Leading the self & team

On the mental and emotional load of the founder. Focuses on improving decision quality, managing personal capacity, and shifting from “doing” to leading.

  • Traffic jams and sleepless nights

    Why leaders often do their best thinking in traffic or at 3am – and what that signals about business design.

  • Give more. Take less.

    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…

  • Beyond the craft: Expertise isn’t enough to build a successful agency

    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…

  • Rethinking the hustle: Should we really ‘Work hard, retire early’ ?

    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…

  • Stop hiding in your blanket fort

    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…

  • Unplugging BossGPT: Why you need to stop being your team’s answer engine

    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…

  • Velocity not speed

    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…

  • It’s time to focus on what is important to your agency, not what is urgent

    High up on my personal list of “Mistakes agency owners know they’re making (but just keep repeating)” is allowing things that are urgent to take priority over what is actually important. Whilst this is a pitfall for any type of business, the nature of the model makes it particularly common in agency world: Constant deadlines,…