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…
Either because the client wasn’t clear, or your team didn’t perform, you end up behind the eight-ball looking to rescue a project that’s already behind budget with a possibility of a disappointed client. You might feel like you need to put in some extra time or get the team to work extra hard on something…
If I boil things way down, a leader’s job is to think. Leaders need to have a perspective on the future and maneuver their firms to take advantage of that future. The only way to do that is to spend time reading, talking to people, and making connections by thinking. One heuristic to tell how…