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Here's what happened on that 'Agency Mastermind' in Dominican Republic...
- Romans Ivanovs
- Apr 21
- 6 min read
It was 6am at JFK.
We'd already flown 12 hours from London, running on airport coffee.
The energy was high.
We were buzzing and not because of the long haul ahead, but because we knew this trip to the Dominican Republic wasn’t just another event.
We knew this would be somewhat different. A room full of agency founders, each building wildly different businesses, each carrying their own war stories.
Veteran operators, agencies flirting with $200K MRR, some ran lean with 10 freelancers, others had full-time teams of 40+.
Different time zones, cultures, service types but all sharing pretty much the same hunger: to build something that didn’t collapse under its own weight.
And something else stood out: zero ego in the room.
Just real questions, stories and a collective desire to do better. Not "performative vulnerability" but the real kind - you could feel it in the room.
I still talk about this with Nigel Thomas (who put this mastermind together) - it's all about WHO you bring into the room. At these kinds of events, the posturing usually shows up early.
One founder from Europe shared how burnout nearly cost him both his business and his mental health. Another opened up quietly but honestly about losing his marriage along the way. These are not easy stories to tell. And they’re even harder to live through.
And I get it.
Kristina and I have been working with agency founders for years now. We’ve seen the toll this takes... the kind of stress that doesn’t just hurt your business, but eats away at your life outside it too.
We’ve felt it ourselves in the early years. That pressure. That silent burn. It's more common than most want to admit.
That’s why we don’t just talk about scalable systems. We talk about operational freedom. Because that’s what most founders are really chasing. Not more meetings. Not more headcount. But space. Clarity. The ability to focus on high-leverage work without getting dragged into the weeds every day.
But it often starts with confronting the cost of not having it.
Revenue is not the real challenge.
It’s how you build the machine behind it.
So we brought something practical, something most agency owners don't even realise they need until it's too late.
You can’t scale past $100K+ MRR with broken logic.
Once your agency grows beyond founder-led delivery and ad-hoc decision-making, things start to unravel. Not because growth is complicated but because the underlying logic holding the business together is incoherent.
Your business already runs on logic.
Every outcome, every missed deadline, every repeat mistake - it’s all downstream of your system’s internal logic. And most of it is shitty, unconscious logic. A collection of duct-taped processes and legacy habits pretending to be some sort of a strategy.
In operations, logic is oxygen.
You either:
React to the loudest client every day
Or choke on the ambiguity of “who’s doing what, by when, and why?”
That’s when you end up spending 80% of your energy on 20% of the wrong problems.
At the workshop, we broke this down with the founders in the room.
We mapped out delivery from client kickoff to renewal and exposed the gaps that quietly kill scale.
What happens when your strategist owns the outcome, but doesn’t have the authority to redirect the plan?
What happens when project managers track tasks, but no one questions why those tasks matter in the first place?
The result?
Noise. Misalignment. Energy leaks everywhere.
The antidote isn’t more SOPs. It’s Disciplined Thought = Operational Logic.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Collins put it well:
“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”
Here’s the strange thing...
In tech, everyone obsesses over the product. Product-market fit. Retention curves. User experience. Entire teams dedicated to just refining the onboarding flow.
But in agencies?
Delivery is the product but hardly anyone treats it like one.
Most founders are still stuck thinking delivery is just the cost of doing business. Like it’s the thing you “have to manage” rather than the core engine that drives retention, referrals and margin.
If you run an agency, your delivery is the product.
It’s what you sell. It’s what keeps clients. It’s what gets you case studies and testimonials and renewals. It’s what determines whether your team loves working with you or burns out and bolts.
Yet we see agencies scale acquisition before delivery all the time. It’s like pouring more water into a bucket that’s full of holes.
Tech founders obsess over product because they know it’s the only thing that compounds.
The agency founder's mindset has to change. Otherwise you’re not building a business. You’re building a leaky tap and no amount of marketing will fix that.
On the workshop day, we began with what might seem like a basic prompt: map your delivery process end-to-end.
Some of the questions followed..
"How do I hand this off to my team without it breaking down?"
"Do I need a Head of Ops, or have I just been too reactive for too long?"
"Are we building the team we need for the next chapter or just collecting roles to patch over pain points?"
These aren't about operational structure per se.. they are of discipline. Of clarity. Of leadership.
Some founders saw how their systems were designed around personalities rather than principles. Others realised they had been hiring helpers, not owners.
But there’s another shift that needs to happen.
Another day during the trip, a bunch of us went out to play paddle.
Now, I’ve always been a competitive person. Grew up that way. Most sporty things get me going padel turned out to be no exception.
But what I love about it most? It brings people’s real personalities out. Fast.
Someone plays it safe. Someone else overcompensates. One player stays reactive, hugging the back wall. Another just goes all in, taking wild swings.
That’s the thing about games: they reveal your instincts.
Psychologically, games put you in a space where you get instant feedback. There’s no time to overthink. Your nervous system doesn’t lie. You show up the way you really are. Confident or hesitant. Strategic or scattered. Committed or checked out.
And it’s the same in business.
You can’t scale an agency by playing it safe. By hesitating. By waiting for someone else to make the first move.
You have to play full out.
You need to decide you’re in. Really in.
I don’t mean overworking or burning yourself out. I mean emotionally committing. Trusting yourself. Backing your decisions. Choosing to build like someone who wants to win.
Because here’s what I see far too often:
Founders who are halfway in. Who want the rewards of growth but keep playing not to lose.
They say they want to scale but they still review every design. They say they want freedom but they don’t let their team lead. They say they want to grow but they build like they’re preparing to retreat.
You have to swing. Miss. Learn. And swing again.
That internal shift — stepping into the game fully is what makes everything else work.
Systems help. Structure matters. But the mindset shifts gears.
So what did this trip really confirm for us?
It’s this:
What we saw in that mastermind room and what we’ve seen with almost every agency we’ve helped scale is that success follows structure, but only when the founder is willing to evolve.
And let’s be honest... so much of this game is mental.
Not just the mindset stuff everyone talks about on LinkedIn. I mean the emotional endurance it takes to lead. The self-awareness to see when you’re the bottleneck. The confidence to back your decisions even when the data isn’t perfect. And the resilience to keep going when everything feels stuck.
Building a real agency means building you... the version of you who doesn’t just react… but leads with clarity, courage and intention.
Play full out. But play from the mind of a CEO or COO, not just the reflexes of a founder.
Shout out to Lara Acosta, Timothy Armoo and Joe Gannon whom we had an absolute pleasure sharing the stage with. I may share some of the lessons we learned from them in the near future.
Watch the latest podcast episode
Wiehan Britz (CEO of Magnet Monster) shares the honest and messy truth behind scaling fast. And what happens when the systems you build… start working against you.
Kristina and Wiehan cover:
When automation becomes bloat
The link between agency psychology and performance
Hiring fast, burning out and what he’d do differently now
The real cost of running your agency on financial guesswork
Ready to build a scalable and self-sufficient agency business?
We’ve helped dozens of agency founders go from firefighting to freedom by building the systems, teams and leadership structure they need to scale without being the bottleneck.
If you’re ready for the uncomfortable but transformational work apply for Strategy Consultation here.
About what we do
At Big Growth Group we help agency owners build high-profit and self-sufficient agency businesses so they can step away from daily operations and focus on strategic growth.
We’re not just consultants who leave you with a list of ideas. We’re also Growth Operators who get in the trenches and work alongside you to deliver real, measurable results.
Listen or watch our podcast "Big Growth Show"
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