Growth-Minded Agency Owners To Gather In Denver May 19-21, 2025

Attendee seats and sponsorships are selling fast for the 2025 Build A Better Agency (BABA) Summit, which will be held May 19-21 in downtown Denver.

Approximately 400 agency owners and leaders will attend for two days of networking, learning, and sharing.

There are over 100,000 small—to mid-sized agencies with one to 300 full-time employees in the U.S. alone, and for decades, no conference has addressed their unique challenges.

“That’s why we created the Build A Better Agency Summit, a conference designed specifically for privately held agencies where the owner is still actively involved in the business day to day,” says conference organizer Drew McLellan, CEO/partner of Agency Management Institute. “We seem to be onto something because since our inaugural conference in 2021, our event has sold out on both the sponsor and attendee side each year.”

Approximately 90% of attendees are agency owners. The other 10% are department heads, C-suite level executives, and other agency leaders. Almost all attendees are decision makers with the power to make purchases and create partnerships on behalf of their shop. Over 70% of attendees are repeat attendees from the previous year, and 40% haven’t missed a single BABA Summit.

“As a veteran agency owner, the BABA Summit is the one professional development investment I make annually that is totally for me and my own enrichment,” says Traci Stuart, president and CEO of the San Francisco-based agency, Blattel Communications. “I’ve connected with my tribe at BABA, and I am thoroughly looking forward to reconnecting and recharging at the BABA Summit.” ?

Since 1999, Agency Management Institute has been dedicated to helping agency owners across the globe grow, scale, and evolve their agency. Our “Build a Better Agency” podcast is in the top 5% of all podcasts on iTunes and we serve thousands of agencies every year.

“Our agency has been part of the Agency Management Institute (AMI) community for over a decade,” says president of Wisconsin-based Predictive ROI, Stephen Woessner. “Immersing ourselves in AMI’s educational opportunities like the Summit has been a critical ingredient to Predictive becoming the profitable agency it is today.”

(For full transparency, I first learned of the event in 2022 when I covered it for Forbes Digital. As a book ghostwriter with many agency owner clients, I became a sponsor.)

“As to demographics, 95% of the agencies represented are based in North America, but we will also have a handful of agency owners from Europe, Australia, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia who are part of the AMI ecosystem,” says McLellan.

The average size of the agencies represented is 20-35 (full-time equivalent employees) FTEs; most have been in business for over 10 years.

“This is the only event I’ve found that’s truly dedicated to helping small-to mid-sized agencies succeed,” says Susan Baier, owner of Audience Audit in Chandler, Arizona. “No other conference even comes close — including the biggest ones.”