In 1987, I was working at Fletcher/Mayo on the Turf & Ornamental division of Elanco, part of Eli Lilly. It was a great account, helping educate professional landscapers and turf managers on products that made commercial, municipal, and private properties more beautiful, and even wading into the early environmental debates around pesticide use. Real, interesting work.
One of their products was Surflan, a pre-emergent herbicide you could spray directly over flowers and ornamental shrubs without harming them. In the mid-80s, that was a novel enough idea that it needed an ad to explain it. We wrote the headline: “Over-the-top, picture-perfect weed control.”
Photography budgets never stretch as far as you need them to, so for this one we went looking for stock. We found an image shot at Butchart Gardens, outside Victoria, British Columbia, the most beautiful planted landscape I’d ever seen, at least in a photograph. A trip to shoot it ourselves wasn’t in the budget. I didn’t even have a passport yet. The stock photo did the job.
Then it kept doing the job. Year after year, at annual planning, our client Roger Foulks would say the same thing: “Keep that ad running. It’s the best performer in the portfolio.” Externally, that’s the dream: a campaign so good the client won’t let you touch it. Internally, it was a problem. Agencies had shifted from commission-based compensation to hourly billing by then, and hourly billing runs on one rule: no recorded hours, no revenue. My leadership and I both knew that to make money, we had to produce: new ads, new brochures, new videos. An ad that just kept working, forever, without needing to be replaced, was bad for business. So while Roger was thrilled, I was quietly hunting for other ways to fill the hours.
The agency business hasn’t moved past that problem. Nearly forty years later, it’s still built on deliverables, outputs over outcomes. Even agencies that have carved out a sharp specialty around a category, an audience, or a specific business problem run into the same wall, because they’re still paid for hours spent, not results produced. It’s a business model that punishes the very thing clients want most: something that works so well you don’t have to touch it.
I made myself a quiet promise back in 1987: someday, I’d see Butchart Gardens for real.
This summer, thirty-nine years later, I finally did: an afternoon on Victoria Island, wandering through one of the most beautiful gardens in the world.
What struck me wasn’t just that the photo undersold it, though it did. It’s that the Butchart family built this out of a failed limestone quarry, and it now draws more than two million visitors a year, not because of any one flower bed, but because of the whole experience of being there. I would have happily paid twice the admission (which was only $40). The beauty wasn’t the product. The experience was priceless.
That’s the thing agency owners should sit with. Your positioning is one thing: the words you put on the website, the story you tell in pitches. But the experience is what you live every single day: how you run meetings, how you show up on a Teams call, what your emails sound like, what your contracts say, how you handle it when something goes wrong. What makes you special can’t just be a line in your deck. It has to be special every time someone touches your business, in expected moments and unexpected ones alike.
That experience isn’t just how people feel when they work with you. It has to include the substance too, the strategic recommendations that actually move a client’s business forward. When clients feel that value, in the room and on the page, they stop treating you like a vendor billing hours and start treating you like a partner worth paying for outcomes. That shift is what makes higher-margin pricing possible. And higher margins are what make the next stellar experience possible: have time to think instead of just produce, get better people on the account, have room to do the right work instead of just the billable work. It’s a flywheel, not a one-time pitch. The experience earns the pricing power, and the pricing power funds the experience.
Butchart Gardens didn’t get two million annual visitors by producing more flower beds every year to justify the ticket price. It got there by making the experience of being there something people would pay for again and again. Agencies that figure out how to do the same, to be paid for the outcome, not the hours it took to produce it, are the ones that will actually break the model I’ve been fighting since 1987.