A friend of mine works professionally as a keynote speaker. He gets a lot of speaking clients from his agency. His mentor once asked him, “Who’s your boss, you or your agency?”

As long as his agency provides him with the majority of his business, he would be working for them. 

Similarly, if an artist was reliant on a record label—for publicity, budgets, perks, etc.—the label would effectively be their boss. 

Or if an influencer was reliant on a social network to reach their followers, the algorithm would effectively be their boss. If the social network goes out of business, so does their connection with the fanbase.

The other path involves doing the work of building relationships with people who work with the agencies. It would involve my friend building relationships with his customers. Only then would he be his own boss; when he owns his marketing, he owns his income.

When you think about going direct, you may think about lead forms and drip campaigns and SMS, which are all great technical ways to manage that at scale. But really going direct is a posture: prioritize building and managing relationships. Do things to create deeper relationships with people, to create experiences, to bring people together.

When everything is changing, focus on the things that won’t. Nobody says, “I wish I had fewer people in my life I could trust and rely on.” In Ignore Everybody, Hugh MacLeod puts forward one such idea. He writes:

The people you trust and vice versa are what will feed you and pay for your kids’ college. Nothing else…. 

In other words: Stop worrying about technology. Start worrying about people who trust you.

Going direct is not just a technical decision; the technology exists in order to serve the relationships and the philosophy.

You can already go direct with minimal technology, too. To build a connection with someone who wants to follow you, you just need their permission, their contact information, and to make something that they want to follow and get updates on. 

You could have a sheet of paper where people write down their email address at your store, offering them 10% off. If you organize events, you can hand out a clipboard with people around, or collect people’s emails when they buy their tickets.

Eventually, this looks like a list of information. If you have a spreadsheet with all of that, that’s a good way to get started. Effectively, whenever the data is portable (e.g., you can download it and move it around), you own the data and can communicate directly with your customers.

That involves a lot of additional work—particularly as you’re getting used to it and setting it up. That’s the cost of this process: the extra work might not necessarily pay you more, but it pays better—because it buys you freedom.

P.S., A short list of a few other valuable things—out of many!—that going direct buys you: 

• Better profit margins without an intermediary
• Relationships with people who can create more options for you in the future
• The peace of mind of not relying on someone else—and wondering if they might quit or if their business is OK (effectively, not worrying about getting laid off)
• The ability to talk to your customers directly
• The ability to control and release your product without approvals or blockage
• The rights to your intellectual property
• The time spent working on your product—worrying less about org structures, politics, and perceptions