At most agencies, “scaling BD” looks like this: the founder hires a Head of Business Development, hands them a vague mandate to build pipeline, and hopes the problem goes away. Six months later, the pipeline is thin, close rates are bad, the founder is back in every deal, and the hire is gone.
I’ve watched this happen across countless agencies I’ve advised, and I’ve done it myself. The instinct to find one person who can take over BD makes sense on paper. But it almost never works, because the problem isn’t the hire. It’s that you’re trying to outsource something you haven’t even broken apart yet.
The Founder Is Wearing Five Hats
When a founder says they “do business development,” what they really mean is they’re doing five or six jobs at once under one label. They’re working events. They’re posting on LinkedIn and sending the newsletter. They’re keeping up with referral partners. They’re running discovery calls and writing proposals. They’re upselling existing clients. It works because the founder is scrappy and has good instincts, but it’s held together with scotch tape and none of it is getting more than 20% of the attention it needs.
You can’t just hand that to someone. The job as it exists today is five jobs. Nobody you hire is going to seamlessly bounce between brand-building, partnerships, prospecting, sales, and account expansion the way a founder does. So the founder’s real job isn’t to find a replacement. It’s to take the work apart.
The Five BD Functions
After spending years talking to agency founders, fractional BD consultants, and sales leaders, and going through our own experience at Barrel Holdings, I’ve started thinking about agency BD as five separate functions:
Marketing and Awareness is the long game. Content, LinkedIn, newsletters, conferences, webinars. All the stuff that keeps you top of mind so when a prospect has a need, they think of you. Some of this may stay with the founder for a while, especially thought leadership.
Partnerships is about cultivating referral relationships with other agencies, consultants, and platform ecosystems. It’s relationship management, not sales. It has its own rhythm that includes check-ins, co-marketing, and mutual referral loops. From my BD observations, this kept coming up as the thing that moves the needle most, especially when your agency’s tight positioning makes it easy for partners to send opportunities your way.
Outbound is cold email, LinkedIn outreach, direct mail. A targeting-and-volume discipline that needs its own process, its own lists, and constant iteration on messaging. It requires a special set of skills and it’s bound to struggle when you lump it together with inbound. We’ve experienced this firsthand and it’s something I heard over and over from experienced BD folks: split inbound and outbound, even if one is just a part-time role.
The Sales Process covers everything that happens once a real opportunity shows up — discovery calls, framing the problem, scoping the engagement, building the proposal, negotiating, and getting to a signed contract. For most founders, this is where their credibility and trust matter most, which is why they’re so reluctant to let go. But the sales process isn’t one monolithic job. Qualification alone could be its own role — someone managing inbound referrals, running the initial discovery, researching the prospect, and determining fit before the broader team gets activated. Scoping might pull in a solutions consultant or subject matter experts from across the agency. The proposal itself can be a team effort. The founder doesn’t need to own every step; they just need to show up at the moments where their presence tips the deal.
Account Growth is upsells, cross-sells, and expanding existing client relationships. This is probably the best ROI BD activity and the one most agencies often overlook. You already have the trust. The question is whether you’ve actually designed what comes next after the initial project.
Get the Sequencing Right
Most founders get the order wrong. They want to hand off outbound first because it feels like the grind. But outbound without positioning, proof points, and case studies just doesn’t land. Here’s the order that’s worked for us and for the agencies I’ve talked to:
Start with Account Growth. You already have people in client relationships such as account managers and project managers. Make account expansion part of their job description. Design the path after the core project. Give them ownership and variable comp for growing accounts. You’re monetizing relationships you’ve already earned.
Then Partnerships. Investing in a dedicated partnerships lead who knows the ecosystems your agency plays in can really pay off. While you may not get opportunities right away, monitor the inputs (co-marketing, sending opportunities to other partners) and let the relationships take root.
Then Marketing Execution. Hire someone to own the content calendar, post consistently, manage the newsletter, keep the website updated. The founder still brings the ideas and the point of view, but the week-to-week execution is off their plate. This is what builds the top-of-funnel engine that feeds everything else. Encourage other qualified members of the team to contribute and develop an authoritative voice as well.
Then Outbound. Only once you have the positioning, the case studies, and the proof points that give cold outreach some teeth. You might invest in a GTM engineer or work with an outbound specialist agency.
The sales process comes off the founder’s plate last. It’s what they’re best at and what’s hardest to transfer. But remember, you don’t have to hand off the whole thing at once. Start by peeling off qualification and scoping to people on your team. Let an account exec handle the early stages while the founder weighs in with insights and key appearances to help close. Over time, maybe 80% of opportunities can be run end-to-end by a BD manager, and the founder only steps in for the high-stakes deals where their presence really matters.
One thing worth calling out: you’ll be tempted to bundle a few of these functions into one hire. Don’t. The founder can jump between these roles because they built the relationships and context over years. That doesn’t work when you stack three of them on one new person.
What the Other Side Looks Like
When this actually comes together, the founder stops being the bottleneck and starts being the person who designed the system. Pipeline gets more predictable because each function has someone paying full attention to it. Each function gets deeper than the founder ever could have taken it, while splitting time five ways.
The founder ends up spending their time on the things that only they can do: showing up for the strategic deals that need their weight, setting the agency’s narrative, being the face of the business, and maintaining the few key relationships that drive the biggest opportunities.
I get that it’s scary to let go of stuff you were handling okay-ish because at least it was getting done. But somebody focused full-time on partnerships or account growth is going to blow past what you were doing in a fraction of your week. It takes a few months, but it happens.
Most agencies don’t have a BD talent problem. They have a system design problem. Stop trying to hire one person to replace yourself. Map the five functions. Peel them off in the right order. Go deep instead of wide. The founder’s job isn’t to do all the BD, it’s to build the machine that does it.
