Erin James Murphy

I want to tell you about a founder who ran a PR agency for eleven years and had never actually left the delivery.

Not fully. She was always in it somewhere. Reviewing pitches. Joining client calls. Catching things before they went out.

$1.4M in revenue. Team of nine. Still could not disconnect.

When we started working together, she said something that a lot of founders say.

""If I step back, things fall apart.""

And she was right. At that moment, they would have.

But that was not a reason to stay in. That was a description of what needed to be built.

We spent four months building the systems, the decision frameworks, and the accountability structures that her team needed to operate without her in everything.

Then we built the same things into their AI workflows so the quality standard was baked into the process instead of dependent on her review.

She did not step back all at once. It happened gradually. Then one day she realized she had not touched a single client deliverable in three weeks.

She told me that felt surreal. Like she had finally stopped being an employee of her own company.

That is what the work is actually for. Not the systems themselves. What the systems make possible.

A digital marketing agency founder told me something last fall that stuck with me.

"We started using AI for content and now my whole team produces output that sounds the same. Clients are noticing."

They had rolled out AI tools without any guidelines for how to use them. No brand voice documentation. No review process for AI-assisted work. No training on where AI was appropriate and where it was not.

Everyone just started using it however made sense to them.

The output got faster. The quality got flatter. And a few clients started asking why the work felt different.

The tool was not the problem. The implementation was.

When AI gets rolled out without workflow design, one of two things happens. Either people use it wrong and the output suffers, or people do not use it at all and nothing changes.

What they actually needed was not more tools. It was a structured approach to where AI fit into their delivery model and where human judgment had to stay in the process.

The agencies getting this right are not the ones with the most AI tools. They are the ones who were deliberate about how AI changes the workflow, not just whether it does.

Speed without quality standards is just faster mediocrity.

A PR agency founder I work with lost her best account manager last year. The person who had been there five years, knew every client, and had relationships the founder thought were irreplaceable.

She called me the day after the resignation. Genuinely scared.

"Everything is in her head. I do not know how we survive this."

What she did not realize is that we had spent the previous eight months getting things out of people's heads and into documented systems.

Client communication history was in the CRM, not in someone's inbox.
Account processes were documented and the team had been trained on them.
Client preferences, quirks, and relationship context were in structured account briefs that lived in the agency's shared drive.

The transition was not painless. But it was manageable. A new account manager was fully operational on those accounts within six weeks.

Before we did that work, the same situation would have been a genuine crisis. Clients might have walked. Revenue would have been at risk.

Key person dependency is one of the most common and most underestimated risks in agencies. Every time critical knowledge lives in one person, you are one resignation away from a problem.

The system that saves you in that moment is the same system that makes the business scalable in the normal moments.

It is worth building before you need it.

Eight years in. Hundreds of conversations with agency founders. Dozens of deep operational reviews.

Here is what we find almost every single time, regardless of revenue size, team size, or service type.

The founder is doing at least three things that should not require the founder.

Not because they want to. Not because they are control freaks. Because nobody ever built the system that would let someone else do it.

The pitch goes to the founder for a final read before it sends. Not because the team cannot write. Because nobody ever defined what a ready-to-send pitch actually looks like.

The client calls the founder when something feels off. Not because they distrust the team. Because the team was never given the authority or the framework to handle it.

The founder is in every billing conversation. Not because they do not trust the numbers. Because the process for how billing gets handled was never documented or handed off.

These are not big problems. But they accumulate. And every one of them has a cost in founder time, founder mental load, and agency ceiling.

The work is not convincing founders to let go. Most of them want to.

The work is building the infrastructure that makes letting go safe.

I have been advising agency owners since 2018. Hundreds of conversations. Business coaching, operations consulting, implementation.

The single highest-leverage thing I have ever seen an agency owner do is get in a room with the right three or four other owners.

Not a room of 50. Not a conference. Not a Facebook group. A small, real group of people at the same stage, dealing with the same problems, willing to share real numbers and real decisions.

Every time I have seen that happen, things move faster. Pricing gets fixed in one conversation. A hiring decision that was stalling for weeks gets made. A service offering that was underpriced for two years gets corrected because someone else in the room says "we charge double that and nobody blinks."

The problem is that room almost never forms naturally. Agency owners are busy. They do not go looking for peers. And the existing masterminds are built for a different kind of agency.

Boardroom is my attempt to build the room that keeps not existing on its own.
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Comment BOARDROOM if you want an application or message me with questions.

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with running a $2M agency.

You have grown past the point where most business advice applies to you. The general stuff does not fit anymore.

Your problems are not startup problems. They are scale problems. Leadership problems. ""Do I hire a COO or a Director of Client Services first"" problems. ""What does my agency actually need to look like for me to eventually step back"" problems.

And the people around you either do not have context for those problems or have a vested interest in how you answer them.

What I see founders at this stage need more than anything is a room.

Not a course. Not a coach. A room where the other people in it are running agencies at the same level, dealing with the same decisions, and willing to say what actually happened when they tried something.

The value of that room is not information. You have information. It is perspective from people who have already been where you are.

I have built that room for agency founders at the $1M to $15M mark. And the conversations that happen in it are different from anything I see in broader business communities.

Because everyone in it knows what it actually costs to run a team. To hold a client relationship at scale. To try to grow something without it consuming everything.

If you are at that level and you are doing it mostly alone, you do not have to be.

The question is not "should I join a mastermind?"

The question is: how many decisions did you make alone last month that would have been better with a real peer in the room?

If the answer is more than two, you already know the gap exists.
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Comment BOARDROOM if you want an application or message me with questions.

"Our clients keep asking for more and we keep saying yes."

I hear this constantly. And I get it. Saying no to a client feels risky. Especially when you need the renewal.

But scope creep is not a client problem. It is a contracts-and-systems problem.

I worked with a $700K marketing agency last year where about 30% of the work being delivered every month was not in any retainer agreement. Just things that had accumulated over time because nobody had ever pushed back.

When we mapped it out, the founder was shocked by the number. She knew it was happening but had no idea how bad it had gotten.

We built three things:

• A scope document that was part of every client agreement and reviewed at 90-day intervals
• A simple internal process for what happens when a client asks for something outside that scope
• A script the account team could use to have that conversation without it feeling awkward

Within a quarter, two clients had moved to higher retainers because the conversation had finally happened. One client pushed back and they were honestly not a fit anyway.

Scope creep does not happen because clients are unreasonable. It happens because nobody ever built the system that makes the boundaries visible and easy to maintain.

If your team does not have a clear, practiced way to say "that is outside of what we agreed," they will just keep saying yes. And your margin will keep disappearing quietly.

A founder I advise told me his biggest client called last month and asked why their team needed three people on the account when "AI can do most of this now."

The client was wrong about what AI can actually do. But that did not matter. The conversation still happened. And it shook him.

He spent the next week wondering whether his pricing model was defensible. Whether the retainer made sense. Whether the client was about to leave.

What he actually needed was not an AI strategy. It was a conversation with three other agency owners who had fielded the same call from their own clients and figured out what to say.

That is one of the things happening inside agencies right now that most people outside the industry do not see. Clients are using AI as leverage in pricing conversations, whether they understand it or not.

If you are navigating that alone, you are doing it the hard way.
_______________________
Comment BOARDROOM if you want an application or message me with questions.

A founder came to me last year convinced she needed to fire two of her account managers.

"They keep dropping the ball. Clients are complaining. I have had the same conversations with them three times."

Before we talked about the team, I asked her to walk me through what the account managers were actually supposed to do. Not the job description. The actual workflow.

She could not.

Not because she did not know her business. Because it had never been written down. The expectations lived in her head and she had assumed her team could read them.

So her account managers were doing their best interpretation of a job that had no defined boundaries, no clear deliverables, and no documented process for anything.

We did not fire anyone.

We spent six weeks building out the account management workflow from scratch. What happens in week one of a new client. What a monthly reporting cycle looks like. What gets escalated and what does not. How client communication flows and what the response time expectations are.

Then we trained the team on it.

Two months later both account managers were performing well. The complaints stopped. The founder stopped having the same conversations over and over.

You cannot manage people to a standard you have not defined. Most performance problems in agencies are not people problems. They are clarity problems.

Before you decide someone needs to go, ask yourself if they ever actually had a real system to work inside of.