Keir Whitaker

The ICP Mistake I See Most Agencies Make

Many of the agency founders and owners I speak to are preoccupied with defining their “Ideal Customer Profile” (ICP).

They want to nail down the demographics, the firmographics, the revenue bands. They assume that getting this right will sharpen their marketing, improve their sales conversations, and make their agency feel less like it’s for everyone and no one at the same time.

And some do the work. They go from “we work with ecommerce brands” to something like “we work with ambitious sustainable DTC brands doing £1–3m a year.” But nothing else changes. The offer is the same. The messaging is the same. The agency doing the work is the same. The only thing that’s really changed is the H1 on the homepage.

The problem isn’t that ICP doesn’t matter. It’s that many agencies are building a filter before they need one.

Don’t Filter Prematurely

A commercial ICP, the kind that tells you to only work with “A B2C, seed-funded, founder-led Shopify brand with £2–5m in revenue, a team of 8–12, a sustainability focus, who are based in London and eyeing Series A”, is a great tool for managing abundance. It makes sense when you have more inbound than you can handle and need a way to qualify quickly. But most growing agencies aren’t drowning in leads. They’re still building momentum.

Filtering aggressively at that stage doesn’t actually make things easier. It just means turning away work you could learn from, before you have enough evidence to know what good actually looks like for your business.

P is For Person

There’s an earlier, more useful version of ICP work that most agencies overlook. Instead of defining who you work with demographically, you build a psychographic picture of the person you’re writing to, thinking for, and solving problems for. Not a revenue band but a mindset. Not a company size but a situation.

For a Shopify agency, that might look like:

• A founder who built their store themselves and knows it well, but has hit the ceiling of what they can do alone. They’re not looking to be educated, they want someone who can see what they can’t see anymore.
• An operator who’s been burned by an agency before. They’re sceptical, they ask good questions, and they need to trust you before they’ll commit. Not the easiest first conversation, but often the best long-term client.
• A brand doing decent numbers but quietly aware that their store looks like it was built in 2019. They haven’t prioritised it because everything still works, but they know it’s starting to cost them.

None of these tell you who to filter out. But each one is a person you can write to, think for, and build content around. When you have someone that specific in mind, your marketing gets sharper. Your positioning gets clearer. You start describing problems better than your clients can themselves, and that’s what actually makes you stand out.

Earn the Filter Through Observation

The demographic and firmographic detail, revenue bands, team size, platform, geography, becomes useful eventually. But it has to be earned through experience, not declared in a workshop.

Pay attention to the clients that energise you, who are straightforward to work with, who don’t haggle over invoices. Look for patterns in business stage, founder mindset, and urgency. Over time, those patterns tell you who you’re really for, and that’s when tightening your filter starts to make sense.

So yes, your ICP matters. Just not the one you think. Less Ideal Customer Profile, more Ideal Customer Person.