What does an agency owner do?
An agency owner is the person whose name is on the risk. They may have founded the agency, bought into it or inherited it, and they own some or all of its equity. The role carries everything: the vision for what the agency is, the clients it chooses, the people it hires, the quality of the work, the cash in the bank and the decisions nobody else can make. At a small agency the owner is also the creative director, the new business lead and the person who signs the checks. At a larger one they may run the company and leave the work to others, though the best rarely do.
Agency ownership is unusual among businesses because the product is people and taste. There is no inventory, no factory and no patent, only the reputation of the work and the loyalty of the team, both of which walk out of the door every evening.
Why it matters
Why an agency owner matters
An agency is its owner, scaled up. The owner's taste sets the bar for the work, their appetite for risk decides which clients get taken on, their values become the culture, and their relationship with money decides whether the place is calm or frantic. Clients feel all of it. When they choose a boutique they are usually choosing the owner, and the agencies that last are the ones where that person has stayed close to the work and honest about the business.
Ownership also means independence. An owner answers to clients and staff, not to a holding company's quarterly numbers, which is what lets an independent agency say no to the wrong work and yes to the strange idea.
In practice
How an agency owner works in practice
- 01
The owner's week is a split screen. On one side, the work: pitching, directing, reviewing, being the final eye on anything that carries the name. On the other, the business: cash flow, pricing, hiring and firing, contracts, insurance, rent, and the slow work of building a pipeline so that the next quarter exists. New business is usually the owner's job whether they like it or not, because clients buy the founder. Over time a good owner builds a senior team that can carry the day to day, so that they can choose where to spend their attention rather than being pulled everywhere at once.
- 02
Many owners also build things beyond client work: products, studios, side ventures. Partly as a hedge against the feast-and-famine rhythm of agency life, partly because an agency full of makers tends to make.
At RIOT
Agency owners at RIOT
RIOT was founded in 2015 in New York's East Village by Chris "Mug5" Maguire, who is still the founder and executive creative director and now runs the company from Hudson Yards and Clifton, New Jersey. The owner here is the creative director, in the pitch and in the edit, and the relationships that define the agency, more than a decade with Coach among them, have been carried by him for their whole length. The ownership has also produced products of its own: Krova, production software; AltSounds, a music video channel; Muvvoo, a music video database; and vandal_, a creative shop. That is what an agency owner who is also a maker tends to do with the spare hours.
Watch out
What people get wrong about agency owners
Thinking the owner's job is the work. The work is the reason the agency exists, but the job is the business that lets the work happen, and owners who ignore cash flow, contracts and pricing do not get to keep making work for long. The second mistake is the opposite: stepping so far from the work that the agency becomes a management company with a creative department. The third is growing for its own sake. An agency that doubles its headcount to serve clients it does not like has traded a good small business for a worse large one.
