I shut down my agency although we had more success than ever before - Here's Why

I shut down my agency because I burnt out 5 times in one year, even though we’d made more money and had more staff than ever before.

The History

At least 10 times in the past 5 years, I wanted to make an influencer agency. One of my investors always said - "Agencies are cash flow rich and asset poor." Generally, the company isn't worth much more than the value of your cash sheet. Creators & staff come and go, it's hard to build an IP and when you're ready to sell, the multiples are low.

The same was true for my marketing agency, adding to the fact that agency owners will tell you that making sales is an almost impossible task for anyone except the founder. Don't believe me? Go and ask your mate who runs an agency that has <50 employees. We tried what all others did, hired sales staff, prospected sales agencies, and invested in PR. In the end, the only person who consistently closed was me.

Suffering From Success

This means that as the founder & CEO, I was responsible for growing business, marketing, personnel management, finance & large-client contract operations.

This came home to roost as we started to explode in growth during late-2021 and into 2022. We finished our first $1M+ USD calendar year, signed our first $1M+ client and then our first multi-$million client. After the dopamine rush of winning another big deal, the realisation set in of having to hire more staff, manage a bigger contract, do a good job for all involved and still somehow try and sell new business.

The Result

What resulted was we scaled up to 9 staff and were making much more money than ever before (after losing money for a few years! Also the margins aren't great), but the struggle of keeping up with work left me with two things: Constantly burning out & unable to keep up with business development.

Then the industry started to slow down, we knew that many of our retainer clients weren't going to be re-signing and my sales funnel was fairly dry. We came to an impasse. Continue on the same way, continue burning out and attempting to scale or use the new-found money we have in the bank and try something else.

The Lesson

We decided neither, we amicably split with our investors, I bought the company back to 100% ownership and decided to move on instead of rebuilding.

We went through 10+ business ideas until we landed on BIGR Social – It all started with the question “How do we turn Chris into AI” and progressed to “How do we solve our issues (agencies' issues) and our clients' issues with AI?”

We realised that we were spending thousands of dollars worth of employee time on generating very similar & repeatable work for clients at minimal (agency) margins and without the ability to scale it. I'll write a whole article on this soon.

Now, we’re laser-focused on developing a digital & scaleable business. Something I should have done earlier.

I’ll write an article soon about how we came up with BIGR AI. Just know that I don’t regret running an agency, I’ve got basically a PhD & MBA worth of knowledge from the past 5 years. I’ve achieved some amazing things and worked with fantastic people and I’m sure some massive agency owners are sitting there knowing what they would have done differently or better than me, and that’s ok.

Dot Point Summary & My Learnings

• Agencies are cash-flow-rich and asset poor
• Sales is hard for anyone not called the founder/CEO
• Margins are low
• Exiting is hard
• I learned a lot & burnt out a lot
• It's time for something new

I hope you learned something! Any questions just ask below and I'll try to answer.