Nothing unusual happened in my final few years of running an agency. Even though it was also the toughest period of my career.
That’s the strange part. When I look back and try to point at the thing that wore me down, there’s no single event to point at. Even losing a huge client and having to do redundancies didn’t make me want to leave.
Just Tuesdays. Lots and lots of Tuesdays. Tuesdays were normal.
The problems were all normal (that’s the point)
Here’s what those last two or three years actually looked like, after the pandemic.
A client leaving. A hire that didn’t work out. A tight month in terms of profit. Someone resigning at a bad time.
Every one of those is a normal agency problem. I’d handled all of them before, more than once. If you’d shown me any single one of them in isolation, I’d have shrugged. That’s just running an agency.
And that’s exactly why nobody sounds an alarm. Not your team, not your co-founder, not you. There’s no moment where anyone says “this is serious”, because no individual thing is.
What was actually different
For the first few years, the problems came with wins built in between them.
You lose a client, but the next month you win a bigger one. Someone great resigns, but a new hire turns out brilliant. A rough quarter gets followed by your best one ever. The wins weren’t just nice. They were doing a job I didn’t understand at the time: they were how I recovered.
In those final years after the pandemic, the problems kept arriving at the same rate they always had. The wins didn’t. Same issues, fewer of the big moments in between that used to reset me.
Nobody warns you about that combination. The problems on their own, I could take. The problems without the relief, week after week, for years, is what got me.
The wins and the positive moments, even the tiny ones, renewed my energy and reminded me why I was running an agency in the first place.
The maths of it
Think of it less like one heavy blow and more like a leak.
Every normal problem costs you something. A bit of sleep, a bit of optimism, a bit of the energy you’d otherwise put into the interesting work. On its own, each cost is small enough to ignore. And if something good happens before the next problem lands, you refill.
The danger isn’t the size of any one problem. It’s the gap between them shrinking, whilst the things that used to refill you get rarer. When the next issue arrives before you’ve recovered from the last one, you’re funding yourself from a reserve that only ever goes down.
You don’t notice, because you’re measuring the events, not the accumulation. Not the compounding effect of all of these normal issues. Each individual thing can be handled on its own. It’s the running total that is much harder.
Why you can’t see it from inside
There are two reasons this creeps up on founders and senior leaders specifically.
First, no single event ever justifies stopping. If a genuine catastrophe hit, you’d clear the diary, rally everyone and deal with it. There’s a script for a crisis. There’s no script for a hundred ordinary weeks. So you’d cancel everything for the disaster that never comes and you cancel nothing for the slow grind that’s actually doing the damage over time.
Second, from the outside, everything looks fine and you often look like you’re handling these problems. If you’re running an agency or leading a team, the people below you are relying on you to lead and you put on a brave face, despite the mounting pressure.
What to actually watch
You can’t track this on a P&L, but you can track it. A few honest questions, asked every month or so, can make all the difference.
When was your last genuinely quiet fortnight?
Not a holiday. A normal working stretch where nothing was actively going wrong. If you can’t remember one, that’s information.
Are wins still arriving and are present for them?
Count them. If problems are outpacing wins for months at a stretch, you’re in the danger zone even if every individual problem is trivial. And when a win does come, take a beat to actually feel it. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s your recovery process.
I’m pretty sure that we had a bunch of wins during the time that I felt like there were very few, but I didn’t let them land.
Has your “normal” quietly moved?
Ask what load you’re currently calling fine and whether the you of three years ago would have agreed. Baseline creep is how founders and leaders end up carrying double whilst insisting nothing’s changed.
Is anything refilling you outside the business?
If the only source of relief is the next client win, you’ve tied your recovery to something you can’t fully control.
None of these fix the problems themselves – but they’re not meant to. They make the accumulation of normal problems visible, meaning that you can do something about it.
Where this doesn’t apply
Some situations genuinely are a catastrophe and this isn’t about those. If you’ve lost 40% of your revenue or you’re facing something existential, that’s a crisis and it deserves crisis mode.
And I’m not arguing that the normal problems don’t matter. Churn, mis-hires and cashflow all have real operational answers and plenty of past issues of this newsletter are about exactly that.
This is about the founders and leaders where every individual metric says fine, the agency is objectively okay and they’re wearing down anyway. If that’s you, the problem isn’t that you can’t handle it anymore. It’s that you’re carrying an accumulation that nobody’s counting.
Founders and leaders often brace for the wrong thing. We build contingency plans for the disaster: the big client leaving, the key person walking, the market turning. This is all very sensible. But the thing that actually takes most of us out doesn’t look like any of that.
It looks like an ordinary Tuesday. Then another one. Then a few more years of them, with fewer and fewer of the good weeks in between.
I didn’t see it at the time and by the time I did, it had already shaped some of the biggest decisions of my life. You don’t need a catastrophe to burn out. You just need enough Tuesdays.
Count yours.
