challenge and accountability. Group advisory programmes apply the same commercial rigour in a group setting, where founders benefit from shared challenge and exposure to patterns across multiple agencies.

Agency advisory is designed for independent marketing agencies with revenues between £400k and £2m. Typically 5-30 people. Founders who are still materially involved in the business and who want to grow without becoming more dependent on themselves.

This is retained work, not a fixed-term project. Most founders work with Gareth over an extended period – typically a minimum of six months to see meaningful structural change. The relationship continues as long as it’s creating value. There are no artificial end dates.

One-to-one retained advisory is priced at £1,500 + VAT per month. Group advisory programmes vary – contact Agents of Change for current programme details and availability.

Results depend on where the agency is starting from and how seriously the founder engages with the work. Clients have achieved revenue growth of 86%, made strategic decisions they wouldn’t have reached alone, and fundamentally repositioned their businesses. The consistent outcomes are greater clarity, stronger margins, reduced founder dependency, and better commercial control.

If you want clarity, not comfort – and you’re open to being challenged on decisions you’ve already half-made – then probably yes. If you’re looking for validation, borrowed certainty, or someone to tell you what you want to hear, Gareth is not the right fit. The work is demanding by design. That’s what makes it effective.

The first step is a discovery call. Gareth reviews where your agency is now, what’s holding it back, and whether advisory is the right next step. Book directly at weareagentsofchange.com/contact.