When Chris DuBois left the U.S. Army after seven years as an infantry officer, his next move surprised even him: he joined a marketing agency. Within nine months, he was running operations. A couple of years later, he was CEO.
“Apparently, ‘I can carry a lot of weight and shoot things’ doesn’t translate on a resume,” Chris joked in our recent chat. But what did translate was his ability to lead teams, synchronize complex moving parts, and stay calm under pressure. These skills now fuel his work helping digital agencies find their focus and scale with intention.
Chris and I met earlier this year at the Agency Builders Conference, where he gave a standout talk on what he calls the “Dynamic Agency OS”, a positioning framework built to help agencies stop spinning their wheels and start owning their niche.
The Real Cost of Not Choosing a Niche
“The biggest waste I see in agencies? Fear of niching down,” Chris says. “People think niching means saying no to revenue. But if you never say no, you never become known.”
Instead of settling on broad verticals like “manufacturing,” Chris pushes agencies to go deeper: “Are you serving textilemanufacturers? Paper? Pick a sub-industry. Then pick a job role within that: CMO, HR manager, ops director. Then focus on a real problem you can solve.”
It’s not about limiting yourself, he says. It’s about making your services magnetic to the right people.
Lessons from the Battlefield
Chris’s military background adds a rare depth to his consulting style. He’s not here to shout orders, he’s here to help agency leaders step into the commander role, orchestrating their team and tools to win battles on their own terms.
But even with his combat-hardened focus, Chris admits that agency life burned him out faster than active duty ever did. “There’s something uniquely exhausting about the digital world, the constant context-switching, the email pings, the approvals… It takes its toll.”
That realization fuels his mission today: helping other agency owners avoid burnout by building stronger systems.
Vendor Partnerships That Actually Help
Chris had kind words for vendors, too. “If a platform can make my life easier and help me stay focused on my client’s problem, that’s value. Even better if it helps me collaborate with my clients more effectively.”
That mindset is why his recent All In Agency Summit brought so many collaborators, even “competitors”, together. His goal? Grow the pie.
“We all serve agencies. We’re all part of the same market. The more attention we bring to that market, the more everyone benefits.”
Chris is building something powerful, and he’s doing it with humility, clarity, and an eye for the bigger picture. If you’re running an agency and feeling stuck, burnt out, or unsure how to grow — he’s the kind of voice worth listening to.
👉 Connect with Chris on LinkedIn or explore dynamicagencyos.com.
Transcript
Roger Williams (00:00)
Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a new friend, Chris. Hey Chris, how are you doing?
Chris DuBois (00:05)
Great, Roger. How are you?
Roger Williams (00:06)
I’m doing really well. You know, we met just a couple of months ago at the Agency Builders Conference in Florida, and you gave a presentation about the Dynamic Agency OS and your approach to helping agencies, you know, kind of navigate the world and everything. And I really enjoyed the presentation. We connected. But today I want to learn more about where you came from. Like, what’s the origin story? How did you end up in digital marketing?
So, you know, kind of take us back a little bit. What got you into all of this?
Chris DuBois (00:35)
Yeah, it’s a very convoluted path. When I came out of college, which with a degree in English, I decided the best way to use that was to be an infantry officer in the U S army. And so, so I did that as on active duty for seven years and moved around a handful of times got to do the fun exploration stuff. But then we, had some kids decided time to get out and actually couldn’t find a lot of job opportunities. Apparently when your resume.
Roger Williams (00:41)
Yeah.
⁓ okay.
Okay.
Chris DuBois (01:03)
you know, I can carry a lot of weight on my back for a long ways and shoot things, doesn’t translate to the corporate world. So, I actually started working at a marketing agency and then did that, learned how to market, nine months later became their head of ops. A couple of years later became the CEO and, ran that for a bit. And then, yeah, step down because I realized, I just wanted to take a little more control of my life, but to, help agencies kind of learn from some of the.
Roger Williams (01:09)
Okay.
Chris DuBois (01:29)
the harder learnings that I had to go through, but then also to help them on the lead generation side of things that I felt like I had figured out.
Roger Williams (01:38)
Okay, all right, all right. So a lot to unpack here. So let’s go back a little bit. First of all, thank you for your service. That’s really awesome. When you were in the infantry, are there things that you, I mean, I’m gonna assume there’s a ton of stuff that you took from that that applies to all the work that you’re doing now, but was there like one or two things that specifically kind of help you stay focused in this crazy digital world?
Chris DuBois (01:41)
Yeah.
That’s a good question. I think so when, when I was at my basic officer course, they really beat into us as one saying, and it’s that we were becoming masters of synchronizing assets in time and space. And it sounds like really, really great when you say like that. It’s like what you would put in your LinkedIn headline, right? But like in reality, here’s what it means. When you’re
Roger Williams (02:18)
Yeah.
Chris DuBois (02:23)
As an infantry officer, you’re never actually the guy shooting your rifle. You’re on the radio, you’re talking to people, you’re coordinating, you’re moving the pieces to support everyone else. From a leadership perspective, it’s awesome. Cause it means like, you know, where you best fit and that’s, you know, aligning all the pieces to make sure your team has what they need and they’re, they’re structured for success on the battlefield, right? You’re not only thinking, okay, I need to move these guys here. I need to move them here, but it’s also.
It’s 3D. like we have helicopters, right? We have artillery flying through the air, hopefully not hitting those helicopters. Like, and so when you’re courting all those assets and it’s all based on a very strict timeline, I felt like moving into the agency world was actually very easy to like, just look at the pieces, see what we need to do in order to make things work. But at the same time, I remember it was probably like month three or four of agency life. And I was like, man, I’m tired.
Like this might be the first time in my life I’m feeling burned out. I just realized cause of how different it was, like where you’re, you’re stressed about different things and, or maybe it just the mental fatigue of right being behind a computer and, you got all these, these assets that you need the client to approve and you’re working on the next thing you’re thinking three steps ahead, but it really like, man, I don’t even know where to go with that. Like it was probably the first time I felt burnout. And so there was also like some.
realization that agency life is hard, like coming from an infantry officer, right? There is something there.
Roger Williams (03:49)
I, you know, so that, you know, that speaks of loads and I hope all the agency life people watching this, you know, take something from that, like realize that, you know, while it’s not as severe a work as the infantry is involved in, it’s still, takes, it takes a tax on you. There’s a lot of emotions involved. And, and I can attest to this, just the brain freeze, the analysis paralysis that occurs.
is wild stuff. So thanks for sharing all of that. That’s very insightful. As you’ve moved into this agency consultant’s work, and now you’re helping the agencies kind of maybe see through some burnout and really focus on their accounts, where’s your big focus when you’re coming into an agency and engaging them?
Chris DuBois (04:34)
First thing I’m looking at is their positioning. Everything that we’re doing stems from how you’re positioned as a business. And so really what the dynamic agency OS is set up to do is help you with that positioning so that you can create great offers and then run your business, like do everything else. But that positioning is going to dictate literally everything, right? It’s who are we going to talk to? How do we need to set up our services to best serve these people? What problems do they have?
I mean, like every part of your business is influenced by how you’re positioned as an agency. And so that’s always where I start. It’s like, let’s make sure that we’re looking at the right audience, the right place so that we can build everything else accordingly.
Roger Williams (05:08)
Okay.
What would you say is the number one thing that is holding agencies back or causing them to waste their time and money?
Chris DuBois (05:21)
a fear of niching down. is, everyone approaches positioning and the ideal state is to niche down and be very well known for one thing. But in doing so, you’re saying no to a lot of other things. And there are very few agencies that have their lead generation engine, I guess, humming to the point where they can say no to other clients. And so everybody wants.
Roger Williams (05:23)
Okay.
Chris DuBois (05:45)
everything is coming in and that’s why you start getting these bloated service menus and you get people who are super stressed out about everything. But when in reality by niching down you actually start taking on really good, like best fit clients. They start coming to you asking for help, right? They start referring you more business and all these things. so yeah, not niching is probably the biggest frustration from my perspective and then also for those agency owners.
Roger Williams (06:11)
Absolutely, so as you’re starting to work with an agency, would only give away too much of the secret sauce, but what are some things that people overlook that maybe they’re already niching and they should recognize that and start focusing that
Chris DuBois (06:26)
So yeah, I’ll try to do this briefly. So I view positioning as like a multi-layer approach. So first, a lot of agencies will pick a vertical, they stop there. They’re like, I got an industry, that’s where we are. It’s like, yeah, but anyone can just do that, right? And so we gotta go deeper. Let’s pick actually a sub-industry. So if we’re talking manufacturing, we’re actually gonna get into textile manufacturing, or we’re gonna get into.
Roger Williams (06:30)
Yeah, yeah.
Chris DuBois (06:51)
you know, paper manufacturing, like something very specific, because when you start talking about that, like people’s ears perk up. It’s like when you say their name out loud in public, like people look over at you. very few people are going out talking to textile manufacturers, right? It’s just, once you have that, that’s your vertical positioning. Then you look at your horizontal positioning. There’s a bunch of different definitions for this. My view is it’s by job function. like CMOs, HR specialists, because those go across industry.
But when you look at a specific industry with that, they’re going to talk about things in a very specific way, right? And so it lets us really refine the search for who we’re looking for and get in front of them. We can better learn their problems, their pain points, which is the next piece we then have layer three is problem positioning, which, and this is like the ultimate, this is where we want to be. When you have your vertical, you have your horizontal, they overlap in that one piece. When you hone in on that circle, you get to look at all of the problems.
that that individual in that industry has, and then you can pick one. Pick any of those that you can make the most impact to help that client, and when you can niche on that problem, people know you are the solution.
Roger Williams (08:00)
Sweet. Yeah.
Chris DuBois (08:00)
That was quick.
That was a very abbreviated. I just did a 30 minute presentation on that for the summit yesterday. And it was a little more in depth.
Roger Williams (08:08)
No, no, that was great. And now you’ve got a nice little sound bite. I’ll be sure to share it with you. So that’s awesome. I like the focus there. in no way, nowhere in that did you talk about building a website, social media. Those are all things, I’m assuming, come much later. But first, you’re telling the customer, hey, I know who you are. I know what your pains are. I’m here to help.
And then you can start kind of laying out the action plan of, all the different ways you’re going to go do this. I want to switch topics here, subjects just a little bit, and self-serve a little bit, right? So Kinsta is a vendor. We’re here to help and support agencies. As you work with the agencies, what are some of the ways that vendors, that you see that vendors can come in and really help the agency?
know, niche down or niche down as you know, some people are saying, I’ve heard. Where do you see the vendors playing a role for the agencies here?
Chris DuBois (09:02)
So there’s a handful of ways. think on one front, it’s if you can make the agency’s life easier so they can focus on other stuff, right? That’s there are so many very, like we were just talking with the infantry, right? Like, yeah, I can talk to the sniper team while the mortar section and the guys on the ground, all of these things. But like, if I only had to focus on one thing, I could get really good at that one thing. So if I have someone helping with operations, if I have someone helping with sales, like all of these other, these, these tools and platforms,
that can make my life easier, now I can just focus on solving that problem for my ideal client. So that’s one front. There’s also the ability for platforms where I can use you with my client. It’s now something we can actually build a relationship on as well, and it gives us a little more, like if we had a Venn diagram, right, we have a little more overlap, and it makes it you stickier as a service provider.
Roger Williams (09:55)
Excellent, excellent. All right, final subject, because I like to keep these interviews short and sweet. You just had your All In Agency Summit. This thing was a rock star cast of presenters. How did it go? What is your major takeaway from doing this crazy event?
Chris DuBois (10:13)
first, thank you to Kinsta for supporting, sponsoring the event. was awesome. ⁓ But yeah, man, biggest takeaway. I have a strong, very strong belief that there’s no one way to do anything. so part of my philosophy with that is bring as many people in here as I can to share all of these insights with as many people as possible. And so that’s really what the summit is about. And I think
Roger Williams (10:19)
Amen. Happy to help.
Chris DuBois (10:39)
probably a lesson that I would love to share with everyone, which might not actually be a direct agency thing, but I think there are two ways that you can get attention for your business. And it’s either one, you go out and you do your marketing and you do all the things that would attract people to like your stall in the market. So that’s one method. You can also just attract attention to the market overall. And so that’s really what like what this event did. It’s like, yes, we’re competitors, right?
For anyone just listening, that’s air quotes, right? ⁓ We all serve agencies, but it’s like by bringing attention to all of this and showing that there’s a support network here, more people want to pay attention to it they want to get involved. And now we actually build up a community and now every stall in this market is getting more service. so.
Roger Williams (11:10)
Yeah, yeah.
I love it.
In the WordPress world, we look at this as we have competitors in WordPress, hosting competitors and whatnot. But to me, I’m really focused on growing the pie, right? Let’s get more people using WordPress. Why aren’t the youth using WordPress to create websites? Why are they all on TikTok and Facebook and wasting their time and effort on platforms that…
are not giving them money. So let’s grow the pie and find a way of getting more people involved. So I really love that philosophy, man. That’s really awesome to hear about. We’re at the end of time. These things fly by. ⁓ If people want to get in touch with you, which they should, so when they want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out and interact with you?
Chris DuBois (12:00)
Look at that. Yeah, it’s quick.
You can find me on LinkedIn or go to dynamicagencyos.com.
Roger Williams (12:15)
Wonderful. Chris, great talking to you, man. I look forward to talking with you again soon. I’d like to do a follow-up, see how things are going and other new ideas you’ve got. Have a great day.
Chris DuBois (12:25)
Yeah, you too, Thanks for having me.