I’m a digital agency owner, and this is my diary and safe space. A place where I can share the highs and lows of owning/running a digital agency, but also learnings and observations. Some of my thoughts are not client, employee or industry ‘safe’, hence why I don’t plan to share who I am or my agency. I can also write swear words in my posts without feeling awkward about it. Sorry mum.
Who?
What I am willing to share about myself and my agency:
- I’m a sole founder/director of my digital agency.
- I began as a freelancer, woke up one day and had accidentally started an agency. Oops.
- I now employ somewhere between 15 and 25 people (being purposefully vague here).
- We’re based in a major city in the UK, but with some early stage operations abroad.
- Our roots are in being a website design and development agency, but we also do some other digital marketing.
- We might have won a few of those ‘top 100 agency’ type awards. But then I guess which agency hasn’t… fuck The Drum and their endless list of awards.
- My current focus is on scaling my agency from somewhere roughly around £1.25m turnover to £2m in the next 12 months, so lots of my posts will be related to how I’m doing that and the challenges.
- Looking a bit further ahead, I plan to sell my agency at some point.
Why?
I thought about this just being a personal diary that no one would see – just a place to pump out all the things running through my mind, almost as a form of therapy (because let’s face it, all agency owners need therapy).
But then I thought about how many of my agency owner peers might find this insightful, funny, scary, or any other kind of emotion. If just one other agency owner can relate to any of this, and realise they’re not alone or learn something, or anything else, I’ll go to bed each night a happy man.
Over the last approximately 10 years of freelancing and then agency owning, I have:
- Met hundreds of other digital agency owners
- Written hundreds of web design and digital marketing proposals
- Attended hundreds of pitches
- Interviewed hundreds of candidates
- Fired fortunately only a few employees
- Fallen into most of the traps of running an agency
- Dealt with lots of great clients, and even more shit ones
- Lost some money
- Overall made more money than I’ve lost
- Spent tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of £ on my own personal development, coaching and consultancy/board advisors
If I can pass any of these learnings onto anyone else that might be thinking of going on a similar journey or from freelancer to award winning digital agency, I’ll also be very happy.
Also, the agency world is full of fucking ‘consultants’ who claim to have sold an agency in the past and now want you to pay them for their thoughts. In reality lots of them ran out of cash and sold the rights to their company logo for a fiver to their cousin’s mate they met at the pub. Not quite the ‘successful exit’ I’ve got in mind. Be careful who you take advice from and do your due diligence.
When I eventually sell my agency, I plan to (maybe) package up all of my knowledge across agency life (new business, marketing, operations, HR, finances etc) into an online course that others on a similar journey could benefit from. 10-15 years of experience condensed into hours of hard hitting content. All the shit I wish I’d known when I first started. All the templates and documents I should have been using from the start. Subscribe or let me know if this is something you would be interested in. I’ll have to make sure I successfully sell my agency before I can actually make this happen…
Financial transparency (kind of)
I’ve decided to share some of my agency’s finances. I’ve simplified, skewed and rounded some of the numbers (no more than +-10%) to keep our identity hidden. I hope insights into the finances under the hood of a growing digital agency will be interesting. I know as we were growing I would have liked to have seen more numbers. I plan to try and keep the numbers up to date monthly here: {LINK COMING SOON}.
Contact
If you have a question, feel free to get in touch. I can’t promise I’ll respond quickly because I’ll probably be too busy apologising to a client or solving a cashflow problem, but I will come back to you eventually.
Subscribe
Sign up, and I promise I’ll make you smile. Or cry. The dopamine hit from seeing people subscribe also encourages me to write more.
*Shit about GDPR goes here
Digital Agency Life 