To Scale, You Need to Fire Yourself from Jobs

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When starting an agency, the founder has to wear many hats: Chief Sales Officer, Chief Client Services Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief HR Officer, and even Chief Orderer-from-Costco Officer.

This makes sense, as the agency has little revenue to pay for a management team. As noted, however, most founders are good at the vision thing and not so good at the operations thing. Moreover, even if the founder is reasonably good at operations, she likely a) doesn’t enjoy it and b) is taken away from the visionary thinking and consultative sales that is ultimately more valuable to the agency.

As such, as the agency scales, the job of the entrepreneur is to fire herself from jobs!?

Most commonly, this starts with operational work (the stuff an integrator will eventually do): HR, finances, office management, and process. But over time, this may also include client-facing work like account management, marketing, and sales.?

For most founders, letting go of the operational stuff is easy, because they don’t like it and often aren’t good at it. The hard part comes when they have to let go of stuff they enjoy.

In my case, the hardest thing to let go of was sales. I loved sales because I truly believed in what we were selling at 3Q. I used to tell the team that if a potential client decided not to work with 3Q, it was their loss more so than ours. I walked into sales pitches with a certain amount of swagger because I was confident that our offering was superior to every other agency. And it was fun to win deals and be such an instrumental part of our agency’s growth.

Over time, however, I slowly let go of sales. I did this for two reasons: first, because at a certain scale, it just isn’t practical to have the CEO spending the majority of his day in sales. At 50 people this is possible, but at 200 people it isn’t - there are just too many high-level organizational challenges that need to be addressed. Second, at some point having the CEO in a sales pitch becomes a liability - either because the CEO likes to “go rogue” and deviate from the pitch (mea culpa) or because having the CEO in the pitch actually makes the agency look small and deters big clients (“this can’t be an enterprise-level agency if the CEO is spending his time in sales pitches”).

Thus, firing yourself from jobs sometimes means firing yourself from things you really love to do. One option is to simply decide not to let go of something you love, knowing full well that this decision may limit your ability to scale. That’s not a crazy choice. Ultimately, scale translates into a more valuable business, but if financial gain isn’t your primary objective, you may decide to stay smaller and maintain a higher level of enjoyment in the business by not firing yourself from your favorite tasks. More money doesn’t always drive more happiness.

That said, if you dream of building an industry-leading agency and competing against the holding companies for multi-million dollar multinational clients, you have to fire yourself from as many jobs as possible.

And this may someday mean firing yourself from the CEO job or even any job at your agency. When we sold 3Q in 2019, I gradually realized that the business had scaled beyond my ability to be an effective CEO. We needed new management to take us to the next level, and so we brought in a seasoned CFO and a President who eventually took over as CEO.

By the time we sold again in 2021, I was no longer in executive meetings, reported to no one, and had no one reporting to me. Most employees and clients had no idea who I was and few people asked for my advice. I had become irrelevant! When I officially left the agency a few months ago, there was no ticker tape parade, only a few letters from the 401(k) and COBRA providers and an empty FedEx box from HR to ship back my computer.?

Sure, this was somewhat bittersweet, but it was also a great accomplishment. And given that by then the agency now employed more than 500 people managing billions of dollars of media spend annually, I think firing myself was a pretty smart business decision.

So whether you want to build a 50 person, 500 person, or 5000 person agency, at every step along the path, you need to fire yourself from jobs. It may bruise your ego at times and may result in giving up some work that you love, but it’s the only way to scale.

Next Week: Tip #8 - Say No to Bad Revenue