My client got on the call and I could tell she was down. She’d had a tough couple of weeks — obstacles at work, disruptions at home. She’s feeling exhausted and discouraged. Because of these obstacles and disruptions, she wanted to talk about different directions she could take her career. “I just don’t love this…
Last week we talked about focusing on your job, the things that are only yours to do. When I see agency owners getting clear that they start to get free of many tasks that were draining energy from them, and that didn’t move the agency forward either. Theoretically, that should free up a lot of…
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…
One of the key roles of a successful agency owner is to build a network outside of your agency. You are your agency’s eyes and ears. You are scanning the horizon to find the “next thing” that clients are going to need, the problems that they are going to run into so that you can…