Have you decided to give your business development a summer vacation?
It seems harmless enough and often happens more from inertia than intent. Prospects are at the beach, decision-makers are out of office, and it feels like nobody signs an agency in July anyway.
But that reasonable-sounding pause is likely setting up a problem you won’t feel until the leaves begin to turn.
I’ll explain what I mean later in this newsletter, but first let’s take a look at what Jen has rounded up for us this week.
— Chip Griffin, SAGA Founder
Jen’s Weekly Roundup
Here’s what caught my eye this week:
OOF, THOSE NUMBERS — Steve Barnes at O’Dwyer’s covers Rick Gould’s annual benchmarking report on PR agency profitability. Average operating profit for North American PR agencies dropped to 15.3 percent in 2025, down from 16.6 percent in 2024. And the numbers get worse the smaller the firm gets. On That Solo Life, Karen and Michelle offer some hope with why independent PR firms are outperforming holding companies right now.
YOUR WEBSITE, YOUR OUTREACH, YOUR PITCH — David C. Baker and Blair Enns on 2Bobs give us thirteen signals your website should send. Websites are definitely still a thing, even in Canada. Lee McKnight Jr. at RSW/US looks at what AI email summaries mean for prospecting outreach — with emails being condensed by AI before a human ever reads them, the old approach to subject lines and openers needs a rethink. And if you’re looking for a channel that doesn’t depend on dreaded cold outreach, Agency Bytes features Jessica Rhodes of Interview Connections on how to land agency clients through podcast guesting without the spam.
INTEGRATION, OPERATING SYSTEMS, AND FAKING IT — Over at Spin Sucks, Gini’s podcast argues that CMOs don’t have an influence problem, they have an operating system problem, and Aquila Mendez-Valdez’s blog post tell us most companies fake integration rather than actually doing it. Your clients may think running a few channels at once counts as an integrated program, but you know better.
KNOWN AND TRUSTED — David C. Baker writes about the high cost of low trust and frames the marketing challenge for independent firms as a two-part goal: be known, and be trusted. Most of you are trusted but unknown, and you need both to be successful. And Jody Sutter notes that the most persuasive thing you can say might be the thing you’re afraid to admit, connecting to how trust gets built in a sales conversation.
GROWTH, AI, AND PAYING ATTENTION — Shauna Nuckles joins Sharon Toerek on The Innovative Agency to talk about breaking the growth bottleneck. For Immediate Release digs into the AI layoffs story and why it’s more complicated than the headlines. And Brad Farris of Anchor Advisors writes about a signal he was getting and ignoring — a reminder that the information is usually there if we know how to receive it.
— Jen Griffin, SAGA Community Manager
The summer pipeline trap
“Everyone’s on vacation. BD will be a waste of time until after Labor Day.”
I hear some version of this from agency owners every July. It sounds reasonable, but it also adds fuel to that feast-or-famine cycle that so many owners worry about.
Here’s why hitting pause on BD is such a bad idea. Agency sales cycles run at least three to four months from first conversation to signed agreement. If you have no active conversations in July and August, you have no new revenue appearing in October and November. That’s exactly when many clients are setting next year’s budgets.
So the summer slowdown isn’t really a summer problem. It’s a fourth-quarter problem you’re creating right now, in flip-flops.
The excuse doesn’t hold up anyway
The “everyone’s away” logic assumes BD means pitching, and nobody wants a pitch in July. Fair enough. But business development for agencies isn’t about pitching, it’s about relationships.
And summer is actually a decent season for relationships. For those still in the office, calendars tend to be lighter. People are less buried in deliverables and deadlines. A prospect who would decline a meeting in the year-end crunch will often take a relaxed 30-minute call or coffee in July, precisely because nothing urgent is competing for the slot.
The best conversations happen when neither side expects anything from them. Summer practically enforces that. Nobody thinks you’re closing them in August, which means you can just talk.
(Plus how many people do you know who actually take the entire summer off? Most take a couple of weeks at most alongside some long weekends.)
What summer BD actually looks like
Keep it light and keep it going. If you use a Nifty 50 list (or any target list), this is the season for low-stakes touches: forward an article, comment on something they published, or suggest a catch-up call with no agenda. Create reasons to have conversations.
A few things that fit the season well: reconnecting with past clients and former colleagues, inviting people onto your podcast or interview series, and taking those “pick your brain” calls you’d normally decline (even though you shouldn’t!). None of it feels like selling because none of it is selling. It’s planting seeds.
This is also the right time to do the prep work that makes fall BD easier: tightening your positioning statement, updating your point of view on where your clients’ industries are headed, and lining up opportunities at events where your ideal clients gather. When September hits and everyone else is scrambling to restart a cold pipeline from a standing start, you’re already warm.
Protect the time or lose it
The thing that kills summer BD isn’t the beach. It’s the calendar. With staff on vacation, owners end up covering client work (because while it seems like prospects take vacations, somehow clients never do). So BD slides to tomorrow. Then to September. Then all your clients have their own end-of-year sprint ideas for you to fulfill.
The fix is the same one that works all year: block a few hours a week for BD and protect it like a client meeting. Every business is different, so don’t treat any specific number as gospel. But zero is the wrong number.
You don’t need to do more BD this summer. You just shouldn’t stop. Consistency beats intensity, and the owners who keep a low hum of conversations going through July and August are the ones who skip the end-of-year panic entirely.
Enjoy vacation. Just don’t let your pipeline take one too.
