You quit your day job, you tell your spouse, “This is the day!”. You buy the domain at 11pm & pay the extra $9 for privacy because you are going to be so big time that you can't risk having domain ownership out there in the world. You announce it on LinkedIn with one of those cheesy animations they've got, your friends comment "congrats!" & your mother text you to ask if you have health insurance.

That is a big, exciting, monumental step in the history of your business and maybe even the history of you. That leap is public. It's full of opportunity, and it's familiar. Everybody in the world knows that you are trying something hard, so even if they aren’t crazy about you, they are probably giving you some silent good wishes.

Nobody tells you about the second leap - it doesn't have any LinkedIn announcement, and nobody offers you congratulations and good wishes. The second leap is thethe leap of faith that you make to grow.

Being a solo agency owner is hard and it's arduous. But here's the crazy thing, if you are successful as a solo founder, you are going to end up with something that's too big for you. You've built a lot of stuff to amplify your talents, and if you are lucky, your talents will have amplified your opportunities so much that you can no longer keep all the trains running on time

This issue is about that second leap - The Leap to Grow.

The first leap rewards a specific kind of person - someone who is doer, an operator and a caffeine-fueled maniac who will work weekends and answer Slack at 6am. That first leap changes you into a founder who does everything they possibly can themselves because nobody else can do it as well, as fast, or, frankly, as cheaply.

If you are really good at that solo founder/operator role, your business is going to grow. It’s going to get too big for you to do everything in it & you are gonna be stressed outta your mind. Eventually, you are going to face a seemingly impossible choice:

The first choice keeps you right where you are. The second choice is the decision to grow.

We've all heard, "What got you here won't get you there." Well, it's totally true. The skills that get you to a million dollars in revenue won't get you to five million dollars. Fundamentally, the skills that built the thing aren’t the same ones to grow the thing.

The strategic-account QBR has a different feeling. The CSM walks in knowing the buying committee, usage trends, support history, news on the company. They've blocked an hour to prep. The customer feels seen.

The other 190 QBRs don't get that hour. The CSM scans the dashboard five minutes before the call. They wing it. The customer answers the same baseline questions for the third time this year.

What if every QBR was a strategic-account QBR? Two minutes before the call, your CSM has the full brief in Slack: usage trends, support history, NPS, news on the company, what their champion just posted on LinkedIn.

Every customer feels like your top customer. Even when there are 200 of them.

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When you've hit the breaking point as the solo founder who can't do any more and you make the decision to grow, often you try to get everything off your plate at once. If you’ve read Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth (and if you haven't, you should), this rapidly leads to abdication rather than delegation. Trying to get too much off your plate at once is a nearly guaranteed way to create unreal amounts of chaos in your agency.

After running three agencies myself, working in larger agencies, and now having worked with over 350 agency entrepreneurs, I can concretely say that this is the order that a successful solo founder needs to take stuff off their plate:

If the work of the agency can't get done without you, nothing else matters. You don't actually have an agency - you are more like a super contractor with some helpers. Until your fingerprints aren't on every deliverable, you can't possibly grow further.

This is a treacherous decision for lots of agency owners. They feel like getting out of delivery means that the quality of the work products will get worse. That's not going to happen if you build the processes, hire the people & let them do it differently than you might have done it if they can show you its better. this feels really difficult because you've been used to being involved at the atomic level of your agency. Spoiler Alert: If you hire well. they are gonna do it way better than you can.

Just between you and me, can you believe the audacity of these people - this “staff”? Them just doing the job you hired them to do & doing it better than you?

Actually, that is a brilliant fucking day when you realize that your team does the work of your agency better than you ever did.

And you’ve gotta get this figured out before you can grow - and that means YOU have got to let go…

Once delivery runs without you, the next instinct is to keep your hands on the clients. "I am the relationship." "I am the trust." "Clients hired me." You will say all of these things & mean it. (And, if you are lucky, some impossibly handsome, charming and deliriously funny agency coach and consultant will tell you to get the fuck over yourself and run the business because that's your job.)

You've held on to managing client relationships because it was easy. it was 100% the path of least resistance. You sourced the deal, you sold the deal, you run the deal, right? It's the only way that you can possibly know that your clients are being treated the right way. I have two words to say to that: BULL & SHIT.

Account managers were put on this beautiful planet in order to own the client relationship. There are people that are so good at managing clients. They are so good, in fact, that it can be their full-time job. They can devote all of their working hours to creating better, deeper, more profitable and healthier relationships with clients. And you are 100% sure that your clients want to work with you explicitly, and that isn't the result of them never speaking to another grown-up in your agency?

Hand it off. Coach the handoff. Stop replying to the email when your AM is on the thread, resist the urge to be the hero on the Zoom. The relationship does not belong to you. The relationship belongs to the agency, and the agency needs to be bigger than one person.

And you’ve gotta get this figured out before you can grow - and that means YOU have got to let go…

You will always be a voice & have market insight. You will always be the one deciding direction and tone and the weird hill the agency wants to die on. That's just the way the job of a CEO goes.

What goes away is you being the entire content team. You no longer have to be the only person who writes on LinkedIn or sends the newsletter or creates campaign briefs or edits your podcast or whatever else you are doing to drive agency visibility.

The order here is usually a marketing assistant first, then a marketing director when you can afford one. The assistant takes the things off your plate that are not creative judgment. The director eventually owns the strategy and just keeps you in the loop. You stay as part of the talent pool. You stop being the production crew. (BTW, DemandOS is a structured framework & process to allow the rest of your team to be part of the marketing solution…worth a look, IMHO.)

And you’ve gotta get this figured out before you can grow - and that means YOU have got to let go…

This is the boss level. (and where most founders break)

Sales is the most treacherous transition because sales is where founders get their dopamine. It is the closed deal, the "we want to work with you" email and the secret joy when you get a Stripe alert on your phone that an invoice has been paid. It’s the little electric jolt of being the person who made it happen. You are the driver of growth & creator of opportunity. You bring home the bacon. (Many founders build an identity around being the closer, and giving up an identity is really fucking hard.)

Here's the straight skinny, gang - the inability to get yourself out of sales is, without question, an insurmountable roadblock to growing bigger than you. If you've hit the $1M-$2M range and you aren't continuing to grow, it’s not the economy, or your niche, or AI that’s at fault. It’s the fault of thinking that you can do it all and only you can do it.

When you were trying to wrap your arms around an agency that's putting real, significant demands on your time, sales efforts only happen when you have time. When you are squeezing sales in-between meetings, there's no opportunity for a structured process to happen. Your leads tend to end up being people that got referred to you or you happen to run into.

You don't have a system, or a process, instead, you have incoherent efforts to try to drive growth without devoting enough time to the growth process. Sales is full of dead-ends & tons of effort that may not yield any results, and a need to focus on things outside of your agency. As the CEO, your primary job is inside the agency.

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Here is what every stuck founder sounds like:

There is no founder so uniquely talented at sales that they cannot create a sales process that embodies some of their magic. The reason they can’t get out of sales is twofold:

Because we are all humans, avoiding downside risk is something that is hardwired. But the founder who won't give up sales because they are afraid, isn't thinking about all the deals that can be won. It takes a special kind of blinders to not understand that overcoming this fear means you can invest in specialized, trained, and well-incentivized resources to create more opportunity.

You have to create a sales process. It needs to be a real one that is written down, with stages and definitions and criteria for what a qualified opportunity looks like, what an alignment call covers, what the recap email contains, what the proposal walkthrough includes, and what the close conversation sounds like.

Before you can reap the benefits of sales resources, you need a sales process first. That’s just unavoidable.

The founders who never make the second leap have a tell. The agency stays a certain size for a long time - revenue holds steady, & the team stays small. The founder talks a lot about "intentional growth" and "lifestyle business" and "we like being lean," and some of that might even be true.

But if you listen long enough, the actual story comes out:

That’s the result of taking the 1st leap, but not the 2nd.

The second leap is the one that actually buys back your time, your optionality, and your ability to grow the thing into something that doesn't require your hands in every single action. It starts with delivery, moves through client management, then marketing, and ends with the one almost nobody nails - sales.

If you can build a sales process that closes without you in the room, you have a growing agency. If you can’t, you built yourself a totally shitty job, and you still have to run payroll every two weeks.

Make the leap, do the work & GROW.

If you want to see where you are on the agency growth spectrum, I've got two completely free assessments that will help you identify the places where you need to work in order to get past the go and into the grow:

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