Two agency owners were on a recent Agency Together call.
Different service niches and different industries.
Both circling the same decision: revising their product ladder because buyers are buying differently right now.
Neither one had figured it out yet, then one of them described that stuck feeling out loud.
The other recognized it immediately. Almost word for word from a completely different business.
Seeing it from the outside did something that thinking about it alone hadn’t.She went back into her own business afterward and made the hard call.
I’ve worked with a lot of smart agency owners and what keeps them from their next stage of growth usually isn’t the strategy or the tactic.
It’s one of two patterns.
The first is a decision that gets made, unmade, and made again, without any new information ever entering the picture. I call it the paralysis loop.
Usually it shows up around niche and positioning.
The analysis, digging and honest look at what’s happening in the business gets done and the decision that comes out is grounded in something real.
Then steps get taken toward it but before those steps produce anything, before there’s new information to act on, the doubt shows up.
So the owner walks back to the analysis and starts it again.
A few weeks later, they’re standing in the same spot, arriving at the same decision, like the first round never happened.
What’s happening in that moment is risk, dressed up as more research.
The second pattern is a decision that’s already been made but never gets acted on. I call it the procrastination stall.
What the owner is doing right now works well enough to pay the bills and keep clients happy but somewhere underneath that, they know it won’t get them to the next level.
So instead of stepping toward the unproven thing, they work harder at the current one.
More hours in the same process.
It’s easy to mistake for progress because the effort is real.
But that’s the nervous system doing exactly what it’s built to do around risk, protect you from a bet with no evidence behind it yet, even when that bet is the real way forward.
The loop and the stall look like different problems but they share the same fix.
Confidence is what lets someone act without needing either as protection.
Normally confidence builds the way you’d expect: take an action, see a result, let the result reinforce the next one.
But small agencies right now are adapting to disruption on more than one front at once.
Economic pressure. Shifts in how clients buy. Technology moving faster than any playbook can track.
There’s no proof of concept yet for a lot of what owners are being asked to try, which means the usual confidence loop doesn’t have anywhere to start.
So the confidence has to come from somewhere else first.
In my experience, that somewhere else is proximity. Being around other owners working through the same questions, facing the same pressures, actively attempting the new thing.
Watching someone next to you try the thing you’ve been circling makes it stop feeling theoretical.
Which is exactly what happened on that call.
If you’re circling a decision right now, or restarting the same analysis for the third time, the thing that gets you unstuck was never more information.
It’s proximity to people doing the same hard thing.
The full breakdown of the paralysis loop and the procrastination stall, and how to get out of both, is on Substack.
