Swallows in a nest

The skill that got you to your first million is now the thing capping your agency.

To get an agency off the ground you have to be the big idea generator, the charismatic centre, the person everyone gathers around and believes in. It works. It is also training. Without meaning to, you teach the people you hire to behave like swallows in a nest, waiting to be fed. Every idea comes out of your head or it does not happen.

Past the first million or two, that arrangement stops being an engine and becomes a ceiling. You feel it as stress, and the stress has a specific source: you are carrying responsibility you cannot hand over, because nobody around you has ever been empowered to take it. Being an entrepreneur was exhilarating once. Somewhere in the grind between two and three million, for a lot of founders, it quietly stopped being fun.

The way out is not hiring a COO to preserve the status quo. It is building a team that grows the agency despite you and around you, with ideas you would never have had. Everybody in your business has three ideas for improving their corner of it. The question is whether you have built the machinery that lets those ideas run.

That machinery is a system, and it can be installed deliberately. It is a large part of what I do as a board advisor.