Bottomline Brunch arrived in Manchester in the middle of a June heatwave, offering agency leaders a different kind of heat to deal with: from pipeline to profit. It was a room built for candour, and a welcome bit of air conditioning.
The event is an invite-only series bringing agency leaders together, city by city, to talk honestly abut the commercial side of running a £1m+ agency.
Co-hosted by Jay Neale, CEO of Synergist, and Rory Spence, Commercial Director of The Wow Company, brought together a room of 25 agency leaders to talk openly about what's working and what's not, from pipeline to profit.
"Thank you for creating a safe (and cool) space for candid, creative not to mention humorous conversations. Our first #bottomlinebrunch, and it won't be the last."
The real agency pipeline problem
Jay Neale opened with a simple question: who felt confident in their pipeline for the next month? The next three months? Hands went up, then slowly dropped. But the real admission wasn't about a lack of pipeline. It was that the biggest challenge for most agencies in the room wasn't winning new logos. It was growing revenue from the clients they already had.
That shifted the conversation to what actually gets in the way of growing existing accounts: strategic conversations with clients about their goals, room to partner rather than just deliver, and a recurring gap in commercial awareness within client service teams. The people closest to the client relationship often aren't equipped to spot or shape commercial opportunity.
The room also discussed how to make these decisions less reliant on instinct. New business review doesn't have to be a leadership-only conversation. Several attendees bring heads of department into the room with visibility on how things are tracking against targets, turning commercial pressure into a shared, objective conversation rather than one person's gut feel.
A new agency pricing model
Discussion moved naturally into rates. Clients now expect rate increases even where agency teams still feel anxious raising them. The discomfort is often internal, not client-side. From there the conversation moved past hourly rates altogether and into value-based pricing, the theme that dominated the rest of the session. Some agencies reported clients starting to ask for output pricing instead of hourly billing, a shift in the client's own language, not just the agency's pitch.
The agencies seeing the strongest margins were the ones getting clients to name the value of the work upfront, before scoping or proposing, whether the job takes one hour or a hundred.
One tension the room worked through directly: if you price on value, do timesheets become irrelevant? The consensus was no. Value-based pricing and timesheets aren't opposites. You price on value. You track on time. That's the data that tells you whether the model is actually working, and it's what keeps resourcing and profitability decisions honest instead of based on gut feel.
Why profitability, not revenue, is the number agencies should plan around
Rory Spence shared benchmarking data from The Wow Company's 2026 BenchPress report, covering gross profit margins, profitability by department, and the case for planning around profit rather than revenue. The message was clear: agencies that scale well track profitability consistently. Agencies that grow but lose margin along the way usually aren't.
For agencies looking to get more structured about this, Synergist's guide to agency profitability is a useful next step for turning benchmarking talk into an ongoing habit.
A brunch that gives back
Every Bottomline Brunch ticket goes entirely to NABS, the advertising and media industry's mental wellbeing charity. Manchester pushed the running total to £2,750. These events are about community supporting community as much as it's about the conversation itself.
No pitch decks. No presentations. Just a safe space to sense-check decisions with people who understand the pressure. A curated conversation with peers navigating growth at a similar scale, and agency experts with 20+ years of combined agency experience and the latest agency benchmarking data on hand.
"Really insightful and useful event to attend, I'd encourage others to do so."
Want a seat at the next Bottomline Brunch for agency leaders? Bottomline Brunch is invite-only and intentionally small, but we're always looking to bring more agency leaders facing similar growth challenges into the room. If you'd like to be part of the next conversation, get in touch. We'd love to have you at the table.