Every business runs on agencies.
This is the map of all of them.
Agencies are the middle layer of the economy. They sit between buyers and the things that are hard to buy directly, charging for matching, access, expertise, and reduced risk. We are indexing that layer, category by category, across the United States.
The thirteen groups
Featured comparisons
All comparisonsThe Margin Map: net margins across 12 agency types, compared
Every agency sits in the middle and takes a cut. The size of the cut that survives as profit varies by a factor of ten. Here is the map.
Staffing agency vs. freight brokerage: two middleman models, opposite economics
One rents out people, one matches loads to trucks. Both live in the middle. Almost nothing else about their businesses works the same way.
Why executive search charges 30 percent and temp staffing charges 3
Both models place human beings. One bills a third of a salary for a single hire, the other keeps pennies on enormous revenue. The gap is what the fee is actually buying.
Insurance agencies and marketing agencies have the same business model (almost)
One sells protection, one sells growth. Strip away the subject matter and the economics are nearly identical. The few places they diverge explain why one of them is a sellable asset and the other usually is not.