On the mental and emotional load of the founder. Focuses on improving decision quality, managing personal capacity, and shifting from “doing” to leading.
It’s a painfully familiar pattern. An agency-founder walks into a Monday meeting with a new idea: A new service line / rebrand / new system to try / partnership that could change everything / Yet another AI initiative. The founder is giving it everything and the wheels begin to turn. Tasks get assigned. Someone sets…
Why leaders often do their best thinking in traffic or at 3am – and what that signals about business design.
A practical look at the blockers to execution discipline; clarity, prioritisation, noise, capability.
A blunt test of how much of your time is spent on real leadership versus operational distraction.
I think everyone should do more things that DON’T have an immediate and measurable ROI. It’s sometimes tempting to look at everything as a line in a P&L – a cost in time, money, or opportunity that we need to have a measurable return from. Our time on LinkedIn gets measured in network growth, our…
Many agencies are born from a talent for “the craft” they will deliver. A talented designer founds a creative agency, a gifted programmer starts a development shop or a PPC expert starts a paid media agency. Each of these founders (and scores like them) shares a common starting point: a profound expertise and passion for…
Working ridiculous, long hours and failing to take holiday are almost badges of honour for many business owners. Whenever I ask anyone sporting those badges why they do it I tend to get a mixture of three common answers: It’s the last of those points I really want to address, as it is both the…
Running a business isn’t just hard; it can be relentless. We all have a finite capacity for the number of hard things we can deal with at once, and that capacity is often not enough. We all have different ways to cope when we feel ourselves reaching (or passing) that capacity, but I want to…
Have you ever counted up the sheer number of questions you field each day as a leader? Or calculated the hours you sacrifice giving answers to ‘quick questions’? While being available for quick questions might seem like the WD-40 that keeps your agency running smoothly, it comes with its own set of hidden costs. Once…
It’s easy to get caught up in the pursuit of speed in our businesses. We all want to enjoy the fruits of our success sooner and it seems logical that moving more quickly will get us there faster. In fact the whole language of business emphasises the importance of speed: “Act now” “Move fast” “No…