Most agency owners can recite their revenue per billable headcount from memory. Ask them how their middle managers are doing and you’ll get a longer pause.
That gap is the through-line of Episode 2 of Billable. Grant and Kurt spent 25 minutes pulling apart the metrics agencies rely on, and what those metrics don’t see. Not a “throw out your KPIs” argument. More like a “your KPIs are answering a question you stopped asking five years ago” argument.
You probably weren’t trained for this
Kurt dropped a number early in the conversation: 90% of agency founders never planned to start an agency. They were designers who got good at client management. Engineers who built something around a CMS and realized they had a business. Account managers who kept getting promoted until the title said “partner.”
No MBA. No operations training. Nobody handed them a playbook for running a 40-person company.
Grant’s version of this: he started in account management, moved to project management, and gradually found himself as COO. Not a career plan. A series of situations that required someone to figure it out.
Easy to treat that origin story as a weakness. It’s not. Agencies that stay nimble, that adopt new models faster than their enterprise counterparts, do so precisely because their leaders aren’t anchored to a textbook framework. But it also means the measurement systems those leaders build tend to be borrowed. Pulled from a Deltek report or a Promethean research benchmark without much interrogation of whether those numbers actually describe your specific firm.
Five numbers on a desert island
Grant proposed a thought experiment partway through: if you were on a desert island and could only see five to ten numbers about your organization, which ones would tell you whether it was healthy?
Revenue per billable headcount makes the list. Revenue per total headcount. Utilization rates. Fine. Standard. But Grant’s point was sharper than the exercise: those numbers don’t tell you whether your team is burning out or whether the person carrying three projects is two months from quitting. They can’t measure culture erosion. And they definitely can’t tell you whether the growth that looks so good on the dashboard is actually sustainable.
You can build vanity KPIs that say you’re successful while the organization underneath is hollowing out. Growth in revenue, growth in headcount, growth in new logos, growth in conference appearances. All of it can mask structural problems that only surface when the growth slows down. Kurt’s line here landed hard: growth covers up a lot of problems.
Communication is the actual infrastructure
Communication came up three separate times in the episode, which tells you something about how central it is to the argument.
Kurt’s framing: most problems in a business are communication problems. Not a new idea. But the layer he added was useful. Having Slack doesn’t mean communication is happening. Having a weekly standup doesn’t mean the right information is moving to the right people. The tools exist. The confirmation that anyone received, processed, and acted on the message usually doesn’t.
His rule of thumb, borrowed from his father: something has to be read seven times, heard three times, and felt once before it sticks. If you said it in a Slack message and assumed it landed, you communicated at yourself, not at your team.
Micromanagement is the wrong word
Sharpest reframe in the episode. Kurt defined micromanagement not as too much oversight, but as inconsistent oversight. He called it the seagull maneuver: fly in, make a lot of noise, leave a mess, disappear. That’s what teams actually hate. Not the manager who checks in regularly with clear expectations. It’s the one who shows up unpredictably, reacts to whatever catches their eye, and vanishes until the next crisis.
Consistency is the differentiator. Predictable check-ins, clear definitions of what good looks like, and follow-through on the things you said mattered last week. Teams don’t resist structure. They resist randomness.
Stop coaching the bottom 10%
Grant and Kurt both landed on a framework for team performance that agencies rarely follow in practice: the 10-15-20% of people who won’t get it, no matter how much time you invest, are not worth the disproportionate attention they consume.
Kurt’s version of this: hiring is guessing, firing is knowing. You’ll never be 100% certain a hire will work out. But if someone has been on the team long enough and the pattern is clear, the decision is already made. You just haven’t acted on it yet.
Real leverage lives in the middle 80%. Not the stars who are going to be fine regardless, and not the bottom tier who need a different job. It’s the large middle group that responds to investment, coaching, clarity, and a manager who shows up consistently. That’s where effort compounds.
Retainers change the measurement problem entirely
Toward the end, the conversation took a turn that deserves its own episode. Progressive agencies are moving from time-and-materials billing to retainer-based recurring revenue. Sounds like a pricing decision. It’s actually an operations decision.
When you bill by the hour, your KPIs are built around utilization, billable hours, and efficiency per person. When you bill on a retainer, the measurement changes. Kurt pointed to agencies where the new performance signal is iteration speed. Three campaign cycles in a day instead of one. Value delivered to the client in a Tuesday test that nobody can attribute to a single role on the team.
Old measurement infrastructure can’t capture that. And most agencies haven’t built the new one yet.
One more thing about incentives
Grant brought up Anthropic giving unlimited tokens to employees as an incentive. Not a pizza party or a plaque. Access to the tool that makes you better at your job, without a meter running.
Small example, but it says something about where incentive design is heading. Agencies that figure out how to reward the behaviors they actually want, not the behaviors their KPI dashboard happens to measure, are going to pull ahead. Everyone else will keep optimizing for last year’s scorecard and wondering why their best people keep leaving.
Listen to the full conversation
If any of this lines up with what you’re seeing inside your own firm, the full episode is worth 25 minutes. Grant and Kurt go deeper on every thread here, and a few that didn’t make it into this post.
Surviving the next two years won’t come down to who has the best KPI dashboard. It’ll come down to who noticed what those dashboards weren’t showing them.