The financial reality nobody warns creative founders about
CEO Weekly · May 2026
By Héctor C. Moncada D.
The Omnicom-IPG merger closed in late 2025, and the industry barely had time to process it before the next headline arrived: 4,000 jobs cut, three legendary agency brands retired, and thousands of senior creatives suddenly without a desk. Many of them are doing what displaced agency talent has always done when the door closes. They are opening their own.
Since the merger was completed, roughly 10,000 advertising professionals have found themselves available and looking for new homes. A significant number are founding their own shops. Others are joining scrappy independent outfits that can move faster than a holding company ever could. Industry observers are already predicting that 2026 will favor small, nimble creative agencies with a clear point of view, the ones built to work at the speed of social, while the big players sort out their next move.
It sounds like a good time to go independent. In many ways, it is.
But there is a part of this transition that almost nobody talks about. It tends to surface around month three, when the first big client invoice goes unpaid, the scope of work balloons unexpectedly, or the spreadsheet that was supposed to track cash flow turns into something nobody on the team can actually read.
The Infrastructure Nobody Tells You About
When a creative director works inside a large agency, the financial machinery running underneath them is largely invisible. In-house finance teams, procurement specialists, legal counsel, HR, and payroll. It all just works. Leave to start your own shop, and it stops working overnight.
That gap is the problem Conor Firth set out to solve. As CEO and Founder of Art First Business Services, Firth runs a financial advisory firm built exclusively for creative businesses. Before starting AFBS, he spent years as CFO across mid-sized agencies operating across three countries, and before that, built a career in the art world, including founding an early e-commerce platform for contemporary art. That dual background, creative by origin and financial by discipline, is what distinguishes the advisory he offers.
AFBS works with advertising agencies, production companies, and independent creative consultants. The services span financial modeling, forecasting, cash flow management, fee negotiation, procurement support, and HR structuring. It is not solely a bookkeeping service or a tax prep firm. It is strategic financial counsel built for people who have never needed to think about it before.
Standard accountants, however competent, often lack the frame of reference for how creative agency fees are structured, how production budgets work, or why a founder might agree to a scope that looks, on paper, like a losing proposition. Financial advice without creative industry fluency frequently misses the point entirely.
“You can’t talk to a creative director the way you’d talk to a CFO,” Firth says. “I’ve learned to strip away the jargon, get to what’s actually keeping them up at night, and work from there.”
A Playing Field That Isn’t Level
One of the less discussed challenges facing new creative founders is what happens when a small independent agency wins a big corporate client. The brief is exciting. The relationship starts well. Then comes the procurement process, with complex fee structures, in-house legal, payment terms that weren’t in the original conversation, and a set of expectations shaped by agencies ten times their size.
Working through that environment without someone who understands both sides is, for most founders, their first real test. It is also where a lot of early-stage creative businesses quietly lose money they didn’t know they were losing.
First AFBS is exactly that intermediary, a firm that understands how corporate procurement works and how creative businesses operate, and can bridge the two in a way that most advisors simply cannot.
The AI Variable
There is a newer accelerant making all of this more urgent. AI is reshaping production economics at a pace the industry is still absorbing. Productions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be executed for a fraction of that. The barrier to launching an independent creative or production company has dropped considerably.
That is creating a new class of founder: leaner, faster, and often with less infrastructure than the displaced agency veteran who went independent a decade ago. Every one of those businesses faces the same structural question. Who handles the financial side?
Industry data from 2025 pointed to mid-size independent agency groups posting double-digit growth while holding companies reported steep declines in traditional agency fees. The structural shift away from consolidated holding companies toward independent creative businesses appears durable, which means the demand for financial advisory that actually understands the creative industry is only growing.
Firth has been building toward this moment for years, growing AFBS in a category he largely had to define himself. The longer-term vision is to add advisors who share his creative industry background and can deliver the same quality of counsel without the translation gap. The goal, as he frames it, is to be the firm a creative founder calls first, not the one they find three months into a problem they didn’t see coming.
Art First Business Services provides CFO-level financial advisory exclusively for creative businesses, including advertising agencies, production companies, and independent creative consultants.
