A woman I used to work with emailed me in August to ask if I knew of anything. Fourteen years in. She ran the qualitative practice, the person every account team borrowed when a pitch got hard and the brief made no sense. She went in the second round, along with four analysts and what was left of the junior planning bench.
Her agency's note to staff said they were protecting the core.
They cut the core.
I have now watched six months of this, at holding companies and at independents, and the pattern is the same everywhere. The first names on the list are the youngest people and the researchers. Not because anyone dislikes them. Because of how the list gets made.
Layoff lists are built by ranking people on the ratio of their cost to the revenue you can attribute to them this quarter, and every function that pays off later fails that test by design.
A junior strategist bills less than she costs for about two years. A research director does not appear on any invoice at all. Neither of them shows up in a spreadsheet as anything but a number with no offsetting number beside it. So they go, and the P&L improves, and the deck says the agency has been made more senior and more focused.
Here is what you actually bought with that improvement.
You bought a business with no mid-level in 2023. Seniors do not appear. They are grown, slowly, by sitting next to someone better for four years, and you just deleted the entry point. You bought an agency that can only sell what it can already staff, which means execution, which means margin pressure forever. And you bought a shop with no one whose job is to go find out what is true, at the exact moment when nothing anyone knew in January is still reliable.
That last one is the expensive part. Demand did not vanish this year, it moved, and moved fast, and the only people trained to go look at where it moved were the ones described in the memo as non essential.
Seniors do not appear. They are grown, slowly, by sitting next to someone better for four years, and you just deleted the entry point.
I know the counterargument, because I have made it in a room. Cash is real, payroll is monthly, and no CFO gets to spend 2023 money in September. Fine. Then cut hours, cut partner draw, cut the office you are not sitting in. Do not tell me a rented floor in the Pearl survived a round that a fourteen year researcher did not.
Karaoke is closed, so I sang in my kitchen on Friday and startled the cats. Truffles left the room. Barnaby stayed, which felt like loyalty and was probably just the radiator.