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Abdication Is For Royalty - You’ve Got A Real Job
There is a moment in every agency where the founder gets tired of being the one who figures it out.
You get tired of being the person who writes the SOP, runs the call, fixes the deck, retools the offer, sits through the bad meeting, debugs the bad hire, and rebuilds the bad pipeline.
So you go do the executively-responsible than and spend money on a setter, a VP, a consultant, a fractional somebody, a new hire with a great LinkedIn profile, an AI-SDR or some BS influencer’s “system.”
You tell yourself, “I’m leveling up. I’m getting out of the weeds. I’m being a CEO.”
Chances are, Skippy, that you aren’t elevating - you are abdicating.
A CEO’s Work Is Never Done
Hot take - process development is not an early-stage problem.
At a $500K agency, process development like figuring out what a good lead is and how to close one.
At a $5M agency, it looks like rebuilding your delivery model because the one that got you here is breaking.
At a $15M agency, it looks like rethinking how you develop culture and people so that they can develop process without you.
The work and scale changes, but the need for you to guiding and influencing the building blocks of your agency never does.
Every stage of agency growth is a variations of “What is the machine, who decides its functions, who builds that machine, who makes sure it serves our market, & who decides what changes are the most important?”
There is executive oversight involved in one or more of these functions every step of the way in every agency. If you aren’t just a passive shareholder, as a founder or executive, you’ve got your hands on one of these moving pieces all the time.
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The Three Phases of Process Ownership
Every process, every service, every department, every offer, every pricing model & every staff decision moves through three phases, in this order, always.
Phase 1 - CURATION: One person owns it, defines it, shapes how it looks and feels and behaves, and has total control. This is the ugly phase. It is slow, manual, idiosyncratic, and almost always done by the founder or a senior leader who has the authority to say no. This is here all agencies start and most agencies stay. BTW - there is ZERO shame in this game. You can be a solo founder/operator, have a small team, generate >$3mm in revenue and have a GREAT life. But this is what is often derogatorily called a “lifestyle” business. It is just a great business run by an owner/operator.
Phase 2 - INFLUENCE: The curator hands off operation but stays close to the design. They no longer touch every widget, but they shape how decisions get made about it. They train, coach, review, and course-correct. Curation & console become influence. The leader of this business is definitely primarily a manager of others, but the machine won’t truly run without them getting their hands dirty. This is an agency that has teams and leads, but a CEO who probably knows each of their clients as well as the account teams do.
Phase 3 - STEWARDSHIP: This is real CEO territory. The original curator is now a sounding board, occasionally consulted, mostly out of the loop. The process has its own gravity. By this time, your only job is running the business, not doing any of the stuff that your business does.
Most agency owners want to skip Phase 1 and start at Phase 2. Some want to skip straight to Phase 3 and just hire a “head of” something.
You can’t skip any phases. And when you do, it doesn’t work…in the immortal words of Chinua Achebe, “…things fall apart…” (btw, I KNOW you were supposed to read this book in early high school and you got the Cliff notes and wrote some horrendous essay - do yourself a favor and read this book now - you will love it…)
Why Skipping Phase 1 Is Stupid (And So, So Tempting)
Phase 1 is awful. I won’t pretend it isn’t - it’s repetitive, lonely, and full of small decisions that nobody else cares about as much as you do.
But, it’s where the actual logic, character and structure of of your business gets built.
When you skip Phase 1, the impact falls into 3 latrine buckets:
You lose the language. You can’t describe what good, great or done looks like, because you never sat with it long enough to know. When the person you hired produces something mediocre, you feel something is off but you cannot articulate why & give shitty feedback like “make it pop” or “give me more energy”. They get frustrated. You get frustrated. The thing never gets better.
You lose the leverage. Process is leverage, but leverage only works if you control the fulcrum. When somebody else owns the fulcrum of process or service design from day one, they ARE the leverage. The process serves their preferences, their pace, their judgment, and suffer’s from their blind spots. Moreover, if they leave, there goes the only person who knows all the intricacies of the process.
You lose the influence. When you skip curation, you also forfeit the right to influence the thing later. You didn’t put in the sweat equity to earn the credibility to push back. You never demonstrated that you understand it. The person you handed it to will (correctly) resist your input as meddling, and they will be right.
That is what abdication actually costs — not just control, but influence too, and forever.
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The Founder’s Real Job
Your job as CEO isn’t be free of the work. (That’s for shareholders.)
Your job is to be the person who has done enough of the work to lead the people who do it now.
There is a version of leadership that is just signing off on things other people built. That’s a board seat at your own company.
Real CEO work means you did Phase 1 long enough to know what good is, you moved to Phase 2 with intention rather than exhaustion, you stayed close enough to the design to influence it forever even after you handed off the doing, and in Phase 3 you built people who could become curators of new things so the agency keeps developing instead of just maintaining what you already built.
That last one is the unlock at every stage past $3M. The bigger you get, the less the bottleneck is process development and the more it is people development that enables process development. You stop being the only curator. You start building curators.
But you cannot teach somebody to curate if you never did it yourself.
The CEO vs CEO-No Test
Look at the three biggest things that aren’t working in your agency right now - the broken process, the missed number, the team that keeps stalling, the offer that is not landing, or whatever it is…
Define What Phase You Are in (1, 2 or 3)
Then ask the real question - am I in the right phase, or did I move too fast?
If you handed something off before it worked, you didn’t delegate. You abdicated. The of going back to fix it is always higher than the cost of staying in it would have been.
The good news is that going back is allowed. You can re-enter Phase 1 on something. You can take the pen back. You can say, “I moved too fast on this, I need to rebuild it from the inside before I can lead it from the outside.”
That move is the 1st move in changing from a CE-No to a CEO.
One More Thing
This isn’t about working more hours. This isn’t a hustle pitch. I am the last person who wants you working 70-hour weeks.
This is about what you do with the hours you already work.
Are you spending them being the curator of the things that matter most? Or are you spending them reviewing other people’s work on processes you never built and do not really understand?
One of those is leadership. The other is a very expensive form of hoping.
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