A senior leader who I coach showed me their Google Calendar on a call recently.
It stressed me out just looking at it.
They knew they had a problem and were actually a little reluctant to show me at first.
For pretty much every client on their books, they’re expected to join the calls and oversee the work. For some clients that means being on a weekly call. For others it’s monthly. Either way, the pattern is the same across the whole client base and they know they’ve backed themselves into a corner. What they’re struggling with now is how to get out of it without losing a client.
The thing is, nobody decided this. There was no meeting where they chose to be personally present on every account forever. It just kind of happened, one reasonable-sounding commitment at a time, until the diary was full and the business couldn’t function without them in it.
Usually, I see this problem (and felt it myself) most commonly with founders once the agency hits a certain size. It’s natural for them to be very present to all clients when they’re first starting out and then accidentally keep this going as they get bigger.
But the example above is from a senior leader who reports to the CEO at a well established agency, showing that it can happen to anyone.
If you run an agency or are a senior leader at one, there’s a decent chance a version of this is happening to you right now.
The quiet trap (why nobody catches this early)
Being on every call feels like the right thing to do. It reads as diligence. Clients love it. Your team probably appreciates the cover. In the early days, it genuinely is the job, because you are the agency. If you’re a senior leader, you probably got to where you are by grabbing hold of things and taking ownership.
That’s exactly why it’s such a quiet trap. It never shows up as a problem. It shows up as commitment. This makes it hard to argue with.
Then one day you look at your calendar and realise you’re doing client delivery for most of the week and your actual job happens in the gaps. Except there are no gaps. So it happens during the evenings, or weekends.
I asked a founder a version of this question a while back: “What happens to that account if you’re not on the call?”
They didn’t know. Not because the account would collapse, but because they’d never tested it. They’d been on every call for years, not because the calls needed them, but because they’d always been there and never questioned it.
That’s the trap in one sentence. Presence by default, not by design.
What your presence is actually teaching people
This is the part that took me a while to see clearly and it’s the reframe worth reflecting on from your own experience.
Every time you join a call your account lead could run, two audiences learn something that you didn’t mean to teach them.
Your team learns they’re not trusted to handle it alone. However good they are, however much you tell them you rate them, your physical presence on the call says the opposite. And people believe what you do over what you say.
For your top performers, this is very damaging to their confidence and longevity at your agency. Top performers value autonomy and trust over most other areas of their role. For your okay performers, they’ll become overly reliant on you and this will hold back their progression. So the damage is done across the board.
Your client learns the real decision-maker is you. Not the account lead, not the delivery team. You. So when something matters, they’ll go around your team and come straight to you, which confirms to everyone that going to you is how things get done.
Run that for a few years and you’ve built an agency where you’re the single point of failure on every account and you’ve called it leadership.
The visible problem is a full calendar. The real problem is what the calendar has trained everyone to believe.
The rooms that genuinely need you (because this isn’t about vanishing)
Let me pre-empt the obvious objection, because it’s a fair one that at least a few of you are probably thinking right now.
Some calls genuinely do need you, for example:
- A renewal that really matters.
- A relationship that’s wobbling and needs senior weight in the room.
- A pitch where you’re honestly part of what they’re buying.
- A new client in the first month or two, where your presence sets the tone.
A fair few of my clients have said these exact words to me when I’ve helped them with this problem. I get it. It’s a hard one for me to argue against. If I tell them to skip a meeting and then they lose a client, that’s not exactly going to help our relationship!
The answer to “I’m on too many calls” is not “attend nothing”. Founders who swing to that extreme usually create a different problem, where the client feels sold to by the A-team and handed to the B-team – even if the “B-team” is extremely capable.
The shift is smaller and harder than simply vanishing from calls. It’s moving from being there by default to being there by design. In the room because you decided this room needs you, this month, for this reason. Not because you’re always in it.
This doesn’t happen overnight. Which is why when a client says something like “I have to be on this call because we need this renewal”, I don’t argue. But we do zoom out and look at the bigger picture and how we can prevent them from being in this position in the future by default.
What to actually do
If this is landing a bit too close to home, here’s a simple way to start. It takes one week and a spreadsheet, or honestly the back of an envelope.
Step one: audit one week of calls
After each client call that you have this week, sort it into one of three buckets:
- It needed me. My presence materially changed the outcome, or my absence would have been noticed in a way that damaged something.
- Didn’t need me. The team could have run it and my being there added comfort, not value.
- Not sure. Which usually means it didn’t need you, but do the honest version of the exercise.
Most founders and leaders who do this find the “needed me” bucket is far smaller than their calendar implies.
Step two: pick the two easiest exits
Don’t try to leave every call at once. Choose the two accounts where the team is strongest and the client relationship is most settled, then hand those calls over properly. Brief the account lead, tell the client the plan and why it’s good for them (a more senior, more available point of contact who isn’t juggling twenty accounts) and then actually stay off the call. Sitting in “just to listen” defeats the whole thing.
Step three: set a decision rule for new commitments
This is the bit that stops the calendar refilling. Before you accept a recurring client call, ask one question: what specifically does this call need from me that nobody else here can give it? If there’s a real answer, go. If the answer is “the client expects it”, that’s not a reason, that’s the corner forming.
The client I mentioned at the start is working through exactly this and it’s slow, because unwinding years of expectation is slower than setting it. Which is the strongest argument for fixing it now rather than after the next five clients sign.
On a sidenote, if you have an Executive Assistant / someone who helps manage your calendar, they can be the gatekeeper here and hold you accountable for this process. Use them.
If your presence is worth paying for, price it
One more thing, because there’s a commercial angle hiding in all of this. And I’ll be honest – I struggled with this a LOT in the early days of my own agency.
If clients genuinely value having you, the founder or a very senior leader, involved in their account, then your involvement is a premium product. And right now you’re almost certainly giving it away for free, bundled invisibly into a standard retainer. Or it’s accounted for but at the same price as your more junior, inexperienced colleagues.
So name it. Make founder or senior involvement an explicit, priced part of the engagement for the clients who want it. Some will happily pay for it and now your time on those accounts is revenue rather than overhead. Others will decide they don’t need it after all, which tells you something useful about how necessary those calls ever were.
Either way, you’ve turned an invisible cost into a visible choice.
The thing we avoid saying out loud
I’m not actually needed here.
I actually got very comfortable with saying this in the end, but it took years to get there.
We all want (and need) to feel valued and needed. But the truth is that if you hire good people, there is a very good chance that they’ll surpass you at some point when it comes to client work.
Being needed feels good. Part of the reason that we stay on every call isn’t the client and isn’t the team. It’s that being the person everything runs through is a form of mattering, and giving it up means finding out whether the business and maybe you, are okay without it.
Those of you who get past this discover the answer is yes on both counts. But you only find out by leaving the room.