The Speed Game: Pride Yourself on How Fast You Level Up

Jeremy Haynes told Derrick Small point blank after learning he had been running his agency for three years: pride yourself on the speed in which you overcome that part of the game.

Three years at the same revenue level is not experience — it is repetition of the same lessons without graduating to the next tier.

The metric that matters is not how long you have been in business — it is how fast you move through each phase of growth.

Every level of the consulting and agency game has a set of lessons built in — small clients teach you delivery, medium clients teach you systems, big clients teach you leverage.

The mistake is getting comfortable at any one level instead of treating it as a temporary phase you need to pass through as quickly as possible.

Haynes has been in the same position as a $15,000 to $30,000 per month agency owner — the difference is the speed at which he moved through it.

Speed comes from intentional action: deliberately pitching bigger deals, deliberately improving your proof stack, deliberately saying no to deals that keep you stuck.

The fear of moving too fast is almost always less dangerous than the cost of moving too slow — staying at the same level for years is the real risk.

Every month you spend serving clients below your potential is a month you are not building the leverage needed to serve clients at your actual level.

The game does not change at higher levels — you still have to push each deal as far as possible and use it to unlock the next one — but the stakes and rewards compound.

Haynes encourages agency owners to measure progress not by revenue alone but by the quality of deals they are closing relative to six months ago.

If the type of client you are signing today is the same type you were signing a year ago, you are not growing — you are just maintaining, and maintaining is a slow death in consulting.