# The Comfort Trap Costing Creative Agencies Their Next Client
Author:  Pal Sinha, Barnali 
Author URL: https://financedigest.com/author/pal-sinha-barnali
Published: 2026-09-04
Category: BUSINESS
Category URL: https://financedigest.com/category/business
URL: https://financedigest.com/the-comfort-trap-costing-creative-agencies-their-next-client

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Winning new business has never been the easy part of running a creative agency. According to RSW/US's 2023 Agency New Business Report, [85 percent of agency new business directors last less than two years in the role](https://www.rswus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/RSW-2023-Agency-New-Business-Report.pdf). That difficulty may explain a pattern financial advisors who work with agencies see constantly: the moment new business gets easier to ignore, it usually is.

Conor Firth, founder of [Art First Business Services](https://www.artfirstbusiness.com/), a financial advisory firm working exclusively with creative businesses, has spent his career watching agencies land a major account and quietly stop looking for the next one. The retainer feels like security. The team's attention shifts entirely toward delivery. And the discipline of prospecting, never easy to begin with, becomes the first casualty of a busy quarter.

"Winning new business is hard, it's slow, it's full of rejection," Firth says. "Creating new work and doing what you love to do is not."

That gap in difficulty explains more of the pattern than most founders would like to admit. A steady retainer creates a kind of comfort that makes the discomfort of prospecting easy to postpone. Agencies pour their energy into the work they were hired to do, the work they got into the business to make, and the unglamorous, non-billable task of keeping the pipeline full drops quietly down the list. Nobody decides to stop pursuing new clients. It simply becomes the thing that always waits until next quarter.

**The math behind the risk**

One commonly used rule of thumb for identifying client-concentration risk is the 20% threshold.According to agency consultant [Karl Sakas of Sakas & Company](https://sakasandcompany.com/client-concentration/), a client that consistently accounts for more than 20 percent of an agency's revenue for three months or longer signals a concentration problem serious enough to require an active plan, not just awareness. Few agencies calculate this number in real time. Fewer still act on it before the client relationship changes.

That inaction tends to compound quietly. Every quarter that passes without meaningful new business activity is a quarter in which a dominant client's share of revenue can climb further, invisible on a standard profit and loss statement because a P&L only reports what already happened. By the time the exposure is visible in the bank balance, Firth notes, the underlying slowdown has usually been building for months.

Some agencies try to solve the problem by hiring a dedicated new business director rather than building the discipline into how the founder operates day to day. Given how rarely that hire lasts industry-wide, that fix is less reliable than it looks. Firth says that, in his experience advising smaller agencies, dedicated business-development hires can sometimes have even shorter tenures, reinforcing the importance of founders maintaining direct involvement in new business. Either way, the founder typically remains the primary driver of new business whether they intend to be or not.

**Treating pipeline like a fixed cost**

Firth's advice to founders, delivered well before most of them think they need to hear it, is consistent: protect a portion of time and profit for business development the same way payroll or rent is protected, as a fixed obligation rather than a discretionary one. Firth advises the founders he works with to allocate at least a quarter of their own time to the search for new clients, and to reinvest a defined share of profit into that effort on an ongoing basis, not only when the pipeline looks thin.

The instruction he returns to most often with clients who have just landed their biggest account yet is simple. "Do not take your eye off new business," Firth says. It is not advice reserved for agencies that are struggling. Between the industry-wide churn among agency new business hires and the concentration threshold Sakas describes, the pattern points the same direction: the agencies most at risk are usually the ones that finally feel like they do not need to worry anymore.


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