We crossed 50 active retained agency partnerships this month. We are writing this down because it is a number we have been climbing toward for seven years and because of how slowly we got here on purpose.
Most fulfillment shops in our category grow faster than this. The math is straightforward: a typical white-label operation that wants 100 partner agencies on its book can usually get there inside three years by being indiscriminate about who they sign. We have done the opposite. We say no to roughly one in three inbound briefs. The reasons we say no are usually one of three things: the agency does not have account management depth to run a white-label relationship well, the client portfolio is outside our practice depth, or the unit economics on the agency side do not leave us enough margin to do the work properly. None of these are fixable on call one. So we decline.
The number we are more proud of than 50 is 19. That is our current average partnership length in months. The industry benchmark for vendor-side relationships in our category sits somewhere between 8 and 11 months. We have not seen a credible study of the number but we have read enough partner-side post-mortems to be fairly confident our 19 is meaningfully above the median. The reasons partnerships last with us are also boring: senior people on every account, written reporting that holds up under client scrutiny, escalation paths that work, and a refusal to ship work we cannot stand behind.
The last number is the one we track most carefully. Across 47 mutual NDAs signed in 2025, we recorded zero disclosure incidents. Our definition of a disclosure incident is any client-identifying information being published, named, or referenced by any Grovant staff or contractor without written partner consent. That includes LinkedIn posts about specific accounts, case studies submitted to industry awards without disclosure, vendor reference calls that name partner clients, and informal references in conference talks. Zero of these happened in 2025. We track it the way other agencies track new business pipeline.
What's next: we are not changing the growth rate. We expect to add 12 to 18 net new partners across 2026, in line with what we did across 2024 and 2025. The shape of the work continues to skew toward senior bench for paid media and SEO, with design and development showing up as project-based work that fits between retainer cycles. If you are reading this and considering a partnership, the application window opens twice a year. The next one is in May 2026.