Don't Launch (Your Agency) Before Reading This

Good agency scaling, good growth is all about delusion and discipline, ego death and evolution. It's about letting go of your ways, trusting others with your baby, and watching your perfect plans get destroyed by reality. It's about danger—risking everything you've built as a freelancer against the cruel forces of operational expenses. Your first hundred projects as a solo operator might have been poetry in motion, but your first twenty as an agency owner might just be enough to make you question every life decision that led you here. And when the monthly P&L finally hits your inbox, it may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.

Agency ownership is the painful science of controlled chaos. Owner/operators who have been able to scale their business belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of intense client tensions, employee turnover, fatigue, and the constant threat of feast-or-famine cycles.

I've been in the service game for long enough (almost a decade!) to know that what happens behind the screens isn't pretty. The pristine Figma files, the polished presentations, the winning campaigns—they're all built on the backs of bleary-eyed creatives pulling it together before the big meeting, account managers juggling impossible client demands, and developers drowning in "quick fixes" that are anything but quick. Or worse, they’re built on the back of an agency founder who is doing all that and then some.

As most of us in the business know, there is a powerful strain of magical thinking in our industry, ranging from the mid-level agency owner who thinks sustainable profit can come from juniors delivering senior level work to the boutique founder who has three different revenue projections—one for the bank, one for the team, and one for their therapist.

Here's how things usually work. The founder who built their reputation on personal excellence suddenly has to trust others to uphold their standards. Many of the practices that made them successful as a freelancer become bottlenecks at scale. When an agency is in growth mode, that beautiful project management system you spent months implementing starts to crack under pressure.

Founders may turn to online business media gurus who tell them to buy their course and bundle of SOPs (that’s Standard Operating Procedures for anyone uninitiated). These process prophets are enemies of everything that's good and decent in the chaotic creative spirit. To run an agency treating every project like an assembly line, every creative like a replaceable cog, or every client like a standardized input feels treasonous.

Like most other agency owners I know, I'm amused when I hear people object to managed chaos on operational grounds. "You just need documentation and processes," they say. These folks have obviously never had to ship work that actually moves the needle. Don’t get me wrong. Systems matter. But creative tension, handled properly, is where magic happens. Controlled scope creep is what increases lifetime revenue and net new business acquisition brought in by happy client referrals. Forgone project management tasks is what allows a designer time to hit a tight deadline. Perfect systems “breaking” is not a bug, but a feature of agency life.

But every agency veteran worth their salt has a story about The Project That Almost Killed Them. Or rather, Projects. Mine have involved too many rounds of redesigns, freelancers who disappear, clients who suddenly "weren’t feeling" our direction after signing off on it, and enough midnight energy drinks to make a dent on Celsius’ balance sheet.. We don't talk about these stories at industry panels. They don't make it into the case studies. But they're the real meat of what we do.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably running an agency or worse, thinking about doing it. You may have been convinced by someone online that agencies are your path to financial freedom. Or for the jaded plenty, you may have even been so bold as to reinvest your agency profits to fail to build a successful SaaS product.

Yet, I love the sheer weirdness of the agency owner life: the dreamers, the hackers, the visionaries, and the pragmatists with whom I continue to work with; the ever-present sound of Slack notifications, client calls, and team celebrations; the pitches, the wins, and the last-minute pivots. Admittedly, it's a life that tests you. Most of us who live and operate in the agency world are in some fundamental way optimistic masochists. We've all chosen to turn our backs on the predictability of employment, on ever having a simple P&L, on ever having a normal relationship with our email inbox.

These days, I see myself moving ever closer to where I should be: running an agency where the growth is sustainable, the team is stellar, and every part of the operation—from sales to delivery—works without killing us all. A steady state where we ship great work, maintain high standards, and proudly push boundaries while staying profitable. What I like to tell my team is, “an excellent place to do excellent work.”

If you’ve noticed the similarities of this post to Anthony Bourdain’s Don’t Eat Before Reading This, that is completely intentional. I mean, look at the name of the newsletter. Over the years, I’ve found my answers to scaling by referencing the restaurant industry. Although we operate in the land of the bytes and not bites, where the sharpest object is the pen tool, I find that we share very a similar service DNA (just without the same fixed overhead and perishable inventory).

Perhaps you may also find inspiration in how to run your agency through the same mental models. Stick around if you think so.

In any case, I’ve got a launch to prep.