You spent months defining your positioning, your niche, your offer, and your messaging. So how did some of your best clients come from something you never planned?

Legendary management thinker Henry Mintzberg discovered something counterintuitive: real strategy doesn’t always flow from the top down. In his 1987 Harvard Business Review article “Crafting Strategy,” he wrote, “Strategies that appear without clear intentions—or in spite of them—[are called] emergent strategies. Actions simply converge into patterns . . . deliberate strategy precludes learning once the strategy is formulated; emergent strategy fosters it. People take actions one by one and respond to them, so that patterns eventually form.”

This is especially true for creative agencies. You’re not building widgets in a factory. You’re solving novel, tricky problems for clients every single day. The patterns that emerge from solving those problems—the repeatable approaches, the specializations you’re naturally gravitating toward, the service offerings that clients keep asking for—are your real strategy. Yes, the deliberate plan matters, but so does paying attention to what’s actually working in real time.

On July 4th, 1924, a restaurant owner in Tijuana, Mexico was running low on ingredients. Packed with holiday tourists, the kitchen was slammed, so the owner cobbled together the basics he had on hand: romaine lettuce, eggs, Worcestershire sauce, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese. That dish became so beloved that it’s now served in restaurants around the world a hundred years later. The owner’s name was Caesar Cardini, and that improvised creation became the Caesar salad. His strategy didn't come from a masterplan written months before. It emerged from paying attention to what he had, what his customers needed, and adapting in the moment.

Too many early agency owners conflate deliberate and emergent strategies (and tactics) in trying to “set up the basics” for their business. They’re insistent that the first thing they need to do is set up an LLC or make a logo or setting up various bank accounts. They try to set up “business foundations” like choosing a niche or writing a vision or company values. They think launching a website is the pinnacle of launching a business.

Yes, all of those things are great to have, but they can all be emergent. Many agency owners don’t land on a solid vision until after they break $1 million, running their businesses for a few years. For my agency SuperFriendly, it took us 6 years to find our niche. The only true deliberate strategy you need for your agency from day one is how to find someone every week who would gladly pay you to alleviate one or more of their terrible pains.

Audit the three projects you’re most proud of. Look at what you actually delivered, what problems you solved, what your team did brilliantly. Write down the patterns you see. What kept showing up? What did you do repeatedly? What made those projects work?

That’s your emergent strategy staring you in the face. It already exists in the work you’ve done. You don’t have to invent it from scratch. You just have to notice it and double down.

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