Field note · August 2026

Why Companies Need a Way Around the Middlemen

In most industries, the normal path from a company with a need to the operator who can fill it runs through a middleman: an agency, a broker, a distributor, a staffing firm. The middleman wins the relationship on one side, then hands the actual work to someone else on the other side. That path is getting more crowded and more squeezed than it used to be, across a lot of industries at once.

Look at what's happening in advertising alone: the two biggest agency holding companies merged in the last year, cutting thousands of jobs and folding smaller names into a handful of bigger ones. At the same time, more companies are pulling work in-house instead of paying a middleman to hand it off. The same pattern shows up in recruiting, in industrial supply, in professional services: fewer, bigger intermediaries, doing more with less, for both sides.

When the middle layer gets squeezed, the people doing the actual work and the people who need it get pushed closer together.

That squeeze is exactly why a direct connection matters more now, not less. A company that just had a reason to need something doesn't have to wait for a middleman to broker the relationship. An operator or supplier doesn't have to wait for a middleman to hand them the work.

The role here is simple: watch for the companies with a live, fresh need, and put them in front of the right operator directly, before three more layers of middleman get in between.

— Sayujya Gupta, CineRoute, routing companies to the operators who fill their next need.