A founder I work with recently admitted something that made me laugh: she only got her strategy and finance updates done in the thirty minutes before our call. Not because she’s disorganised or because she doesn’t care about the work. But because without the scheduled check-in with me as her advisor, strategic work kept getting pushed aside by client delivery, team issues and the hundred small fires that fill an agency founder’s day.
And she isn’t the only one – two other founders who I work with have said similar things over the course of us working together. One founder went as far as to say that the main reason he engaged with me was to hold him accountable for getting things done.
He explicitly said: “Your presence provides accountability for me otherwise I’ll just keep pushing things back.” He then went on to describe me as his accountability partner.
This reveals something important about how founder (and senior leader) work actually gets done, as opposed to how we think it should get done.
The thing we don’t like to admit about strategic work
Strategic work often has no natural deadline. Things such as:
- Agency-wide processes and documentation.
- Team structuring.
- Growth plans.
- Proper HR processes.
- Marketing strategy.
…all the things that would actually move your agency forward, they all compete with urgent client work that does have deadlines.
Client work pretty much always comes first and that’s understandable – delivering great client work and helping them meet their goals is how you thrive as an agency.
You know what you should be working on. You’ve probably known for weeks, maybe months. But you know that you haven’t touched it. The internal guilt cycle is familiar: “I should be doing X” becomes “I really need to do X” becomes mounting frustration as another week passes without progress towards the bigger picture.
An agency I’m working with keeps identifying the same team performance issues from a small number of their team. The founder knows they need:
- Better feedback frameworks for their managers.
- Better ways to document and improve performance issues.
- Training for their managers on how to spot performance issues early.
But finding the time for these is difficult when every day there are new client issues to fix, quarterly reviews to attend, contract negotiations to run… you name it, they’re doing it.
We hate to admit that:
- We can’t trust the team to handle basic things, so we get pulled into them.
- By the time we do have a spare hour or two, we’re exhausted and not in the right headspace for strategic work.
- This is unlikely to change if things remain as they are.
It’s not a time management problem. It’s that certain types of work have no forcing function.
Why willpower usually isn’t enough
A mistake that many of us make when scheduling our work or going through or to-do list is that we assign the same level of cognitive function to each task. We’re aware that some tasks will take 30 minutes to complete whilst others may take 3 hours. But we don’t think about the fact that the 30 minute task is an intense piece of work on potentially letting go a member of the team vs the 3 hour task that is reconciling your expenses.
Sure, the latter may be boring, but it’s not emotionally draining – well, hopefully not, I guess it depends how big your expenses are! Anyway…
The point is that we may well have the willpower to finally get to those strategic tasks that have been on our list for months, but in order to do a good job, we need the right level of headspace and focus.
Strategic work requires different cognitive resources than operational firefighting. After you’ve dealt with a junior client issue that someone with six months’ experience should be handling, then managed contractor problems, then checked whether leads are being properly reported, there’s nothing left for the recruitment strategy or business development work you know needs doing.
The hidden cost: founders and senior leaders think they’re being productive because they’re busy all day. And you are productive, in a sense. But the business isn’t moving forward.
The accountability structure (what actually works)
It’s actually very simple to create structures and processes that hold yourself accountable for strategy work. The hard bit is actually doing it, consistently, over and over.
If we take a step back and think about what accountability actually means – it’s simply doing what you said you were going to do at the time you said you’d do it – every time.
That’s it.
In order to enable this, you simply need someone who asks you whether you’ve done that thing that you told them you’d do two weeks ago.
This person needs to be someone who you actually feel accountable to – perhaps even a little fearful of them!
Once you have someone who can be this person for you, you need to settle on the cadence of accountability check-ins. This could be weekly, bi-weekly or monthly – it depends on how you tend to work and the pace at which you want to move.
These check-ins create artificial deadlines for work that have no natural urgency – which is the root problem here. Strategic work usually doesn’t have an urgent or even a fixed deadline at all.
The accountability check-ins fix this.
The person on the other end doesn’t need to be an expert in what you’re doing either. They need to be someone who’ll notice if you haven’t done it. Someone who’ll ask, “Last time we spoke, you were going to work on X. How did that go?”
The format is simple: what you said you’d do, what you actually did, what’s blocking you, what’s next.
What this isn’t (and why that matters)
This is not therapy or coaching, though it might feel supportive. This is not project management. You’re not tracking deliverables in the traditional sense. You’re creating commitment points.
And this is not admitting failure on your part.
When the owner of a successful agency tells me “I need you to hold me accountable for doing this stuff, otherwise, I won’t get it done”, that’s not admitting failure. It’s recognising that they need support in order to move their agency forward.
The distinction from traditional consulting matters: traditional consulting tells you what to do. Accountability structures help you do the thing you already know you should do. The value isn’t in expertise for every topic. It’s on the scheduled day of reckoning.
Several of my clients use me as what they call an accountability partner for exactly this reason. Not because I know more about their specific situation than they do, but because I’m going to ask them about it.
The common objection is: “I should be able to do this myself.” Sure. And you should also be able to resist every immediate operational fire and preserve cognitive resources for strategic thinking under pressure. But that’s not how human brains work. Especially not founder brains that are responsible for everything at their agency.
When you’re constantly firefighting client issues, managing underperforming team members, and covering operational gaps, the issue isn’t discipline. It’s structure.
Setting this up (if you’re going to try it)
I feel like it would be remiss at this point not to say – get in touch!
You just need someone – a business partner, an advisor, even another founder who’s willing to be equally accountable to you.
The critical elements are:
- It must be scheduled (not “when we get around to it”).
- It must be short (30 minutes maximum ideally 15-20 minutes), focused on commitment and follow-through.
What to track: the two or three strategic priorities that keep getting deprioritised. With specific next actions, not vague intentions. Not “work on team documentation” but “document the three specific performance issues from this week.”
It’s also important that both parties need to know this is a real commitment, not just loose catch-ups that drift.
Why this matters to your agency
Most founders beat themselves up for not making progress on strategic work. You assume it’s a personal failing or a discipline problem. Some see it as a sign that you’re not capable of running an agency at all.
But if you’re constantly firefighting, the issue isn’t you. It’s that certain types of work only happen when there’s a forcing function.
The accountability check-in isn’t a crutch. It’s recognition that you can’t rely on willpower when you’re making a hundred decisions a day and every operational gap defaults to you.
If the only way you get your strategy documentation done is thirty minutes before a call with someone who’s going to ask about it, that’s not a personal failure. That’s just information about what structure you need.
If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll get to that strategic work “next week” for the last three months, you probably already know what you need to do.