Elevate 2025: A Transformational Workshop for Agency Leaders

Two days, a room full of ambitious agency owners, and one experiment:
What happens when you give yourself the space to think differently about your business?

That was the premise behind Elevate, a workshop I’ve wanted to bring to life for years. My hope wasn’t to overwhelm anyone with frameworks or models. I wanted to create an environment where smart, driven people could walk in carrying the weight of their business… and walk out feeling lighter, clearer, and more in control of where they’re headed.

What happened in that room went far beyond the agenda on paper.
Here’s what I saw up close.

Day One: A Room Wakes Up

Shyam Patel speaking at Elevate Workshop

We opened the first morning with Shyam Patel, with Sublingual, a long time friend, mentor, and co-worker, who immediately cracked open everyone’s thinking. His message was simple but disarming:

Most of what you believe about the future is shaped by your past.

Shyam challenged the group to explore multiple possible futures, not just the one they were unconsciously anchoring to. He talked about constraints as a source of creative power, narrative alchemy, and the trap of trying to design new futures with old words.

I know any Shyam presentation is like an acid trip. It starts off weird and by the end you realize you’ve unlocked a new part of your brain. While I was a vet to this experience, it was fun to watch the neurons unlock for everyone else in the room.

You could almost see the question settle over the group:

What if the future of my business isn’t limited to what I’ve already seen?

Leadership Through a New Lens

Kelsey Taylor presenting the Enneagram session

Next, Kelsey Taylor (The Working Enneagram) walked everyone through her presentation “Know Your Leadership Strengths” to help them see how they show up as a leader using the Enneagram framework, a tool I’m quite fond of. Her reminder set the tone:

“Don’t use your type as a shield or a sword.”

Kelsey is the definition of empathy as she asked each person in the room to reflect on how their Enneagram number relates to their day to day interactions. Some realized they over-function. Others saw why they avoid conflict. A few suddenly understood team dynamics that had puzzled them for months.

This was the moment the room loosened up. People shared openly, laughed at themselves, and admitted things like:

“Okay… this explains a lot about how I run my team.”
“I didn’t know this was so obvious to others.”

That openness set a foundation for the rest of the workshop.

Seeing Their Business With New Eyes

After lunch, Ryan Watson with Upsourced Accounting, stepped in to walk the group through the reality of their agency’s life cycle. It created some of the biggest “Oh… wow” moments of the day.

People finally saw that their struggles weren’t personal failures, they were predictable symptoms of the stage their agency was in. It was a sense of relief and validation; coupled with the insight of maybe outright growth isn’t the best thing to focus on right now.

One attendee later wrote that the session “made me feel less alone and more equipped,” and another said they finally understood why things felt chaotic, even though revenue looked fine on paper.

Ending Day One with Vision (and Permission)

Attendees talking and smiling during the workshop

Rich Allen, with Tour de Profit, my long time mentor and business coach, closed the afternoon by guiding everyone through crafting a compelling long-term vision, something most owners rarely give themselves permission to do.

He asked questions that made people pause:

“What do YOU actually want?”
“Why does this business exist for you?”
“What does your future look like at three, five, and ten years?”

The energy changed. The conversations got deeper. People began to see bigger futures than they walked in believing were possible.

Day Two: Clarity Turns Into Commitment

Day Two was about locking in what the group had uncovered. The goal? Creating a strategy for their business for the upcoming year. The agenda was a carefully curated process to explore opportunities that could create the biggest ripple effect in each person’s business.

No distractions. No Slack notifications. No competing deadlines.

One attendee stated, “I didn’t realize how badly I needed uninterrupted thinking time until I had it.”

From there, the room shifted into strategy mode: prioritizing, solutioning, mapping, stress testing, and aligning 2026 goals with clarity.

The Real Magic: The Room Itself

Group photo of all attendees at Elevate Workshop

If I could bottle the energy of that room, I would. And use it to fly me around the sun and back. Being surrounded by people who understand the messy middle of agency life created an atmosphere you simply can’t replicate over Zoom, or even in your home office.

The generosity, insight, honesty, and momentum in that room were unmatched. People weren’t competing, they were sharpening each other.

As one attendee put it, “Being with people who understand the challenges without needing me to explain them was everything.”

A Moment of Shift

There was one sentence that summed up the entire workshop:

“I thought our goal was $2M. Now I think it’s $5M.”

That wasn’t ego talking. It was clarity. And clarity creates confidence. It wasn’t a pipe dream they concocted with a spurt of energy, it was built by working backwards and identifying the most critical pathways to making it happen.

That’s what Elevate was all about. Not hustle. Not hype. Not sprints.
But space. Perspective. Honesty. Structure. And the courage to imagine a bigger future.

What This Means for You

Even if you weren’t in the room, the lesson stands:

You need space to think.
You need peers who challenge you.
You need frameworks that make the future less foggy.
You deserve clarity about where your agency is going.

You don’t have to wait for a workshop to give yourself that kind of space.
But if you want a room designed specifically to create breakthroughs… Elevate will be back next year.

And if you want to talk before then, I’m here.

Russel
“The Backboard”