A founder I work with recently went away for a week on holiday. It was their first break for nearly a year and they would be in a different time zone with proper distance from the agency. They left clear instructions for the team before leaving. They’d explicitly set up what needed to happen: quarterly business reviews organised, renewal conversations handled, the usual account management basics were reiterated. 

It was actually a good time for the founder to go away – clients were generally pretty happy and there weren’t many fires to be put out. Even the renewal conversations were expected to go well and didn’t seem too challenging. The team also weren’t stretched in terms of capacity and were in a good place.

So, what went wrong?

Well, the founder didn’t exactly get a peaceful week away. Their Slack and emails blew up more than useful with messages from the team asking questions that they should have known the answers to themselves.