Happy 5 years of agency life to me! After 5 years running an agency, I’ve watched dozens of talented founders stay stuck at the same revenue level year after year. They’re best at what they do. They have happy clients. But they can’t seem to break through to the next level.
I was one of them.
For two years, we hovered around the same revenue mark. We’d win a big client, lose another, hire someone, have them leave. It felt like running on a treadmill—heaps of effort, zero forward movement.
Then something clicked. And it wasn’t what I expected.
The Comfort Trap Nobody Talks About
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most agencies stay small because staying small is comfortable.
I know that sounds harsh. But hear me out.
When you’re running a $100K-$400K agency, you know everyone. You’re involved in every project. Clients call you directly. You can keep everything in your head. There’s a certain security in that level of control.
The problem? That control is exactly what’s keeping you small.
I realized this during a particularly stressful month where I was personally managing six client projects, interviewing candidates, coordinating with devs for fixing a technical issue, and trying to close two new deals. I was exhausted. But I was also comfortable with being the person everyone needed.
That’s when it hit me: I wasn’t building an agency. I was building a very expensive job for myself.
The Shift That Changed Everything
The breakthrough came when I asked myself a different question.
Instead of “How do I grow the agency?” I started asking “What would this agency look like if i was gone tomorrow?”
That question changed everything.
Because suddenly, I wasn’t thinking about how to do more. I was thinking about how to build systems that could operate without my constant involvement. I wasn’t looking for employees—I was looking for people who could own outcomes.
The shift was from founder as chief executor to founder as architect.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
I stopped being the smartest person in the room. I hired people who were better than me at specific things—project management, client relations, technical execution. Not generalists who needed direction, but specialists who could own their domain. I was and am a generalist. I still handle work that falls under my forte.
I documented our “secret sauce.” Everything I was keeping in my head—how we pitched, how we structured projects, how we handled difficult conversations—Everything was turned into documented processes. This was hard because after 5 years, I thought I’d remember everything. I didn’t. Not rigid playbooks, but frameworks that gave people guardrails while letting them operate independently. SOPs that just works without being too rigid.
I charged more and took fewer clients. This was scary. But we went from serving 15 clients at lower rates to serving 8 clients at significantly higher rates. The revenue stayed the same initially, but my time freed up dramatically. And that freed-up time is what allowed me to actually work ON the business instead of IN it. We now have a 10 client cap now.
Three Mindset Changes Required to blaze Past roadblocks
Looking back, here are the three mental shifts that had to happen:
1. From “I can do it better” to “I can enable others to do it better”
Yes, you probably can execute faster than your team. You’ve been doing this for years. But every time you jump in to “save” a project, you’re teaching your team that they can’t handle it without you.
I had to learn to let people fail small so they could succeed big. In year 3, I was still jumping into every crisis. By year 5, I realized I was the crisis—because nobody else could learn. That meant biting my tongue in meetings. That meant watching someone take three hours on something I could do in thirty minutes. That meant accepting 80% execution from others so I could focus on 100% strategy.
2. From revenue growth to profit growth
We got obsessed with hitting revenue milestones. But we were adding clients faster than we were adding systems or margin.
The real shift happened when I started tracking profit per client instead of just revenue. We discovered that our most profitable clients shared certain characteristics—and our least profitable clients also shared patterns.
We stopped chasing revenue and started chasing profitable revenue. That meant saying no to projects that fit our capabilities but not our business model.
3. From founder identity to business builder identity
This was the hardest one for me.
I loved being the creative director. I loved being on client calls. I loved being the person who solved the hard problems. That was my identity.
But that identity was capping the agency’s growth at my personal capacity.
I had to shift from “I’m the person who does great work” to “I’m the person who builds a business that does great work.” Those are fundamentally different roles requiring fundamentally different skills.
It meant spending less time in Figma and more time with the CRM. Less time on creative and more time on operations. Less time delivering and more time enabling.
What Nobody Tells You About Growing an Agency
Here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier:
Growth is uncomfortable. There’s a period where you’re not the executor anymore but you’re not quite the CEO yet. You’re in this awkward middle phase where you’re training yourself out of old habits while learning new skills. It feels terrible. That’s normal.
Your team will make different decisions than you would. And that’s okay. Sometimes they’ll make better decisions. Sometimes they’ll make worse ones. But if you’ve hired well and built good systems, the outcomes will average out to be just as good—and you’ll have your time back.
What took you from 0 to 1 won’t take you from 1 to 10. You can’t just “scale up” what you were doing. You need different systems, different people, and different processes. Accepting this saved me months of frustration.
You’ll lose some clients in the process. Some clients hired YOU, not your agency. When you step back, they’ll feel it. Some will leave. That’s the price of scaling. Let them go.
The Hard Conversation Every Founder Needs to Have
At some point, you need to sit down and have an honest conversation with yourself:
Do you want to stay a high-paid freelancer with a team? Or do you want to build a real business?
There’s no wrong answer. But there are very different paths forward.
If you want the lifestyle business where you’re highly involved, where you know every client, where you’re the face of everything—great. Optimize for that. Charge premium rates. Keep the team small. Enjoy the control.
But if you want to scale, if you want to build something bigger than yourself, if you want freedom instead of control—then you need to start making uncomfortable changes now.
For me, the answer was clear once I asked the question honestly. I didn’t start this agency to create a job for myself. I started it to build something meaningful. Something that could grow beyond me. Something that could, eventually, give me the freedom to work on other things.
Like the SaaS products I’m now able to build on the side. But that’s a story for another post.
Where I Am Now
We’re not a massive agency. Still a small team of 6 operating from India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, USA, Philippines and Canada. We’re not trying to be. But we’ve broken through that ceiling that held us back for years.
More importantly, the business no longer requires me to be involved in every decision. I can step away for a week and things keep running. That freedom? That’s what scaling actually gives you.
It’s not about the revenue number. It’s about building a business that works without you being the bottleneck.
The agencies that scale understand this. The ones that stay small usually don’t.
Which one are you building?