Major pivot: investing through the COVID slowdown

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Starting with a clearly defined niche can make all the difference when you're landing your first clients and deeply understanding that niche can carry you through the toughest seasons of agency life. Today's featured guest built his agency on exactly that foundation.

Before launching his firm, he spent years working as a consultant for governments, UN agencies, and the European Commission. Along the way, he identified a clear gap in the market.

That expertise proved invaluable during the pandemic. While uncertainty hit many agencies hard, he trusted his understanding of the space and chose to weather the slow months, confident the work would return. His patience paid off as demand surged later in the year.

He'll share the lessons learned from more than 20 years of building and running a thriving niche agency in one of the most political and complex markets in the world—and why focus, patience, and deep domain knowledge remain his greatest competitive advantages.

Filip Lugovic is the co-founder and CEO of The Right Street, an EU-focused digital communications agency based in Brussels. For the last 20 years, he's lived in the middle of the "Brussels bubble," where organizations, trade groups, and companies fight for attention from the European Commission, Parliament, and Council.

His agency sits at the intersection of public affairs + digital communications, serving organizations trying to influence policies that impact nearly half a billion people across Europe.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

• Identifying and owning a highly specific niche.

• Building a client list with the power of low-hanging fruit.

• Getting their best quarter during COVID.

• Keeping a creative team inspired during slow cycles.

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From Door-to-Door Sales to the EU Policy Bubble

Before he ever pitched a digital campaign, Filip was strangers' knocking on doors in Southern California selling heart-shaped pillows and screwdrivers with built-in flashlights. Not exactly glamorous, but it taught him the skill most agency owners run from: sales.

When he landed in Brussels in 2005, he fell into a job selling ads for EU Observer, one of the leading political publications at the time. His clients were the same organizations trying to get in front of policymakers.

Over the next decade, he built a deep network and a knack for relationship-based selling. Eventually, he left to consult on his own, but by 2017, he hit the same wall most consultants do: "I'm making money… but it all goes to someone else."

A lunch with his current business partner (a seasoned communicator who had served as spokesperson for governments, UN agencies, and the European Commission) led to a plan to build something together.

Building a Niche Agency: Where Marketing Meets Lobbying

Once they figured out their roles and what they brought to the partnership, Filip and his partner started making plans and realized something: Most agencies in Brussels fell into one of two buckets:

• Lobbying firms who knew politics but didn't understand digital.

• Marketing agencies who knew digital but didn't understand politics.

No one sat in the middle.

So they built an agency that merged both worlds, pairing policy context with high-quality digital production.

At the time, it was a hypothesis, and a risky one. Only a couple of competitors existed. But they saw the gap and took it.

Landing the First Clients by Leveraging Existing Relationships

Filip is no stranger to knocking on doors to sell a product, and he would have for his agency. However, this wasn't the right environment for that, so when it came time to start looking for clients, he relied on his network.

Filip's approach to sales was never transactional and he very much enjoyed building lasting relationships.

This is something many agency owners overcomplicate. Filip's first step wasn't SEO, funnels, or paid ads. It was: "Let me call every single person I already know and ask them to grab a coffee."

That alone got him his first tiny clients. It wasn't a big account. Five hundred euros for hours of work, and zero profit. But it built the early case studies they needed.

Most agencies try to skip this part. They want the big brand logo first. But every agency you admire started by leveraging relationships and building proof.

Pro tip: You should always continue to revisit these relationships. Reach out to that client and buy them a coffee. This is the low-hanging fruit that can get your agency out of a tough spot. If you're not doing this, you're leaving money on the table.

How Deep Market Knowledge Helps in Hard Times

By January 2020, Filip's agency was growing at a healthy pace, had a new office and a seven-person team.

Then we experience COVID shut downs.

Their contracts froze, clients stopped paying, and their pipeline evaporated. Meanwhile, the agency had fixed expenses and a growing team relying on them.

Most agencies would've cut staff and hoped to survive. Filip didn't.

Luckily, he understood his market: EU organizations operate on annual budgets. If they don't spend it, they lose it the following year.

So he and his partner made the hard call: No salaries for themselves (they relied on their wives for a while). Keep the team. Use that time to aggressively market.

Their bet paid off and by Q4, every organization that couldn't run events was suddenly scrambling for digital support.

Their best quarter ever happened during one of the scariest years on record.

It was the foundation of everything that came afterwards.

Keeping the Team Inspired During Slow Cycles

How do you keep a creative team motivated when client work stops?

Filip's answer: "Let them create whatever they want." There were no clients nitpicking colors or people demanding designers to make the logo bigger.

It was a rare opportunity for pure, unfiltered creative expression.

The team remembers that period as one of the most enjoyable times in the agency's history, despite the financial uncertainty.

Why Big Name Clients Don't Always Make the Best Case Studies

Most agency owners are probably familiar with this scenario: A famous brand comes in with big expectations and a big budget, and you brush off early concerns thinking their reputation would suffice to make the use of their case story all worthwhile.

It happened to Filip and, unfortunately, after dismissing those concerns, the client rewrote everything and destroyed the design.

Now they couldn't even put it on their website.

Filip laughs about this now, because it still happens. Sometimes the smallest project gives you the best case study. Sometimes the biggest one becomes a "please-don't-put-our-name-on-that" situation.

Just show the work you're proud of, not just the work you were paid for.

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