I recently gave a talk at an Agency Hackers event about “How Can You Cope with Burnout as an Agency Leader?”
It’s probably the most personal talk I’ve given. It starts with my own story: ten years running an agency, normalising every challenge because I’d chosen this life, so how could I moan about it? Working harder every time things got difficult, because that had always worked. Until one day it didn’t, and I left the agency I’d co-founded. My therapist later summed up my entire approach in one line, which I’ll get to below, and which floored me when I heard it.
The rest of the talk is the practical side: where the stress of agency life actually comes from, the four things you have to take control of before anything else works, and why some of the best leadership behaviours out there (including a memorably crude one about eating, not nibbling) can quietly make things worse if you get the order wrong.
The slides are below, with the key takeaways underneath.
Key takeaways from this talk
The agency business model is set up to make life hard. An agency’s product is its people: your team working with your clients. And people are weird. Growth means balancing staff and clients that never rise in step, so you’re permanently either too busy or too quiet and both states create pressure.
“Normal” challenges are still allowed to hurt. Winning and losing clients, tricky cashflow, hiring and firing: everyone knows these come with the territory. Paddy’s mistake was normalising them, giving himself a hard time for struggling with things he’d signed up for, and just getting on with it. Knowing a challenge is normal doesn’t neutralise its effect on you.
Diagnose which of three things you’re actually short of. Stress for agency owners comes from a lack of time (literal hours), a lack of energy (doing the right type of work at the right time), or a lack of headspace (holding too much stuff in your head). They feel similar but need different fixes, so work out which one is really the problem.
Take control of the four sources that trigger them. Email and Slack, meetings, clients, and your team. If you let them, other people will control all four, and lots of small issues from each will compound on your mental health until it feels like the agency is running you.
“I’ve just got way too much work” is usually not true. When Paddy sits down with owners who say this, the first step is listing absolutely everything on their to-do list and in their heads. Getting it out of your head is half the battle. He’s a fan of Getting Things Done, but the system matters less than having one, and you set the organisational example for everyone else at the agency.
Have a shutdown routine. The Zeigarnik effect describes how incomplete tasks dominate your attention: stop dead at 5pm and the open loops bottle up in your mind all evening. A deliberate shutdown routine, with one non-negotiable of writing tomorrow’s to-do list before you wrap up, gives your mind closure for the day.
Don’t wrap your team in cotton wool. One of Paddy’s biggest mistakes as a leader. Yes, have their backs, but if your team never feels any tension, you end up shouldering all of it yourself.
Set boundaries mechanically, not just intentionally. Block and fiercely protect deep work time, take complete control of your calendar, schedule your emails rather than sending them at all hours, and stop checking work messages before bed and on holiday. Manage your energy, not just your time.
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 get things done, and for most of his career it worked. When it stopped working, doing more made him less effective, and he kept going until one day he couldn’t. He didn’t see any of it until after he’d decided to leave.
Good leadership behaviours can work against you. Run towards trouble, ask for feedback, take ownership, and (borrowing the famous line) if you’re going to eat shit, don’t nibble. These are some of the most effective ways to grow as a leader. But without control of your inputs, they become an accelerant: Paddy did all of the brave behaviours and none of the control, and that’s where it ultimately went wrong. Control first, then chaos.
