Friends, this one’s a bit more personal than usual – even for me.
When people talk about a founder’s confidence taking a hit, they tend to picture a big moment. The biggest client leaves you or a senior team member quits or a huge deal falls apart at the last minute.
For some founders, that’s exactly how it happens. A single moment makes them question everything they’ve built and everything they are as a person.
That wasn’t how it happened for me.
For me, it was a slow decline over a few years. And it took me far too long to see what it was doing to me.
How it crept up on me
When the pandemic hit, growth at the agency I ran dropped. We recovered somewhat, which felt like a relief at the time. Then we stayed at roughly the same level for quite a while. Not doing badly, not doing great, just getting by okay.
That plateau was very different to what we’d been used to before the pandemic. And this is the bit I find hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t run a business.
Standing still felt like failure. Even growing very slightly felt like failure.
Not a dramatic, everything-is-on-fire failure. A quiet one that never really went away. Yes, there were big moments along the way that hurt, but weirdly, I rode them out okay and got through them in one piece.
That carried on over the course of a few years and over those years my sense of self-worth took more and more of a pummeling. The agency’s flat line had stopped being a business problem and felt more like a personal one. It had become a verdict on me and my own performance. By the end, it made me feel worthless.
The slow version is the dangerous one
If you read this previous issue, you’ll recognise the shape of this. Normal problems, compounded over years, are what break you. This is the same mechanism pointed inwards.
A single bad moment is at least visible. You know something has happened, you can name it and other people can see it too.
The slow version gives you nothing in particular to react to. There’s no day where it obviously goes wrong. Each month is only slightly disappointing, so you never stop and ask why you feel the way you do. You just carry on and the gap between how the agency is doing and how you feel about yourself quietly closes until there isn’t one.
Whether it’s one moment or a few years, both routes end up in the same place. How you feel about yourself rises and falls with how the agency is doing.
And that’s another reason why it creeps up on you – because when things are going well, you do exactly the same but your self-worth increases and you feel great. You don’t even consider that you and the agency being one and the same thing is a problem – because at that point in time, it’s not.
Why agencies make this so easy to fall into
There are two things about running an agency that make this especially hard to avoid.
1) You’ve tied yourself to things you can’t control
Clients leave for reasons that have nothing to do with you:
- Budgets get cut.
- Markets turn.
- Good people resign because their partner got a job in another city.
If your self-worth tracks all of that, you’re trying to control the uncontrollable just to feel okay about yourself.
I used to blame myself when a team member left and ask myself what we could have done better for them. Even if the reason was nothing to do with the agency itself!
2) Growth is the measure everyone looks at
In agency land, growth tends to be the measure of whether you’re doing well. Revenue up is good, revenue flat is a problem. And agency revenue is never truly settled anyway. Every win quietly resets the balance, because somewhere else a client is winding down or a project is finishing.
So when growth stops, it doesn’t just look like the business has stalled. If you’re not careful, it looks like you have.
Let’s be honest – you won’t fully separate yourself from it
I’d love to tell you there’s a clean way to split who you are from the agency you run. I don’t think there is.
Even when you’re fully aware of this problem, it’s hard to separate yourself out 100%. You built the agency and your name is on it. You’ve probably given it years of your life. Of course it feels personal – it is!
So the goal here isn’t a perfect wall between you and the business.
It’s getting enough distance so that a flat quarter is a flat quarter, not a judgement on your worth as a person.
Essentially, we need to embrace the fact that we can’t separate ourselves from the agency 100% and simply find ways to prevent it from becoming a huge problem.
What actually helps
Disclaimer – I didn’t solve this before leaving my own agency. Unfortunately, I only figured a lot of this out after the fact and have applied these learnings to my work today. But I hope that these ideas help you avoid ending up in the position that I did.
Also, none of this is quick, but here’s what I’d point any founder towards.
1) Get aware of it first (genuinely aware)
This is the first step and it’s a bigger one than it sounds. It’s not just saying that you’re aware now that you’ve read this article or after having a conversation with someone who pre-warns you. It’s about being aware of how you feel when things change.
Notice when a number on a spreadsheet changes how you feel about yourself, not just about the business. At first you’ll only know it intellectually. Over time, you start to actually feel the difference a bit. That’s when things begin to shift.
2) Find meaning outside the agency
If the agency is the only place your sense of purpose comes from, every wobble in it will land on you at full weight. Look for meaning in your life beyond the business, so that it isn’t carrying your whole identity on its own.
This will be different for everyone but it comes back to things that still give you a sense of achievement and allow you to feel good about yourself.
3) Get some perspective on whether things are actually that bad
Standing still isn’t necessarily failure, especially in a tough market. Holding your ground when the conditions are against you can be a decent result. It just doesn’t feel like one when your only reference point is the growth you used to have.
I once spoke to a friend who runs a very successful agency that you’ll probably have heard of and he told me about being “overjoyed” at growing revenue 5% year on year. I was surprised because this agency had grown much more than this in previous years. But his joy was because of the wider perspective of a tough market where some agencies weren’t growing at all or even closing down.
This is where someone outside your own head helps. A peer, an advisor (hey!), or anyone who can look at the numbers without your history attached to them.
4) Stop being “all in” on one thing
This is what helps me most now. I focus on a couple of projects at the same time rather than one single job where I’m all in. I also take my physical and mental health far more seriously than I ever did when I was running the agency.
Together, those give me a balance I didn’t have before. When one thing has a bad month, it’s one thing having a bad month, not my entire life.
Being all-in mentally, financially and physically on just one thing is what I now try to avoid.
I’m not saying stop caring
This isn’t an argument for caring less about your agency or work generally. Caring is a big part of why good agencies are good.
Take the business seriously. Care about the clients, the team and the numbers. Just don’t let the business become the verdict on you as a person.
The business is what you do. It isn’t what you’re worth.
If your agency has gone flat
If you’re reading this a few years into a plateau that feels like failure, it’s worth asking yourself a question.
Is it the agency that’s stalled, or is it how you see yourself?
Those are two different problems with two very different fixes. The first might need a new strategy. The second needs you to step back and look after the person running the agency.
I didn’t separate the two for years and it cost me far more than a few flat years of revenue ever did.
