As we’ve leaned into getting ourselves out of the day-to-day grind by letting go of doing the thing and focusing on building the system that does the thing, I want to pause and think about “the why.” If you let go of the thing you trained your whole life to do; you need a powerful…
Over the last couple of posts, we’ve been talking about how important it is to let go of what you did as an individual contributor and embrace your role as the leader of a growing firm. But being an individual contributor was easy. I knew how to do that! I was clear when I had…
On Saturday we talked about how your job isn’t doing the thing. (The thing might be designing, writing, creating campaigns, storytelling, whatever it was that you were good at that you sold to clients to get the agency started!) Your job is to build the system. Your job is to create the container, the way…
Jerry Colonna coaches venture-backed CEOs, and he’s coached a boatload of them! He’s worked with the CEOs of Etsy, Foursquare, Intuit, and Soundcloud to name a few. But not just when they are big and famous; he works with many folks who are in their startup phase. On a recent podcast, he said of the…
Too many agency founders have drunk the 24/7 hustle culture Kool-Aid. “We’re in a service business, we need to be there to serve our clients! This is what agency life is like, it’s not a 9-to-5 job.” You’ve heard it, maybe you’ve lived it! I’m thinking that might be why so many of you responded…
The messages from last week where I talked about freeing ourselves from the endless grind with no finish line and the idea of reframing our work to be light, easy, and fun brought out many encouraging replies, including this one: Hey, Brad! This morning, I reflected that 10 years ago, I was grinding, traveling, building…
According to Greek legend, Sisyphus so angered the gods that they sentenced him to the worst torture they could imagine. He will spend eternity pushing a rock up a hill — as it reaches the pinnacle, it will roll back down again. After returning to the bottom, Sisyphus would then have to push it back…
Over the last week, we’ve talked about how we have to price the customer, not the project. We’ve also looked at how letting the customer make trade-offs can help us close more deals and make more money. Today, we will talk about how charging more money helps us win better clients and provide us with…
On Thursday we talked about what your work is worth. Though we want our work to have some intrinsic value, the truth is that the only one who can tell us the value of our work is the client. The same work could be worth very little to one client, or a whole lot to…