6am, on the platform, heading to London for a 5pm dinner with some ecommerce founders. Trips like this are the job now, because the ecommerce agency game has fundamentally changed. You are not just competing with other agencies anymore. You are competing for attention itself.
The owner’s reality
Business owners are firefighting daily: sick kids, fulfilment issues, a key team member burning out. Growth takes a backseat, not because they do not care about it, but because the fire in front of them is louder than the opportunity behind it. That reshapes everything about how you reach them. Sales cycles are longer than they used to be, and a non-response almost never means no interest. It usually just means this week had a bigger fire.
Once you internalise that, you stop reading silence as rejection and start reading it as timing. The owner who ignored your email in March is not a lost cause, they were mid-crisis. The question is whether you are still around, and still useful, when they finally surface.
What actually wins
Show up. Stay in touch. Be there for the “now I am ready” moment, whenever it comes. The agencies that win are not the ones with the slickest deck, they are the ones still present, still helpful, still top of mind when the owner finally has a spare hour to think about growth. Presence beats persuasion, because you cannot persuade someone who is not listening yet, but you can be the first name they think of once they are.
That is the same principle behind who shows up when a business is in dark mode rather than only when the budget is flush, and it is why a real partnership leads with value, not a pitch. It also ties to the bigger shift that you cannot just be a dev agency anymore, and that human connection is becoming the rarest, most valuable thing in marketing. If you want a partner who stays present instead of vanishing after the proposal, book a call.