In this episode, we cover:

Hear from a former agency owner on making the decision to close.

Learn the 3 things you can do to avoid the most common agency problems.

Discover what to do when your personal goals no longer align with your business.

Tough times usually means desperate measures. If you’ve been running your agency for awhile and have ever thought about raising the white flag, you are not alone.

Today’s guest is not an agency owner… ANYMORE. Earlier this year Noah Stokes, a designer/developer by trade, chose to close the doors on his digital agency — 6 years and 5 employees after he founded it. Noah is now the Senior Product Designer at Creative Market and quite content with his decision.

Why become a startup digital agency owner?

Sometimes the grass IS greener…. for awhile.

I think a lot of agency owners have a similar story. It starts out as a hobby or side jobs until eventually it makes more sense to go all in and do the legit agency thing. Same with Noah. He had been working full time and began taking freelance work on the side. Eventually, he was spending full time hours and had enough retainer work to quit his regular gig and branch out on his own. He told himself he would never work for anyone else again. And that was his entire goal.

After a year flying solo, Noah took on a partner with complementary skills. They began getting busier and slowly hired team members to keep up with the demands of the growing client list, the increasing size of their projects and increasing client budgets. Noah says adding to his team made sense to offset the amount of work but created a new level of complexity to his position as founder and CEO. Suddenly the grass was NOT greener. He was forced to spend more time on “business stuff,” like business development and team management and pulled away from the “creative stuff” he loved.

3 Mistakes a Former Agency Owner Doesn’t Want You to Make:

They say hindsight is 20/20…

Every agency owner makes mistakes, but even mistakes can provide value when we learn from them. Owning an agency no longer aligned with Noah’s goals and he decided to close the doors to his agency. Here’s some of his insights on mistakes he made or things he wished he’d done differently.

* Lack of systems. Noah knew they were putting out good work, but finding the work was a problem. The agency relied strictly on referral business. A good lead generation system would have created a more sustainable business. He and his partner were constantly wondering where the next project was going to come from. A business development/strategist helped with that concern a few years in but looking back, a leads system should’ve been in place much sooner.  

Lack of clarity. In the beginning, Noah knew he didn’t want to work for anyone else. He knew he wanted to keep the agency small-ish (5-8 employees), but otherwise he didn’t know where he wanted to take the business. He and his partner did hire a strategist/business developer to help define their direction but eventually projects and leads started drying up. (See #1.) Fortunately, Noah eventually took the time to get clear about his goals and made a change to get himself closer to them.

Lack of hiring (for the right role). The decision to hire wasn’t a problem. It was which role to fill, that was the issue. Looking back, Noah believes hiring a project manager would’ve saved him a lot of headaches. On paper, he felt hiring a project manager just didn’t make sense because those are not billable hours. But by not having a project manager, it was another role Noah was forced to fill himself, in addition to management, development and production.

Goals Evolve and Your Strategy Should Too

For Noah and his partner, the writing was on the wall.