The Business Model
The root mechanism behind why a company with real budget pays someone else 15–20% of it, the client-sophistication tiers, how agencies actually get paid, and the real unit economics behind a managed-spend retainer.
In this module
The Root Mechanism and the Client TiersWhy a company with real budget pays someone else 15–20% of it, instead of hiring the skill in-house — and why the answer changes with client sizeHow Agencies Actually Get PaidCommission-on-spend, flat retainer, hybrid, and the rarely-used performance model — the real math behind each, and the opaque mechanism regulators have spent a decade trying to force into the openThe Real Unit EconomicsWhat a retainer actually nets after real costs, the margin benchmarks by agency size, and the one metric ("AGI, not revenue") that makes every other number make sense