Inside a Growth Marketing Agency Built on No Approval Chains

I didn't set out to build an agency.

I set out to build the place I always wanted to work.

I spent 15 years as an employee before I became a founder.
I worked at Sony, Hulu, and NBCUniversal.

They were big brands with big budgets.
Structures that had grown past what any individual could navigate cleanly.

Those years shaped Fluency more than anything else.

I learned a lot during that time:

✅ Layers multiply faster than judgment does.
✅ Senior thinking gets filtered down through junior execution.
✅ The people closest to the work are rarely the ones making the calls.
✅ By the time a decision reaches the top, something important has already been lost.

Brands pay for that gap.

So when I built Fluency, I made one call early and held it.
Everyone here is already experienced enough to own their work.

We don't have training layers or approval chains for decisions that should be made close to the client.

What we have instead is something most large companies can't offer:
Real ownership across many brands at real scale.

Our team learns faster by managing a variety of decisions.

Seeing impact across different businesses is something you can't replicate inside a single company.

That's what keeps me going 👇
Helping a lot of brands rather than one.

I got the culture piece wrong early on, though.
I assumed hiring experienced people and giving them real work was enough.

But I underestimated how much deliberate communication still matters in a small team.
That one took me longer than it should have.

It also means being intentional about rest.
One of our team traditions is Fluency Fridays, a full day off each month.

Our team takes their Fluency water bottle out wherever they go that day.
Yellowstone. London. Wherever life takes them.

It started as a small thing.

It's become a reminder that the work is only sustainable if the people doing it are.
That matters to me more than it probably should.

Fluency was not built to be the biggest agency in the room.
It was built to be the one I would have wanted to work at.

That's still the benchmark.

What's one thing you most wanted from a workplace earlier in your career that you rarely found?

♻️ Repost if this resonated.
Follow me, Jacob Rokeach, for more on growth, creative systems, and how operators make decisions under pressure.