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