Most agencies treat core values like a tattoo: something you decide on once, ink permanently, and then live with forever - even when it stops representing who you've become.

The values get written in year one, when the agency is four people and a Slack channel. They make it onto the website. Maybe into a SOP. And then the agency triples, triples again, weathers a few rough quarters, loses some people and gains others. All the while, those original values just sit there, frozen, describing a company that has long outgrown them.

Unfortunately, agencies are dynamic, and their values are too. And particularly, in the agency world, where teams shift constantly, that's a problem worth taking seriously.

So the question isn't whether your values will drift. It's whether you'll catch it before or in time.

Your Values Have Two Expiration Triggers

Two triggers should send you back to the drawing board.

1. Every time you scale 3x up or down.

When a team of 3 grows into a team of 9, it doesn't just get bigger; it becomes a different company altogether as its needs, goals, and focus have changed. The same is true going from 30 to 90, and just as true when 30 shrinks back down to 10.

Every time your headcount triples or collapses, the culture mutates whether you're watching or not. New people bring new defaults. New pressures expose new cracks. The traits that made a five-person team magic don't automatically scale at 15 people, and the values that held a big team together don't automatically survive a contraction. At every 3x threshold, re-running the exercise isn't optional. It's maintenance.

2. Every 3 years, at minimum, even if nothing's changed.

Maybe you haven't scaled. Headcount's been flat and steady. Even so, three years is plenty of time for values to quietly drift. Leadership evolves. Priorities shift. The agency you are today was shaped by a thousand small decisions you never consciously made.

Think of a three-year check-in the way you think of an oil change: routine upkeep you do on schedule, not damage control you do after the engine fails. It's a moment to step back and ask: Are we still functioning the way we used to? Are we still who we say we are?

The Slow, Silent Cost of Doing Nothing

Values that have become stale and outdated aren’t easily apparent. That's exactly what makes them dangerous. It shows up first as fog. One leader makes a call one way, another makes the opposite call, and there's no shared reference point to settle it. Onboarding gets vague, because nobody can clearly say who is the “ideal fit here" anymore. Hiring becomes a gut-feel guessing game. Feedback gets awkward, because the standard everyone's measured against was quietly written for a historical agency that has now drastically changed.

And then comes the part that actually hurts: your A-players feel it. The exact people you'd clone, the ones you'd rebuild around… they're the most attuned to the gap between the culture they signed up for and the one they're living in. They notice the drift first. And because they're your best, they're the ones with the most options when they decide they've had enough.

Picture this: your agency started with eight people who genuinely lived "ownership." Nobody waited to be told. If something was broken, someone fixed it. If a client was about to be blindsided, someone flagged it before anyone asked. It wasn't a value on an SOP; it was just how everyone operated. And one person embodied it more than anyone: your A player. The one who'd catch the mistake at 5 p.m., quietly fix it, and never make a thing of it.

Then the agency grew. Tripled, and tripled again. The new hires were talented, but they came in with a different default, a new mindset: more transactional, more "that's not my task," more clock-in-clock-out. Not bad employees by any means. Just hires who were never hired for the same values that made the early team special and successful. Over time, they grew comfortable assuming someone else would catch the dropped ball.

And someone always did. Your A-player. Kept holding the old line while everyone around him quietly settled into the new normal. For a long time, it worked… which is exactly the problem. From leadership's view, nothing looked wrong. Deadlines were met. Clients were happy. Ownership still "lived" at the agency because of him.

That's the trap: oftentimes, these drifts are invisible from the top, because your best people take care of the problems. But eventually, they will stop. Your A-player will come to realize that he wasn't being held to the standard because the standard that made up the team he loved to work with had disappeared. So he left. Quietly, the way the best people usually do.

Outdated values start as confusion and end as turnover, and sometimes, it’s your best who leave first.

How to Actually Run the Conversation

Knowing it's time to reassess is the first part. Most agencies stall here because they don't know what the actual conversation looks like.

Step 1: Get the right people in the room.

This is not a founder's solo project. When one person redefines the values and hands them down like commandments, your team doesn’t get buy-in - you get compliance at best and quiet resentment at worst. The strongest room isn't the biggest one; it's a small, deliberate mix of perspectives:

• Leadership because they're the ones who have to live up to it first. The team mirrors whatever leadership actually models. If leaders aren't bought in, nothing you decide in this room will stick, because employees follow the behaviors of those they look up to.

• Long-tenured people who've lived through the agency's chapters and can tell you honestly what's been gained, what's been lost, and what should stay.

• A recent hire, ideally someone under a year in. They still have outside eyes. What the culture feels like to someone new is vital insight that you can't get any other way.

Keep it as small as possible. Any bigger and the honest voices might be over dominated.

Step 2: Put the current values on the table - literally.

Start by writing your existing values where everyone can see them. Ask the questions that matter: Is this still true? Is it actually how we operate today?

Step 3: Pressure-test each value against real decisions.

Values are easy to agree with in the abstract, so don't stay abstract. For each one, ask the room to name a recent, specific moment where the agency either honored that value or quietly violated it. A value you can't find a single real example of isn't a value anymore; it's a historical one that doesn’t hold current relevance.

Step 4: Hunt for the unwritten values.

The reverse is just as important. Ask: What do we actually reward around here? Sometimes a value has emerged that you never named, but should be explicit moving forward.

Step 5: Decide what stays, what changes, and what goes.

Every value lands in one of three buckets: keep it (still true, still earns its place), rewrite it (the spirit's right but the words have gone stale or vague), or cut it (it's no longer who you are). A value you've outgrown is proof that the agency has evolved.

Step 6: Leave with clarity on next steps.

A reassessment that ends in a nice conversation and no action yields no value. Whatever you land on, assign it a home: who's responsible for making the kept values visible again, how each team expects these values to translate to their everyday work, and how the changes get shared with the rest of the team. The people in the room may set the standard, but the follow-through is what makes the team believe, and live, the values.

The Best Time to Reassess Is Before You Have To

Revisiting your values isn't about rewriting your identity every year. It's about making sure the words on the wall still match the people in the building.

When you have the discipline to check in before your values drift too far from reality, they stay useful - guiding how you hire, how you lead, and how you grow. So watch for the triggers. Get the right people in the room. And whatever you do, don't wait until the culture's already broken to figure out what it was supposed to stand for in the first place.

New agency, or never formally defined your values in the first place? Start with our companion post on how to build core values your team will actually live by.

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