Your Agency Doesn't Have a Sales Problem.
It Has a People Problem
Most agency consultants will talk your ear off about funnels, pipelines, and processes. They're not wrong, but they're missing the plotline that's actually keeping you up at night:
That time when your best designer just quit after only nine months
Why you are reviewing every client brief but you’re afraid what will happen if you don’t
How you secretly dread what will happen to your overworked team if they actually land that dream client.
Most agency owners I talk to think they have a sales problem, a marketing problem, or a prioritization problem. They're trying to fix the lead gen, the project plan, or the profit margin. But after years of watching them struggle, I've realized they're all looking in the wrong place. The real barriers to growth aren't in your marketing plan or Trello board; they're in your org chart.
My name is Dan, and my expertise isn't in slinging copy or ads in an agency—it's in the art and science of developing the people inside them. I use my 15+ years in Learning & Development to fix the human-centric problems and systemic friction that actually stalls agency growth.
I don't help you build a better agency; I help you build a better team that can.
If this sounds familiar, you're in the right place
You're not just imagining it. The real problems that keep your agency from scaling feel less like a spreadsheet and more like this:
Carlos, your best designer is quitting, and you just hired him this year.
Your to-do list always involves reviewing a client brief because you don’t trust Ashley, your most experienced account manager.
When you lost that recent deal, part of you was happy because you didn’t know how your SEO team could have handled it with their currently-overdue backlog.
The great thing about people problems is that they’re solvable and I can show you how.
Circa 2016, where I was travelling every month to run my new hire onboarding program to 15-35 new hires every class while also running company-wide training programs and managing the customer-facing learning programs. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever held because the people made it a great place to work.
My superpower isn't running an agency.
It's developing the people who do.
For over 15 years, I’ve been teaching organizations how to scale. I wasn't just building training programs; I was on the front lines of hyper-growth, architecting the talent systems for a tech company as it scaled from 500 to over 2,000 employees. Later, I moved inside the agency world itself, re-imagining the onboarding experience for a 38,000-person global marketing organization.
Circa 2021, where I was Chief Operating Officer at a startup networking organization, responsible for building the internal infrastructure, team, and revenue pipeline to host a 6K+ attendee conference…for free. The team was what made the long days delightful.
I saw what it took to solve "people problems" at a massive scale.
But I also saw a huge disconnect.
The agency world was full of the most creative, fast-moving people I'd ever met. Yet they were constantly fighting the same fires that big corporations had already learned how to prevent: preventable burnout, high turnover of their best talent, and founders who were so trapped in the day-to-day that they couldn't lead. They had brilliant ideas but lacked the human infrastructure to support them.
I watched as countless sales consultants and brand strategists failed to solve problems for small marketing agencies. Sure, these experts produced clear action plans, glossy brand books, and configured project management softwares…yet it didn’t move the needle. Or moved it downward as the agency failed to adopt the change.
The best sales process fails if your people don’t follow it.
See How It Works: A Case Study
It’s one thing to talk about a new approach; it’s another to see it in action. MillerMedia7 was a successful creative agency, but their team felt like they were "winging it" with an inconsistent sales pipeline and a confusing brand story that was holding them back.
That's why I founded Learn to Scale.
I took everything I learned from the trenches of corporate L&D, my experience as an operator building and scaling business units from scratch, and my consulting with startups and scale-ups to create a new kind of consultancy.
I don't just teach you leadership theory. I help you build the practical, durable systems for hiring, training, and leading that allow your agency to grow without breaking your culture.
Ready to Pinpoint Your Agency's Real Growth Blocker?
The first step is a Agency Talent & Culture Audit. This isn't a sales call; it's a strategic working session. We will dig into your current challenges, diagnose the systemic friction holding your team back, and you will walk away with a clear, actionable plan to address it.
A Little More About CEO and Founder Dan Newman
With over fifteen years in the learning and development space, Dan has been teaching sales teams, marketing professionals, support organizations, and executive leadership how to effectively learn and grow. As part of his talent development experiences, Dan has launched product lines, run organization-wide change management programs, spoken at numerous conferences on employee engagement strategies, and coached senior leaders on blending strategy and tactics to achieve business and personal success.
Dan specializes in strategy, training, and business operations with a particular passion for small service-based businesses.
Dan is a Certified Professional in Talent Development from the Association for Talent Development, the pinnacle achievement from one of the largest organizations in talent development.