Ep 163: How One Agency Owner Went From 80-Hour Weeks to a Seven-Figure Agency

Today is a solo episode.

We're going to be walking through something.

So this is a story of an agency founder that I worked with.

A couple of years ago, I started working with this founder.

He was doing roughly $20,000 to $30,000 a month.

Very typical sort of early stage agency.

He had already hired contractors.

And on paper, he was doing the thing that you're supposed to do.

You work to get more clients by generating sales and just trying to draw up leads.

And then he started to get pretty busy.

And what do you do when you get busy? Well, you hire people, right? If you have no more time, you realize I need to bring more people onto the team.

So he hired people and then he knew that he had to start delegating.

So he started handing work off, except even after this, even after building a team of multiple people, he himself was still working 70 to upwards of 80 hours per week.

That's sometimes like a 16 hour day.

That is insane.

Now, the team that he had hired, they were doing work, but he ultimately was still responsible for making sure that the work itself worked, that the work was good.

If something went wrong, he was always the one that caught it first.

If a client needed attention, he would still jump on the call.

If the quality wasn't good enough, and it often wasn't, he fixed it.

And if there was a fire, he literally was the fire department.

This is where a lot of agency owners discover that hiring people and building a company are not the same thing.

The uncomfortable truth to all of this is that adding more people to this model can actually make the founder's job worse.

And that is kind of where he was at.

more people, more clients, which just means more complexity, more things to check, more things that can go wrong.

Now, what was actually wrong with this whole setup? Well, a lot of people start with saying, well, you clearly need better people.