Learn to Scale is turning 6. Here’s the most expensive lesson I’ve learned so far.


Hey Reader,

For six years, I’ve been a founder. The journey has been a winding road of trial, error, and a whole lot of learning. I’ve sold to HR departments, consulted for startups, and chased opportunities across different industries, always feeling like I was just one step away from "figuring it out."

I was a generalist trying to solve everyone's problems. And it was exhausting.

But looking back, a clear pattern emerged. Every time I did my best work, every time a client had a true breakthrough, it wasn't because I'd fixed their marketing funnel or their sales process. It was because we'd fixed something deeper. Something human.

It was in my work with marketing agencies over the past few years that this pattern became undeniable. I saw how:

  • A hiring problem, not a lead-gen problem, was causing their feast-or-famine cycle, forcing them to constantly restart their growth engine with mismatched talent.
  • A leadership problem, not a service delivery problem, was making the founder the bottleneck for every decision, putting their biggest client accounts at risk.
  • A culture problem, not a scoping problem, was killing their profitability because the team lacked the psychological safety to have hard conversations until it was too late.

These are the real, expensive problems. And I realized they are the only problems I am truly built to solve.

That's why, for Learn to Scale's 6th birthday, I'm making a big change. I'm retiring the "generalist" hat to go all-in on the niche that needs this work the most. I'm now focusing exclusively on acting as a fractional Agency People Officer to help founders solve these messy, profitable problems.

To celebrate and kick off this new direction, I'm not asking for anything. I'm giving something away. I built a simple, fun tool to help you start diagnosing these issues yourself.

It’s called The Agency Problem-Finder 3000.

It's an interactive "game" that serves up the same "dangerous questions" I use to uncover the real challenges holding an agency back. It's free, it's fun, and it might just give you the "aha!" moment you've been looking for.

This is the new, hard-won direction for Learn to Scale. I'm excited to finally be solving the right problems for the right people.

Thanks for sticking with me,

=Dan Newman

Dan Newman

Your agency doesn't have a sales problem. It has a people problem. I spent 15+ years building teams, from scrappy startups, to scaling tech companies, to huge agencies like GroupM and WPP. Now, I give small agency owners the SOPs, frameworks, and hard truths they need to build high-performance cultures that run without them.

Read more from Dan Newman
A man sitting down for his performance review, believing he's the shit but actually, he's not the shit.

A bi-weekly roundup of ways to make EOY reviews a little less awkward November 29 - December 12 What Wrapping Paper Do You Use For Tough Love? It’s December 12th. You can practically smell the holiday break. But there is one thing standing between you and that final "Out of Office" auto-reply: The End-of-Year Review. If you are like most small agency owners I know, you are probably trying to find a way to wiggle out of it. You might be telling yourself: "We’re a small team, we talk every day....

A bi-weekly roundup of why now is the best time to measure the worst emotions November 15 - November 28 Burnout, On Sale Now While the rest of the world is obsessing over doorbusters and discount codes today, someone- either you or one of your team members- is sweating. If you have ecommerce clients, your team has been sprinting for weeks to get assets approved, campaigns loaded, and fires put out. Even if you don’t do ecomm, the sheer gravitational pull of Q4 deadlines has likely pushed your...

a man popping out of box labelled "Business Problems" wearing a shirt that says "I'm the Problem"

A bi-weekly roundup of people problems, explained through short-form video November 1 - November 14 Doomscroll Some Problems TL;DR- I launched a TikTok channel. I consider myself good at time and project management but I also know that I'm a meatbag in a capitalist society. Companies with more money than God have designed supercomputers and apps pointed directly at my brain, but I've taken steps to protect myself from their siren calls. One of those steps was installing an app blocker on my...