I ran my agency for just over twelve years. For most of it, I felt like I was barely keeping up with the demands for my time. The to-do list never got shorter. The context switching never stopped. There was always something urgent, always a fire, always a reason I could not get to the things that I felt were more strategic.

One thing that made it harder was my management team. Not because of them, they were doing their best. Genuinely great people, already overworked with delivery and then they had an extra layer of management they were’nt experienced to take on. Over the years I promoted good people into leadership roles because they were good at their jobs. Not because they knew how to lead. And I did not do enough to bridge that gap.

That meant I was still holding more than I should have been. Still pulled into making decisions that could have sat one level below me. Still firefighting, in part, because the people around me were not equipped or probably empowered to take the weight off.

The pattern I keep seeing

When I talk to founders now, the same things come up. The relentlessness. The feeling of never quite getting on top of it. Lying awake at 3am with your brain churning over a conversation had or one yet to come.

The two things are connected. When the people around you are not fully equipped to lead, more lands on you. When more lands on you, the mental weight gets heavier. It is not anyone's fault. It is what happens when good people get promoted into roles they have not been prepared for, which is how most agencies do it, and how I did it too.

What I want to understand

So I am doing research. Two connected things.

The first is the feeling of overwhelm itself. I want to talk to agency founders, past and present, about what running an agency is actually like on the inside. What creates that feeling. How they experience it. What helps and what does not. I would love to write or create something genuinely useful from it. Maybe a book. I do not know yet. Right now I just want to listen.

The second is the management team gap. I want to understand how founders are using their team leaders, where the knowledge gaps are, and whether a low-cost mentoring and training programme for those leaders would make a real difference. My own experience tells me it would. But I want to hear from the people living it now before I build anything.

The bottom line

I do not want to rush to a solution. I want to understand the problem first, from the people who have lived inside it. That has always felt like the only honest place to start.

Running an agency is hard in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who has not been there. I have been there. And I think there is more to understand than most resources ever get close to.

Are you carrying more than you should be right now? Or do you have people around you who need more support than you have been able to give them?

If either of those lands, I would like to hear from you. No pitch at the end. Just questions and listening and then hopefully a solution that you would get first dibs on for free, or heavily discounted as a massive thanks for helping shape it.