I'll say the thing most agency owners won't: for years, the industry I worked in rewarded doing less for clients, not more. I don't run ALC Consulting that way, and this is why.
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Several industries, straight from school
Bachelor of Business, Marketing
Manufacturing, 10 months
Four years in agency
Founded on the Sunshine Coast
I finished school convinced that business was only built in spreadsheets, so I spent my early twenties managing sales floors and looking at performance charts. It taught me the raw mechanics of transaction and human motivation, but I always felt like I was analysing the aftermath rather than creating the spark.
Eventually I went back to study, bridging the gap between the rigid numbers of commerce and the fluid nature of human attention. I wanted to understand not just what people bought, but the invisible currents that guided their decisions.
My first real marketing role threw me into the deep end of a multi-million dollar portfolio. There were no training wheels—just budgets to manage, campaigns to launch, and immediate revenue targets to hit. I learned to run fast, make decisions under pressure, and translate creative concepts into concrete, measurable business outcomes.
That's when I moved into my first agency role, working across diverse industries and building everything from local brand identities to complex national search campaigns. It was a fast-paced environment where you either adapted daily or fell behind. I mastered the technical execution of modern digital marketing here.
But I also learned something else, the part nobody puts in the agency pitch deck.
In a typical agency model, there is a fundamental misalignment of incentives. Agencies are built to sell retainers, scale their headcount, and maximise billable hours. Business owners, however, want lean, high-velocity execution and direct accountability. This tension creates a silent rift that slowly erodes trust.
I watched that cycle play out for years: onboard with hype, hand off to junior account managers, watch communication break down, and inevitably face churn. Clients weren't wrong to leave. The model was quietly designed to give them a reason to.
That's the piece agency owners constantly miss. They blame client expectations when they should be questioning their own structural foundations. We decided to build something different—completely stripping away the bloated structures that make true alignment impossible.
