• Mastering how a 63-year-old ad agency stays relevant by launching new service offerings is one of the clearest separators between firms that plateau and those that scale to a successful exit.
• Marc shares the specific moves that made the biggest difference — lessons that only come from doing it, not reading about it.
• Most founders underestimate how much how a 63-year-old ad agency stays relevant by launching new service offerings affects enterprise value; treat it as a strategic priority, not an afterthought.
• The key mindset shift: approach how a 63-year-old ad agency stays relevant by launching new service offerings as an owner building a sellable asset, not as an operator solving today's problem.
• Topics like how a 63-year-old ad agency stays relevant by launching new service offerings are discussed weekly inside Collective 54, where founders get peer accountability and expert guidance from people who have been in the same seat.

Listen on:🎵 Apple Podcasts🎵 Spotify

As professional services firms scale, developing new service offerings is critical to staying relevant with your clients. In this episode, we hear from Marc Cooper, President and Partner at Junction59, to learn how his firm uncovers new client needs and develops new service offerings as part of a business scaling strategy.

TRANSCRIPT

Greg Alexander [00:00:15] Welcome to the Boutique with Collective 54, a podcast for founders and leaders of boutique professional services firms. For those that don’t know us, Collective 54 is the first mastermind community to help you grow, scale, and exit your firm bigger and faster. I’m the founder. My name’s Greg Alexander, and I’m also your host today. And on this episode, I’m going to talk to Mark Cooper, and we’re going to talk about designing new services. So, Marc, welcome to the show. 

Marc Cooper [00:00:47] Thanks for having me today. 

Greg Alexander [00:00:49] Would you mind properly introducing yourself to the audience, please? 

Marc Cooper [00:00:53] Absolutely. I’m Marc Cooper, and I’m the president of Junction 59. We’re a Canadian integrated ad agency based out of Toronto. We like to say that we work at the intersection of people and points of view where ideas meet to make a better tomorrow. 

Greg Alexander [00:01:10] Okay, very good. And what types of clients do you serve, Marc? 

Marc Cooper [00:01:15] So we’ve a broad range of clients actually that reflect, I would say, the Canadian landscape. But for the most part, we divide up into three different categories: B2B clients and B2C clients who are interested in reaching their clients throughout the journey. So a lot of direct marketing and journey marketing. And then not-for-profit  clients. 

Greg Alexander [00:01:41] Okay. 

Marc Cooper [00:01:42] All about fundraising. 

Greg Alexander [00:01:43] Very good. Okay. So the topic today is about designing new service lines as a way to scale your firm in the common-sense explanation. It’s pretty basic. And it says if you have one thing to sell and deliver, scaling a business  is going to be hard. So at some point in the journey, you know, firms invest in additional service lines so that they can go back to their happy client base with new things to talk to them about and potentially earn expansion revenue. 

So let me start with kind of a 30,000-foot  question, which is, how many service lines do you have today? And how has that evolved since the founding of the firm many years ago? 

Marc Cooper [00:02:25] Well, it’s an interesting question because in a marketing and communications business, you know, you could bucket all of our services under marketing communications and say we have one service. Yeah, but of course, you know, as the industry has evolved and different platforms have come to life, you know, there are lots of agencies that specialize just in digital, just in traditional print or television or out of home. 

And then across that, you’ve got some that have a strategy and some that don’t. So if you start to look at all of the different service offerings that we have at a much more sort of focused level, I would say we have upwards of 30 to 40 different services that we’re able to offer. 

Greg Alexander [00:03:14] And you’ve been around for how long? 

Marc Cooper [00:03:17] We’ve been in business since 1959, which is where the 59 and Junction  59 comes from.