16d • The Weekly Stack
Question of the Week?
Something nobody talks about enough in agency circles: the business you've built might not actually be a business. It might just be a very stressful, well-disguised job.
Most agency owners I talk to will tell you they got into this to have freedom; freedom of time, freedom of income, freedom to choose who they work with. But somewhere between landing the first few clients and building out a small team, something shifts. You become the lynchpin.
You're in every sales call because clients expect to talk to you. You're reviewing every deliverable because the work that goes out has your name on it. You're handling escalations because nobody else on your team has the context or the authority to make the call. And you've adapted to it.
You've optimized around your own presence. You've gotten good at being the center of gravity. But here's the uncomfortable question that sits underneath all of that: if you couldn't work in your agency for six months, genuinely couldn't, whether that's a health issue, a family emergency, a mental breakdown from years of grinding, or just finally deciding to take the extended trip you've been promising yourself since 2019, what would actually happen?
Not what you hope would happen. Not what you'd scramble to set up in the two weeks before you left. What would happen tomorrow if you just weren't available? Would your clients stay? Would your team know what to do? Would the right decisions get made without you? Would revenue hold? Would deals close? Or would the whole thing quietly start unraveling within a few weeks because you are, whether you've admitted it to yourself or not, the product?
This isn't a hypothetical designed to make you feel bad about where your agency is right now. It's one of the most clarifying lenses I know for understanding what you've actually built versus what you think you've built.
So, what would actually happen to your agency if you couldn't show up?
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Question of the Week?
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