Agencies Love ROI. Just Not Yours.

Agencies bang on about ROI like they invented it. But let’s be clear: it’s not your return they care about. It’s theirs.

Your budget props up their staff utilisation. Your retainer fattens their “enterprise value.” Your logo is window dressing for their next pitch.

Meanwhile your Optimizely stack is left to hibernate. Not dead, but dormant. On snooze while opportunities drive by waving cheerfully as they disappear down the road.

The symptoms are depressingly familiar. Persistent issues that never really get fixed - just patched until the next round. AI talked about endlessly but only ever inside PowerPoint. Integrations that stop halfway, shoved into a “phase two” that never comes. Customer experience personalisation promises that sparkle in demos then vanish into the ether.

And the service itself leans entirely on one or two poor sods who clearly care but are stretched so thin they squeak every time they accept a calendar invite. Everything feels reactive, apologetic and a little embarrassing.

The only proactive thing your agency ever does is ask for more budget - usually to cover the job they already said they could do.

And so, you get the invitation:

You are cordially invited to attend another “Strategy Workshop”. Led by people you’ve never heard of. You're offered the chance to gaze into the future of the art of the possible.

You know full well what’s possible. And whatever this is, it's not it.

Weeks of expensive billable time blown conjuring decks that are indecipherable, self-important, or both. Vanity jobs designed only to be admired for their beauty - not implemented. Decks full of ‘change initiatives’ so broad, so sweeping they’d be tricky for any global CEO to enact - let alone a regional IT manager straddling six vendors and a capex freeze.

It’s not strategy. It’s abject naivety cut with corporate cosplay fan fiction.

Truth is you’re being neglected by your agency. Taken for granted.

If your agency is VC funded or PE backed, it lives in permanent exit mode. Exit mode is the enemy of growth.

Exit mode agencies don’t invest in their clients. They invest in optics for investors.

They trim staff, recycle ideas, and churn out decks to pad their “strategic value.”

Because decks make agencies sound visionary without having to risk actually changing anything.

And you feel it. Clients always feel it. The fatigue. The loss of momentum. The polite evasions.

Delivery reduced to the minimal viable effort, unless of course you sign a chunky change request.

That’s why we started First Three Things.

Perhaps surprisingly, we weren’t interested in being another also ran agency flogging decks nobody reads and everyone resents.

We wanted to be, and are, a founder-led, Optimizely-first, AI-fluent consulting business that gets work done.

We don’t get paid to admire ourselves. We get paid to make things work.

We don’t bill weeks writing fantasies. We use that time to build, test, and deploy.

We don’t ask for bigger budgets. We show you how much more value is possible with the budget you already have.

That’s the difference between an agency rehearsing for its exit - and us - a partner obsessed with your success.

So if your Optimizely investment feels like it’s dozing off - buried in decks, delayed by backlogs, or kept alive by one exhausted Project Manager - don’t pretend another workshop will fix it.

You don’t need anymore decks.

You need someone to shake the giant awake.

To get it moving.

To make it roar.

Wake up and roar.