Shayne

Founder @SugarNova | Owner @Glossy_PR
I build brands that scale, compound & sell, so founders can exit on their own terms through PR, GEO/SEO, Paid & M&A.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Most agencies optimise your marketing report.

I optimise your business.

I've acquired companies myself, taken equity in clients, and seen how the right growth system changes what a business is worth.

That's why founders come to me when they want to scale, not just grow.

SugarNova Group → https://t.co/ccckdIU4e7
Glossy PR → https://t.co/XeXQrNXL2n

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Buyers do not start with your revenue.

They start with one question: how much of this business runs without you?

Everything else is downstream of the answer.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Buyers do not start with your revenue.

They start with one question: how much of this business runs without you?

Everything else is downstream of the answer.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

The strange part: the work that makes a business sellable is the same work that makes it calmer to run today.

Less you in the detail. More system doing the lifting.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

The strange part: the work that makes a business sellable is the same work that makes it calmer to run today.

Less you in the detail. More system doing the lifting.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Most agencies are not losing clients.

They are losing margin quietly, retainer by retainer, scope creep by scope creep.

Do you know your actual profit per client right now?

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Most agencies are not losing clients.

They are losing margin quietly, retainer by retainer, scope creep by scope creep.

Do you know your actual profit per client right now?

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Most agencies price on effort. I used to do the same.

Here is what that gets you: clients who think they are buying your time, not your results. They watch the clock. They question every hour. They churn the moment a cheaper option shows up.

I restructured our pricing model in 2024 around outcomes, not deliverables. Specifically, we tied our retainer tiers to the commercial outcome the client was trying to reach, not the number of assets we produced.

Three things changed immediately.

First, sales conversations stopped being about cost and started being about ROI.

Second, our average retainer value went up 34 percent without adding a single new service.

Third, churn dropped because clients stopped measuring us against other agencies and started measuring us against their own growth targets.

The tactical shift: strip every proposal of hour counts and deliverable lists. Replace them with a problem statement, a target outcome, and your mechanism for getting there.

That is the whole move.

If your pricing model is making clients focus on what you do instead of what they get, it is costing you money every month.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Revenue gets you in the room.

Transferability gets you priced.

Two businesses with identical numbers can sell for wildly different multiples, and the gap is almost always founder dependency.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Most agencies do not die from losing clients. They die from slow margin bleed nobody notices until it is too late.

Here is what I see when I audit agency ops right now:

1. Scope creep that never gets billed. The team absorbs it, the PM apologises, the client gets used to free work.
2. Retained fees set in 2023 that have not moved while delivery costs have gone up 30 percent.
3. Utilisation tracked loosely in someone's head rather than a system. You genuinely do not know which client is profitable.

None of these feel urgent on a Tuesday. All of them compound quietly.

The fix is not a rebrand or a new service line.

It is a proper operational diagnostic.
Look at your trailing six months of client data.
Calculate real margin per account.

Find the three clients costing you money and make a decision about each one.

I go through this exact process on every agency audit I run.

It takes about two hours and it always finds something.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

AI search is changing how your clients find agencies. Right now.

Swipe to see the three shifts I am building into every client strategy in 2026.

1. Structure your content so AI can cite it
2. Build third-party authority so models treat you as the source
3. Accept that your first client touchpoint is now invisible to you

Most agency founders I talk to are still running a 2022 acquisition playbook. That is fine until it suddenly is not.

I have been inside this shift for 18 months. It is real and it is accelerating.

If you want an honest look at whether your agency is positioned for AI-driven search or quietly being bypassed, I am running free audits this month.

Book yours at https://t.co/CMBX5RE2H4

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Your attribution model is gaslighting you.

Buyers are now researching on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews before they ever hit your site. By the time they arrive, intent is already formed.

Your dashboard says: direct session.
Reality says: AI-assisted discovery.

The brands winning in 2026 have two things dialled in:
→ A content corpus LLMs actually cite
→ An attribution framework that accounts for dark funnel behaviour

If your CAC is creeping up and you can't explain why, this is where to look first. 🔍

We run a full GEO and attribution diagnostic as part of our growth audit. Link in bio or head to https://t.co/4S914uMztA 📲

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Most agencies have a diagnostics problem, not a sales problem.

You cannot close a deal you have not properly diagnosed. Fix the discovery process before you fix the pitch.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Your ROAS looks fine.

Your blended CAC tells a different story.

Most growth strategies have 3–4 silent leaks before the media budget even matters.

https://t.co/XVTX47mAA8

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Your agency doesn't have a visibility problem.

It has a routing problem.

Vague content + no clear next step = inconsistent pipeline.

Fix the exit before you fix the reach

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Your GA4 'direct' channel is probably 30-40% AI-referred traffic mislabelled.

You are making £10k+ budget calls on structurally broken data.

Fix the measurement layer before you touch spend.

https://t.co/XVTX47mAA8

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Your ROAS looks fine. Your margin does not.

The bleed is almost never the ad. It is the post-click sequence, the abandon flow, the absent retention layer.

Fix the architecture. Not the budget.

https://t.co/XVTX47mAA8

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Your attribution model was built before AI referrals existed.

Now ChatGPT sends buyers to you and your data calls it direct traffic.

You are optimising on a lie.

Fix the model, not the tracking. → https://t.co/XVTX47mAA8

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

Most agency SEO packages are selling a product that AI search is quietly making irrelevant.

GEO and AEO are not trends.
They are the new game.
Get ahead of it or explain the drop later.

https://t.co/XVTX47mAA8

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

🚩 New SEO red flag: deleting old blog posts to "clean up" your site.

Yes, thin content can drag performance. In some cases, consolidating makes sense.

But bulk-deleting without a redirect and canonical audit? That's how brands lose 30% of their organic traffic overnight.

Audit before you delete. Always.

[Shayne @ScaleWithShayne]

The beauty brands getting Vogue coverage right now have one thing in common, and it's not a big budget!

The brands winning right now aren't waiting for press to come to them. 👀

With beauty media consolidation accelerating and editorial desks stretched thinner than ever, the founders getting coverage in 2026 are the ones who've already built the infrastructure, strong brand narrative, media-ready assets, a PR partner who knows which doors are still open.

Thursday reminder: reactive PR is expensive.
Proactive PR is strategic.

If you don't have a clear story that a beauty editor can pick up in 30 seconds, you're already behind.

We're auditing beauty brand PR strategies this month, spots are limited. Book yours at https://t.co/SOKgpxDheF ✨