🌉 Bristol – 8th September 2025
🐝 Manchester – 9th September 2025
Operations used to be the stuff that happened quietly in the background.
Today, it’s the engine for every ambitious agency trying to grow, scale, or simply stay sane.
New challenges for agencies pop up every day:
- Too many platforms daisy-chained together.
- Too many dashboards no one consults or can interpret properly.
- Too many complexities with hybrid working and keeping talent.
And when you’re bogged down in ops systems that don’t scale, neither do your teams.
The agencies that thrive are the ones that make operations a strategic priority, not an afterthought.
At Agency Growth Summit, we’re gathering the people who’ve been through the mess, and lived to tell the tale. This is your chance to pause, rethink, and streamline your way forward.
You’ll hear how others are simplifying their ops, choosing tools that work, and building systems that scale, without sacrificing creativity or culture.
Join us at Agency Growth Summit to find the inspiration you need to take you where you want to go.
What is Agency Growth Summit?
Agency Growth Summit is an afternoon that will help you get inspired, and meet other people that you can learn from.
- It’s aimed at agency leaders and their operations leaderships. It’s a blend of interactive talks and group discussion.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
What to expect?
- Conversations with leaders who are growing their agencies: We’ll look at how leaders are dismantling broken processes and reducing complexity. Learn from people who’ve swapped tool sprawl for simplicity, and know how to keep it that way.
- Avoiding the ‘Tyranny of Choice’: Learn how to confidently choose tech that fits your agency, and avoid ending up with 15 dashboards you don’t need. A car needs one dashboard. Your ops should, too.
- Processes that will actually scale with you: Discover how agencies are future-proofing their operations so that they don’t collapse when they hire two more people, or land two new clients.
Productive x Agency Hackers
Agency Growth Summit is in partnership with Productive.io.
- Purpose-built for agencies, Productive.io lets you get a firm grip on business operations, increase cross-company visibility and drive profitability.
- By consolidating resource planning, project management, and financial tracking, Productive.io offers real-time insights into your business performance.
- With in-depth audience data spanning 50+ markets, you’ll be able to fine-tune pitches, tell more original stories, and spot the perfect partnerships for your clients.
Bristol Speakers
When it comes to automation in agency ops, it can be tempting to look to AI. But AI isn’t a magic tool that will fix all your problems.
Stephen Pratley joined Emerging Communications, when the business ran almost entirely on spreadsheets. “Not even the same spreadsheets,” Stephen says. “I’ve been going through killing spreadsheets left, right, and centre.”
He’s been on a mission to centralise systems and build the right foundations so everyone is looking at the same numbers.
Instead of chasing new tools, Stephen shadowed teams and mapped out issues, making every automation deliberately.
“You can’t automate everything on day one,” he explains. “Make sure people are doing the right things before automating them out.”
What he’s done isn’t flashy. But it works.
Now, people are suggesting automation themselves. The bigger lesson? When to automate is as important as how.
Read more.
When it comes to systems in agency ops, the real challenge isn’t building them. It’s choosing the right ones in the first place.
Jon Payne, RevOps, has a long history in agency life – and he’s seen firsthand what happens when your tech stack spirals out of control.
“It starts with good intentions,” says Jon. “You add a tool here, a dashboard there. And suddenly, you’ve got 15 dashboards and no one’s looking at any of them.”
Jon calls it “the tyranny of choice”, the overwhelming number of tools and systems available, and the paralysis that often follows. “Either you don’t make a decision and you stick with something crap,” he says, “or you try to solve it and make it worse.”
But you need to bring everything into one place.
“It’s like a car,” he says. “You can see your speed, your temperature, your fuel maybe – you don’t need 15 different dashboards. No one’s looking at that. We’re not astronauts.”
At Agency Growth Summit, Jon will explore why simplicity is the future, and that standing out doesn’t require more tools – just better thinking.
Read more.
When it comes to building ops that actually scale, Alicia Grimes believes it’s not just about process, it’s about people.
“It doesn’t matter how many fancy workflows you have in place – if your people don’t know how to use them, everything will break,” says Alicia, co-founder of The Future Kind Collective
At the heart of her work is what she calls the Company Operating System, a framework that connects purpose, values, metrics, structure, rituals, and more.
“It’s your scalability scaffold,” she explains. “So that as you’re growing, you can think about what you need in place to help that happen.”
It’s a way to spot the cracks before clients feel them.
“Ops can often feel unwieldy,” she says. “So we break it down into small incremental tasks, you can assign it to people, have ownership, and keep track of everything, rather than kicking the ops can down the road until it becomes a problem.”
At Agency Growth Summit, Alicia will show how to build a scalable ops function rooted in your agency’s identity.
Read more.
Manchester Speakers
Financial visibility isn’t all about complicated spreadsheets and awkward conversations.
Something Charlotte Wand, Ops Director at Creative Spark can back up. She’s transformed how her team understands their time, tracks their work, and sees the bigger financial picture.
So how do you actually bring visibility to your finances, without scaring people off?
The answer lies in transparency, not complexity. And also…. time sheets.
“Everybody has a reluctance to do time sheets. Nobody wants to do them. They’re awful,” she says. “But without the accurate time sheeting, you’re always guessing at what things cost.”
This clarity has made a measurable difference.
“When I started, about 50 or 60 percent of the jobs that we did would end up in the red. Now, there is only 4 percent in the red.”
So what changed? Simple systems and clear targets.
At Agency Growth Summit, Charlotte will share how she’s created financial visibility that empowers her team.
Read more
You can’t just roll out a shiny new system and expect people to use it – something Neil Adams found out the hard way.
“I must have evaluated about 20 different project management systems,” he says. “I got it down to about three or four different ones. I’d created test systems. I’d imported our data. I thought I’d nailed it and found the perfect system for my team.”
There was just one problem.
“I got my whole team together in a room and said, right, this is what you’re going to be using. And everyone just kicked off. They were like, ‘I don’t want to use that, I like what I do.’”
Why? Because he hadn’t consulted them at all.
Neil’s now a strategist and mentor to agency leaders, and this session is your shortcut past those painful mistakes.
“You need a reason to galvanise everybody to take action,” says Neil. “You can’t just say, we’re going to be more efficient so I can get better net profit. That’s not going to work, is it?”
Whether you’re rolling out a new tool, overhauling your internal processes or just trying to stop things from falling apart as you scale, this session will show you how to lead operational change that actually lands.
Read more.
When it comes to AI, Joe from Tangerine Communications has a grounded perspective: it’s not magic, but it can make a real difference.
“We’ve invested 1.2 million in AI,” says Joe. “Part of that process is trying to loop it into our workflow systems to try and get them to work more efficiently.”
Rather than just throwing AI at everything, Joe has been finding ways to implement it meaningful ways.
For Tangerine, the biggest impact has come from using AI for capacity management. “Before we started to implement it, we didn’t have a really clear picture of six months ahead,” Joe says. “So making hiring decisions or making freelancer decisions were really, really tough.”
He’s also found it’s helping him make a case for change, clearer and faster.
“It won’t tell you what issues are, and it won’t tell you how to fix them, but it will help you to find points in the data,’ Joe says. “It’s helping us to back up problems that we know by finding the data to kind of show where the issues are,” Joe says.
At Agency Growth Summit, Joe will talk through how to actually integrate AI into agency ops, not as a cure-all, but as a tool to amplify what good ops leads already know.
Read more.
More speakers to be announced…
Agency Growth Summit – FAQs 🤖
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We are running this event twice – once in Manchester and once in Bristol. We start each event at 1.30pm so try to arrive by 1pm.
The day’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by Agency Hackers facilitators who make sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and sweet things to keep you going.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from are all agency leaders with interesting stories to tell about how they’ve achieve agency growth.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured . We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is mainly for agency owners and leaders – but it’s potentially of interest to keen “second in commands” who might be responsible for growth.
Basically, anybody can attend if you think it looks up your street.
