Many, many moons ago, I crashed my agency so hard that it left a crater in my emotional state, my finances, and even my marriage. On the surface, everything looked good. We had a lot of revenue. We had good clients.

But you could fill a book with all the things we didn't have, like structure, process, operations. I just piled all that stuff on my back, and after four years of growth: we had a reasonable-size team, we generated good results, but most of all, we relied on the fact that I did not sleep, take a day off, or let anyone else own anything. Everything ran through me. The agency and I had somehow merged, and the agency could do nothing without me

A few years later, I started another agency, and I was super focused on not having that happen again. I hired people that were better than I am at their jobs. I focused a lot on systems.

But still, there was plenty of stuff that I kept as “only Tim can do”. And over time, that list grew and grew and grew.

Luckily, I started working with a coach and was put that habit in the rearview mirror - or so I thought.

Fast forward to my 3rd agency, and the opportunity to make something that only I could do was too strong to resist. We we're pitching our first enterprise-level client, and the client asked if I would be “hands-on” with their account. Instead of saying, "No, we've got a process and a team and technology and all this other stuff," I said, "Yeah, of course." (News flash - I am an idiot.)

So I worked on that client account. I got so deep inside of their paid search that it was an enormous challenge to hand it off to someone else because, of course, I did things my way, and that was largely undecipherable by someone else.

When the demands of running the agency insisted that I no longer handle this account, it probably took me four times as long as it should have to hand over the account to someone else because I kept no process and I changed the structure frequently. I created a naming convention that only I understood.

That handover nearly cratered that client’s performance & the agency’s stability, too.

Every CS team has a top tier. The strategic accounts that get briefed QBRs, fast escalations, executive sponsors checking in mid-quarter. The other 190 get a generic quarterly email and a renewal scramble in week 11.

What if your top-tier playbook ran across your entire book? Every QBR briefed. Every renewal flagged 60 days out. Every usage drop surfaced before the CSM notices. Every sponsor change flagged the day it happens on LinkedIn.

That's what your CS team gets when there's a colleague in Slack reading the portfolio every morning, drafting every QBR brief, and watching the health signals around the clock. Your CSMs talk to customers. The prep work runs in the background.

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Okay, sports fans, you might feel like you are too advanced for this, but Pay attention anyways, because this pattern creeps up again and again and again because, as a founder, you've got founder magic. That's my shorthand for:

By the time your agency pays you as much as you might have made at a more traditional job, you are actually really good at what you do. When you've got that level of experience and competency, your brain takes a shit ton of shortcuts - you don't have to use a checklist. You are the checklist.

Even if you feel as if you do something intuitively or just because it's the right thing to do, you aren’t really thinking about the way you think. If you were to ask a lot of entrepreneurs, they’d say that they weren’t following a process. Listen carefully - you ARE following a bunch of processes - you developed them subconsciously.

Think about it…you probably have some sort of ritual when a new lead comes in. You might look at their websites or check out their ads or research them on LinkedIn or whatever, but you've got a thing that you do that helps you understand if there's an opportunity. And regardless of what's in that ritual, you are just looking for patterns that you've seen before.

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Even if you never have plans to hire a sales resource, you've got to get your sales process out of your head.

Why, Tim? That seems like a waste of time…

I get it - it does seem like a waste of time! But, if you don't get that subconscious process out of your head, you can't really figure out what parts of the process work and which parts don't.

Stay with me for a couple of minutes. When you are in the flow of pattern recognition that you don't actually even realize you do, you are recognizing pattern approximations, not exact pattern matches. That's one of the shortcuts your brain takes. It sort of sees 80% of the pattern and figures it can fill in the remaining 20%, even if the thing you are looking at doesn't support that 20%.

You need to document that ritual that you have around qualification or around call prep or whatever exercise it is, so that you can more effectively do real pattern recognition, but more importantly identify which parts of the pattern that you are looking at make a difference and which don't.

For example - let's imagine that there are five qualifiers that you need for the pattern that you want to be fully reproduced. your brain sees four of them and assumes that the fifth one is there, so you go racing down the primrose path. the client is terrible, or they don't have money, or it's a bad fit in some other way, and you don't really know which of those qualifiers they didn't meet because you didn't actually match them all up. You saw what looked like four of them, assumed the fifth, but something went wrong. On your next qualifier pattern recognition - you see another four pattern matches, and you assume the fifth. But this time the fifth is different than the last time, and this deal goes wrong for different reasons than our original example - but since we didn’t have a “control” reference for all of the variables, we don't know which of those qualifiers really screwed up the opportunity.

So all of your freakish pattern recognition gets wasted because your brain will only do most of it. Pay attention the next time you go through whatever sort of ritual or evaluation process that you have, so that you can really look for and enumerate all of the things that you value, so that you can refer to it in the future. You are going to get a sense of which of those variables might be optional, which are mandatory & what combination of those variables make the best fit.

Force some rigor on yourself…I know you can do it.

Truly, every CEO is actually a shadow CMO. Brand and value proposition and values are often direct expressions of the founder, but it's so important to create the great divide between you as a founder and the brand of your business.

Even if you are a self-named business, you and your agency aren't the same. In my story above about a client asking if I would work on their account was a prime example of why you and your agency can't be the same.

There’s 2 reasons why this is important:

Entrepreneurs are bizarre - they ingest information about the clients they serve, the industry that they serve, and the markets that they are in all the time. As a founder, you have so much more context about marketing and about the way clients work than your team does. In my second and third agencies, I had so much more client-side experience than my team did. I talked obsessively about the pressures on a client-side marketer. I told my team what it was like as a CMO to get screamed at by the CFO because we weren't generating enough margin. I told my team what it was like to give a board presentation because that's something that happens to the people they deal with.

There is a big difference between those of us who are entrepreneurs and those of us who are employees. Employees tend to focus on their job. Entrepreneurs tend to focus on their opportunities. In some way that means that employees are often heads down in their work, whereas entrepreneurs are heads up looking out for the next opportunity. There’s a huge difference in perspective there. In order to help your team grow, even potentially grow beyond the confines of your agency, you've got to share that perspective with them. All of the things that you see as opportunities, threats, and changes in the market impact the clients that your team deals with. If your team is not keenly aware of platform changes, regulation changes, industry trends, economic trends, and cultural trends, there's no way that they can lead clients in the way that they need to be led. You have got to get your expert-level vision into a sustainable messaging to your team so that they can grab the benefit of your perspective without losing the impact that their perspective has on the work.

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If you don't learn how to document your own actions and create structures that you can hold yourself accountable to. Your agency is eventually going to fall apart. Read that first paragraph about my first agency for the lesson.

But if you have a single ambition to create something that is bigger than yourself, that has more impact than you have bandwidth, that delivers results far beyond your own skills because of the quality and insight of your team, getting these things out of your head and into whatever format you think is going to work for you is crucial.

The inability to get crucial insights, processes, patterns, and language out of your head and into the hands of a bigger group is functionally a hard ceiling for your agency. Lots of people are actually happier operating under that hard cap, but they’ve engineered a lack of options.

If the most important parts of your business are trapped in your head, your business can't get bigger than you - and that might actually feel okay to you. But if you choose that path, you've taken away all other paths.

If you don’t want to go through the work of self-documentation, self-accountability, and helping others get better at their craft, there a case to be made that you are a little bit on the selfish side. If you have the gift of entrepreneurship and the skills to build something that can support even a small team, I feel like it's your obligation to share your knowledge, your sense of pattern recognition, your insight, and your energy with your team so they can be better prepared for whatever comes next.

In so many ways, it seems to me that that is what life is about: leveraging your skills, talents, and attitudes for the benefit of others. get all this shit out of your head and into a document or a voice memo or something that you can reference, because the way that you work can lead the way for other people to find better satisfaction in their jobs and maybe more money in their paycheck, and 100% the feeling of satisfaction that comes from growth.

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