I joined Ginny on The Action Effect, a podcast about people who’ve taken action on hard things. This one goes deeper than most conversations I’ve had publicly.
We start with the fun bit: how Aira was agreed in about half an hour over drinks in a Vegas casino (the Aria, which is where the name comes from, read it backwards), and the napkin full of terrible rejected names that my wife still claims credit for. But the heart of this episode is the part of my story I talk about less often. In early 2024, after ten years of running the agency, I had a mental breakdown. The moment I knew something had to change was when my wife and my business partner, separately, asked me the same question: was I okay to be on my own?
We talk about what led up to it, what I did in the days and months afterwards, and what I’d tell any founder who recognises the early signs in themselves. Ginny also asked me a question I still haven’t fully answered: am I thankful it happened?
The full conversation is below, with the key takeaways underneath.
Key takeaways from this episode
De-risk the leap by defining the worst case. Before leaving Distilled to start Aira, Paddy worked out what failure would actually look like: getting another job. With ten years of experience, some savings and a wife with a secure income, the worst case was a bruised ego. You can’t remove the risk of starting a company, but you can calculate it and decide it’s manageable.
Know whether you can handle going solo, because not everyone can. Paddy turned down chances to freelance for years because he knew going from a big team and culture to working alone would make him miserable. What made Aira click was that Matt already had a small agency of three, so he was stepping into something rather than starting from nothing. Neither route is wrong, but you have to know which one is right for you.
Running your own company hits differently, and you can’t fully prepare for it. Paddy’s old boss Will Critchlow warned him the week before he left: when it’s your own business, the way people relate to you changes. Paddy texted him a couple of years later to say he finally got it. Ten years on, he’s not sure he ever got used to it.
In an agency, people are the product. You’re selling people’s time and expertise. If those people hate their jobs, it carries through to your clients, and eventually to your revenue. Culture isn’t a soft extra, it’s the thing you’re actually selling.
“We can’t promise to action everything, but we promise to listen.” Aira ran regular happiness surveys, but the scores only worked alongside the qualitative side: zooming out to trends, still talking to managers, and visibly connecting feedback to the changes made because of it. How you respond to suggestions, including the ones you say no to, dictates whether people ever make another one.
Career progression is the most actionable culture lever there is. One of Paddy’s favourite definitions of culture is “the way we do things around here”, and the most concrete thing Aira did was map progression paths for every single role. Everyone needs a next step they’re working towards. If you’re a founder, ask yourself: why is each person on my team getting out of bed in the mornings for me?
In a small agency, no structure means opportunity. If you’re five to eight people with no formal teams yet, that’s not a weakness, it’s a chance for people to put their hand up and carve their own path. One early Aira team member built the entire client services function that way.
Small things compound, and you can’t to-do list your way out. Paddy’s breakdown didn’t come from one catastrophe. It came from two and a half years of small things going wrong week after week, met with the same coping strategy that had always worked before: just crack on and get things done. Until it stopped working.
Optimise for enjoyment, not just the exit. Paddy traces a lot of what went wrong back to well-intentioned advice to optimise for profit and EBITDA. The exit obsession, and the industry’s habit of measuring agencies by headcount, pulls founders towards growth for growth’s sake. A ten-person agency you love running and never sell is a completely legitimate ambition.
If you recognise the early signs, act sooner than Paddy did. The first thing he did was book a therapist for the next morning, just to get everything out of his head. The regret isn’t the actions he took, it’s that he didn’t take them 18 months earlier.
