Sometime around 2019 the calls started. Quiet ones, mostly. Coffee at a hotel bar near Piccadilly, a "just exploring conversations" line in the email subject. The roll-up funds had moved past the obvious targets and were starting to ask after the rest of us. By 2022 it was constant.
We didn't take any of them. The reasons were rarely the ones the funds expected.
What people get wrong about staying independent.
The cliché is that founders stay independent because they're emotionally attached to the brand they built. There's some truth in that, but in our experience it's the least interesting reason. Plenty of founders we know are perfectly capable of letting go of a logo if the next chapter is good.
The actual reasons are more boring and more durable. They tend to come down to two questions: what kind of work do you want to do for the next ten years, and what kind of company is best at producing it?
For us, the work we want to do is long-term, often unfashionable, and full of judgment calls that look bad on a quarterly board pack. Cutting a retainer because the client's not getting their money's worth. Walking away from a six-figure pitch because the brief is rotten. Hiring an engineer two years before we'll have the revenue to justify them, because we know the work that's coming. Putting our own time on a project at cost because the relationship is worth more than the line item.
None of those are illegal in a fund-owned agency. They're just structurally penalised. The board pack measures different things; the comp plan rewards different behaviour; the next-quarter-or-bust gravity bends decisions away from the kind of work we want to do.
What independence actually costs.
It would be tedious to pretend independence is free. The honest list:
- Slower personal liquidity. A founder who sells their agency at year ten gets paid sooner than a founder who doesn't. We're aware of that one.
- Less leverage on big-platform deals. When you're inside one of the holding groups, the platform partnerships come pre-negotiated. We've had to earn ours individually, which has cost us speed in places.
- Harder hiring at certain levels. A subset of senior people want the predictability of a multinational behind them. That's a fair preference; we lose some of those candidates and we don't pretend we don't.
- More personal capital risk. The founders carry the risk of a bad year in a way that gets diffused once a fund's underwriting it. That's a genuine cost, not just a romance line.
If any of those costs were unbearable for us, we'd probably have taken a call by now. They aren't, but they're real.
What independence has paid back.
The upside is harder to put on a slide, which is partly why the roll-up funds keep underestimating it. A few things we've kept that we don't think we'd have kept inside someone else's portfolio:
The right to say "not yet."
Half of the cleanest decisions we've made across our first 20 years were decisions to not do something this year. Not pitch this client. Not open this practice. Not move into this market. None of those decisions look impressive on a growth chart. All of them turned out to be cheap insurance.
A relationship-shaped book of business.
Our oldest client has been with us for over a decade. That isn't a metric you can engineer; it's a side-effect of being able to make trade-offs that prioritise the relationship over this quarter. That's harder to do when the quarter is being audited by a fund.
Permission to start the next thing.
Standing up Sprint Studio inside a fund-owned group structure would have taken us two years and an internal sponsor with the political capital to fight for it. We started writing the operating note for it on a Sunday. That speed is worth a lot, and it's the sort of thing that doesn't come back once you've sold.
None of this is meant as a pitch against selling. We know plenty of brilliant founders who took the call and got their best chapter out of it. The point is that the decision is more interesting than the cliché suggests. Independence isn't a virtue; it's a structure that lets certain kinds of work happen at the cost of others.
For the kind of work we want to be doing in 2036 — same founders, same instincts, same long view — it's still the right shape.