Two years ago, I accepted an unusual invitation: my town’s fire department was going to burn down a donated house as a training exercise.
Several firefighters went inside, while others worked the hoses outside. Meanwhile, the battalion chief stayed back, using live drone footage—including infrared data—to monitor the situation and direct the response.
Notably, the fire chiefs were not running into the house themselves.
That’s the lesson for agency owners who are tired of being the bottleneck. As your agency grows, your role needs to evolve:
- From personally solving emergencies, to
- Directing others as they respond, to
- Creating the systems that prevent emergencies in the first place.
I call this the Fire Fighter → Fire Chief → Fire Marshal framework. Here’s how the three roles differ.
Agency framework: Fire Fighter → Fire Chief → Fire Marshal
When you started your agency, you were probably the Fire Fighter: always putting out the fires yourself. This was normal at first, and you may even have come to enjoy it. After all, it feels good to save the day.
Over time, you hired a team. You still might get pulled into larger fires—but ideally, your role starts to shift. You’re no longer the person holding the hose every time something goes wrong.
As the Fire Marshal, your job is to prevent future fires. You study past fires and invest resources to keep similar problems from happening again. This includes preparing to minimize damage—like clearing dry brush from around a house, or ensuring the team builds in extra QA checks when they’re accelerating a deliverable.
I’ve used this framework with agencies since 2022, and it’s helped in my work as an advisor.
More recently, I realized there’s an important step in between—a role that you likely hold at some point, and that key employees will continue to hold. I call that middle role the Fire Chief.
The Fire Chief is still on-site at the fire, but they’re coordinating others. Instead of pointing the hoses or running into the burning building, they’re creating the strategy to fight the fire, monitoring its progress, and making sure everyone stays safe.
Why owner optionality is harder than it looks
This is where many agency owners get stuck. If you’re still the Fire Fighter, you can’t step back far enough to coordinate. And if you’re always coordinating as Fire Chief, you don’t have enough space to prevent the next round of emergencies.
Fire Fighter mode creates risk and limits your growth
When you hang onto the Fire Fighter role, your team doesn’t build judgment and your managers don’t build confidence. Clients learn that escalation requires the owner. The result: you solidify your position as the agency’s safety net. That’s not the ‘job security’ you want.
Based on revenue, margins, and headcount, your agency may look mature. But if every meaningful issue still routes through you, the business remains owner-dependent. That doesn’t mean your team is failing—but it does mean the system still treats you as the safest escalation path.
As you grow, the question isn’t, “Are there fires that need to be put out?” There will always be fires.
It’s better to ask: How strong is your firefighting system and what’s your role in it?
How to think like a Fire Chief at your agency
If the Fire Fighter is on the front lines, the Fire Marshal is focused on prevention. They ask: why did the fire happen in the first place, and how can we prevent future fires?
But when an emergency strikes, the ‘missing middle’ role in this dynamic is the Fire Chief: the one who organizes the response.
During the practice burn, I learned that the chiefs drive an SUV or pickup truck, so that they can get to the fire faster than the full-sized fire trucks. That way, they can start strategizing the response—including if they need to call in more teams or specialized equipment.
The Fire Chief’s role is to assess the situation, decide who needs to be involved, and assign ownership. They don’t personally hold the hose every time, but they also aren’t operating purely in prevention mode.
When everything is urgent, nothing is truly prioritized. A strong Fire Chief helps your team distinguish between a true emergency, a manageable issue, and something that merely feels loud.
When I observed the firefighting exercise, the chiefs made decisions based on the drone’s intel—and years of experience—not by personally leading the procession into the burning house. They kept their distance, to maintain operational clarity.
To be effective, a Fire Chief needs to communicate clearly, bring calm authority, and stay engaged until the right people are solving the right problem. At agencies, this role often belongs to a COO, president, managing director, VP, department head, team manager, or other senior leader.
Contrasting roles: Fire Chief vs. Fire Marshal
At your agency, a Fire Chief will ask and determine:
- Who owns this? What decision is needed? What does the client need to hear?
- What’s the team’s next step? Who needs to be informed?
- What can we handle without pulling in the owner? When do we need the owner?
- Once the initial emergency is over, what should we change in the future?
A strong Fire Chief creates more space for the owner to lead at the right altitude, but they can’t be effective during the emergency without trust and authority from the top.
The Fire Marshal is focused on prevention: determining why the fire happened in the first place. They ask:
- Why did this problem happen? Was this truly a surprise, or was it predictable?
- Did we have the wrong person in the role? Did the team lack training?
- Did the client have unclear expectations? Did we under-scope the work?
- Did we miss warning signs? Did our process fail? Where else might this same issue happen again?
As the Fire Marshal, your job is not to be uninvolved. It’s to be involved differently.
When you aren’t constantly on the front line, you have breathing room to develop new ideas and solutions. The Fire Marshal uses this space to reduce risk, improve systems, and strengthen leadership.
Agency roles are very different from the heroics of firefighting—but you still need Fire Fighters (and one or more Fire Chiefs).
You can’t skip the Fire Chief stage
Many owners try to step away, but it doesn’t always stick. Saying, “I’m going to stop jumping in” helps—but your team also needs clarity, confidence, and authority. And you have to stick with it.
For example, I worked with an owner who’d delegated most accounts—but then they jumped-in to add comments in a client-facing doc. Because they weren’t up to date on the account, this created new problems for the team.
It’s not a delegation problem alone. Before an owner can fully step into the Fire Marshal role, someone needs to own emergency coordination. That person might be the COO, president, or managing director. In a smaller agency, it may still be the owner for a while—but the owner should be consciously training someone else to take over the role of Fire Chief.
The transition looks something like this:
- Fire Fighter: “I’ll fix it.”
- Fire Chief: “Here’s who’s handling it, and here’s the plan.”
- Fire Marshal: “Here’s how we prevent this type of problem in the future.”
How to move from Fire Fighter to Fire Chief
If you’re currently the Fire Fighter, don’t just disappear. Instead, start by narrating and transferring your judgment.
When someone brings you a fire, don’t immediately solve it for them. Instead, ask your team questions:
- What’s your recommended solution? What options did you consider?
- What do you need from me? Who else should be involved?
- What would you do if I were unavailable?
This connects to my 3A’s for agency communications: are they making you Aware, asking for your Advice, or asking you to take Action? Over time, you want fewer Action requests and more Aware/Advice updates—because the team is building judgment instead of handing you the hose.
What this looks like by agency stage
At a small agency, the owner may still be the Fire Fighter more often than they’d like. That’s not ideal, but it may be realistic.
At a growing agency, the owner should be actively developing Fire Chiefs. This is often where managers, directors, and operations leaders need to step up.
If you have a leadership team and you’re still the default Fire Chief, the problem may not be effort; it may be unclear authority.
The larger the agency, the more expensive Fire Fighter mode becomes. And it’s not just emotionally expensive; it’s financially expensive, too. Every hour the owner spends personally fixing preventable problems is an hour they’re not spending on strategy, leadership, growth, enterprise value, or future optionality.
Self-assessment: Are you the Fire Fighter, Fire Chief, or Fire Marshal?
If you’re not sure where you are today, use this brief self-assessment. Ask yourself: Which role are you primarily playing today?
You’re probably the Fire Fighter if:
- You personally jump in to solve client, delivery, or team emergencies.
- People escalate to you before proposing solutions, and your team waits for your judgment before acting.
- You can’t step away without things piling up. You frequently think (or say), “It’s faster if I do it myself.”
You’re probably the Fire Chief if:
- You coordinate the response but don’t personally do all the work.
- You decide who owns the issue. You help the team prioritize under pressure.
- You communicate clearly during emergencies. You keep others informed without over-involving them.
You’re probably the Fire Marshal if:
- You spend more time preventing recurring issues than solving one-off problems.
- You inspect systems, roles, and risks. You look for patterns and use emergencies as data.
- You strengthen the business so it depends less on individual heroics.
- You focus on making the agency more valuable and less owner-dependent.
Fires will still happen. Agencies are human businesses: clients change their minds, team members miss things, and priorities collide. The goal isn’t zero fires. The goal is a stronger response system—where the right people handle the right problems, and the owner isn’t required every time the alarm rings.
So ask yourself: Which role am I playing most often today: Fire Fighter, Fire Chief, or Fire Marshal? And then: Who needs to become a stronger Fire Chief, so I can spend more time as the Fire Marshal?
