If you own an agency, you’ve probably had the approaches: the flattering emails, the exploratory calls, the time wasters. Over ten years of running an agency, I had three conversations that got properly serious. One consumed nine months of our lives and fell apart with two weeks to go. One ended when the buyer’s own team got fired from underneath the deal. And one was negotiated at a time when the agency, and I, were well and truly on the backfoot. Two of those turned out to be lucky escapes. The third taught me the lesson this whole talk is built on.
The slides below are from a talk that I gave at NXT LVL, titled “Building for Exit, Not Burnout.”
I also share the piece of received wisdom about selling that I now think is wrong, why due diligence is uniquely horrible (you’re doing your day job while making the biggest decision of your life, in secret), and what being on the backfoot in a negotiation actually feels like: waiting to be found out.
The slides are below, with the key takeaways underneath.
Key takeaways from this talk
You’ll never be 100% exit ready, but some times are far better than others. Neither you nor the agency ever feels completely ready and there’s no perfect moment. The one thing to avoid above all: negotiating a sale when you’re on the backfoot. Feeling overwhelmed and anxious is a terrible position to negotiate from, because you spend the whole process waiting to be found out.
Once the idea of selling is out of the box, you can’t easily put it back in. A serious conversation changes how you think about your agency, and Paddy pushes back on the standard advice here: people tell you not to spend the money in your head, but he thinks you kind of have to in order to assess if that part of the deal is worth it and what it actually means. Better to acknowledge that than pretend the thought isn’t there.
Due diligence is harder than anyone tells you, for human reasons. You’re running the agency as normal, making possibly the biggest decision of your life, and keeping it all secret at the same time. And every normal day-to-day problem feels magnified while a deal is live, because now it feels like it might cost you the exit.
The agency model itself creates the backfoot conditions. An agency’s product is its people, growth means balancing staff and clients that never rise in step, and you’re permanently either too busy or too quiet. The pressure is structural, which is exactly why you can’t treat it as background noise.
Don’t normalise the “normal” challenges. Losing clients, tricky cashflow, hiring and firing all come with the territory, but that doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you. Paddy’s mistake was giving himself a hard time for struggling with challenges he’d chosen, and just getting on with it instead of stepping back to handle things better.
Control the four sources of stress, especially mid-exit. Email and Slack, meetings, clients, and your team: if you let them, other people will control all four, and small issues from each compound on your mental health. During an exit process this matters even more. Then work out which of three things you’re actually short of: time, energy, or headspace, because each needs a different fix.
Get everything out of your head and into a system, because acquirers notice. “I’ve just got way too much work” is usually really “I have no system for organising it.” Listing absolutely everything is the first step and makes you feel more in control on its own. Use Getting Things Done or anything else, but use something, because your team copies your level of organisation and so does anyone doing due diligence on you.
Protect your evenings with a shutdown routine. The Zeigarnik effect means incomplete tasks dominate your attention all evening if you just stop dead. Write tomorrow’s to-do list before you wrap up, protect deep work time fiercely, and stop checking Slack before bed.
You can’t to-do list your way out of these feelings. The line from Paddy’s therapist. His default response to hard times was to work harder, and it worked for most of his career until it didn’t, at which point doing more made everything worse. He kept going until one day he couldn’t, and he didn’t see any of it until after deciding to leave his agency.
If you’re not in control of your agency or yourself, you’re not exit ready. You can still sell, but it’s far less likely to be on your terms, and the earnout period is challenging enough as it is. The real point of the talk: building this control makes you and your agency more effective and healthier whether you ever exit or not.
