It’s been a lot of fun to make, because it is very representative of my POV on how projects — and therefore, how agencies — should run.

From working with dozens of agencies over the years, one core thing I have noticed is the tendency to over-engineer solutions to relatively simple problems, or run to tools that do way more than necessary. I include myself in this assessment, by the way.

Glance is almost aggressively simple. To paraphrase our marketing site, it takes the thing that agencies and their clients need to know about their projects and stops there.

I hope you’ll help shape this thing — your time and enthusiasm would mean so much to me.

Apply for the Alpha on the website :)

This is It’s Not Easy — a very quick, curated collection of articles, posts, and uncategorizable things that might be interesting for agency owners (hopeful or current) such as yourself.

I posted on LinkedIn about SAY:DO ratio, one of my preferred ways of evaluating creative employees.

About a year ago, I met Andrea Popova. A former employee of Meta, she and her co-founder have one of the most interesting and unique agencies I have come across lately called STFU.

She framed it as a network of comedians and producers who create hilarious, memorable brand content. The way she put it, it’s like hiring a writer’s room for your brand. I primarily find this interesting because I think that a group of creators being legitimately funny might be a moat against the AI surge. Might.

Anyway, Andrea wrote on LinkedIn about the importance of always getting things in writing.

Her story is about an event, but it’s equally valuable when applied to any agency related to travel costs (flights, hotels), creative costs (fonts, stock images), or ongoing costs (hosting, maintenance).

Repeating her words: Always, always, get it in writing.

Charlota Kolar Blunarova wrote a smart little piece about framing options for your client.

I love the way she breaks this down as a “spectrum of risk”:

→ The Safe Choice.
Close to what they briefed. It says "I heard you." This builds trust before I push anything.

→ The Bold Choice.
The one that challenges something. An assumption, a convention, a constraint they thought was fixed.

→ The Bridge.
Lives between the two. Has the ambition of the bold with the comfort of the safe. (honestly, this is the one that ships 70% of the time)

When I frame it this way - "how adventurous do we want to be?" — the conversation shifts completely.

She correctly points out that simply giving a wide variety of creative choices can often freeze up the client, making them cherry pick things they like from each concept.

I think if you can nail them down on how much they are willing to stretch their idea and brand — you will not only iterate less, but you’ll have a much clearer idea of their appetite for risk moving forward. Everyone will be happier with the outcome.

Lastly, this short post from Thijs Kraan about how to get early studio clients is too concise and helpful not to share.

If you know me, you’ll know that I’m in total agreement that networks are the best place to start. Use and abuse your professional circle. If there was ever a time to debase yourself, that’s it.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.

If there’s anything interesting you’ve seen lately that you think other agency operators need to have eyes on, reply and let me know.

— Mark

This is It’s Not Easy — a very quick, curated collection of articles, posts, and uncategorizable things that might be interesting for agency owners (hopeful or current) such as yourself.

Have you tried Google Stitch? I spent a lot of time playing with it last week and… I mean, damn.

I have resisted the vibe code allure for a while, but over the past couple of months, I’ve been having a little bit more fun with Claude Code. Honestly, though, it’s just not anything unless you possess a titanic amount of patience — especially on the UI side. But also on the UX side. And on the code side. I’ve heard an AI agent described as basically being the equivalent of a very junior employee, and that’s certainly how it has felt at times.

Stitch is the first tool I’ve used that genuinely felt threatening on a service level. The UI it creates is not perfect — unless you already have a robust brand in place, it’ll be pretty white label-feeling (although, worth noting that if you give it an empty, brand-less prompt, it does create a little brand system for you which is a nice touch). Ask it to create an app for you and you’ll get a pretty pedestrian design system, but still something that looks a lot better from what I have seen out of every other AI agent.

And it still must be said, these tools — including Stitch — still completely fall flat on the UX (creating a prototype is quite hellish) and on the code side.

What’s crazy about both tools is that someone like me is able to build and deploy a (very shitty) app in a short amount of time. Claude was able to walk me through the whole process. That was unthinkable to me not that long ago — it’s reminiscent of the early days of Figma, where for the first time, non-designers could have some active work behind the gates. The good designers I worked with embraced this, and loved having more people on the team fluent in their tools… but there were also plenty of designers who were gatekeeper-y and resisted. I can’t help but wonder if maybe all the ire for generative AI is really just another one of those situations.

Sure, we’re going to get a lot of people pushing out garbage apps, bragging about their Claude acumen in breathless LinkedIn launches. Optimistically, I’m wondering if in the end we get a lot more people understanding and appreciating the process. It’s very liberating for creators who lacked the skillset previously, is what I’m saying.

All that in mind — I don’t find this stuff threatening yet. But I really want to emphasize yet. Vibecoding anything will still result in a piece of trash without intelligent UX and UI design oversight, and a developer who knows the right questions to ask around security and implementation. Claude, Stitch, and the rest of them might trick a lot of people into thinking that they are designers or developers or someone who doesn’t need either of those, and the work they do will be painfully, painfully bad.

I think there’s an opportunity on a service level for agencies that encourages vibecoding, but acknowledges the expertise that already exists with designers and developers.

I thought this guide helping non-developers interview developers was really smart and thoughtful.

Over time, consistent questioning builds real depth, not just definitions, but reasoning. Why this framework instead of another? Why this database? Why this architecture? Those answers are where technical fluency actually lives.

That spoke to me. My experience making technical hires was, at one point, pretty disrespectful. I was definitely one of the “learn the buzzwords” types, and in particular, I asked a lot of yes/no questions just to even see if I had the right person, and evaluated from there. If you aren’t a developer, it can be such an intimidating conversation that you are careful not to get into opinions.

A trick I have grown to love using in interviews is to acknowledge up front that I’m pretty much an idiot. The more technical the discussion, the more of an idiot I am comfortable being. I ask for concepts to be explained in simple terms, and to ask about specific decisions and lessons learned. When you stop trying to convince the other person that you’re smart, you learn a lot about their communication abilities, and their patience for explaining complex things to those with less or no experience. This only becomes more important as a role is more technical.

Tim Keen does kind of the same thing I do, and is a good follow. I thought this post about growing your business following vs. growing a cult of personality captured something I’ve thought about a lot.

A lot of Founder/CEOs really struggle to find their correct place in growing a business. For a long time, I’ve said that every Founder I have ever worked with has been best deployed in one very narrow spot. Sometimes they are a creative leader and are best as a recruiter/creative force. Sometimes they are exceptional salespeople, even if they came up on the creative side. If you’re in this role, it’s vitally important that you find the lane where you can best help the business from your very high perch.

If an agency has reached a certain level of esteem, it probably means that there is a pretty charismatic and unicorn-like individual at the helm (this might be you) who possesses opinions that people are actually interested in hearing. They may not like it, but they need a figurative microphone in their hand. It doesn’t matter which lane gets set for them, as long as they’re talking publicly about their point of view.

And if it isn’t them, it needs to be somebody.

Eli Rubel made a quick post about a topic I like: raising rates.

If you suspect you are undercharging, pay attention to this:

1.Wait until you're at full capacity (this is critical - you need leverage)
2.For your next 5 prospects, quote 25-50% higher than normal
3. Watch what happens

If 3 say yes → your prices are way too low, go again
If 2 say yes → you're in the sweet spot, hold there
If 1 or 0 say yes → you pushed too far, dial back 15%

Most people fear raising rates because they don’t think they’re worth it. But so many agencies I work with are leaving money right there on the table.

The “wait until you’re at full capacity” point is a smart one. Most agencies operate with a high dependency on that next big deal and live in utter fear out of losing it because of something like, you know, charging what they are worth… which I can joke about, but also see as understandable in these very uncertain times.

I always love hearing about stories of AI being used for good.

Recently, baseball season has me thinking about how youth sports coaches (like me) use AI to create logos for their teams. That’s a beautiful thing. No brand designers are losing any work here, and kids get the thrill of having a cool looking logo for their baseball team.

I also recently came across a product called Durable, which I think falls into the same bucket. They’re a complete business builder that starts with a website and brand, but also carries through to CRM, invoicing, and marketing automation.

I think any world where the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs is lowered is a good one. You could make the argument that a tool like this edges out local or junior designers and marketers, but I don’t know if I’ve ever known many people happily clamouring for that work to begin with.

If this prevents a 23-year-old designer from having to go to small claims court over an unpaid $1,200 invoice for a website they made for a catering company, I’d say it’s a win for all involved.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.

If there’s anything interesting you’ve seen lately that you think other agency operators need to have eyes on, reply and let me know.

— Mark

Mark from Tamaribuchi here. When you first gave me your email, I promised you a newsletter for agency owners. So far, I’ve done a pretty bad job. That changes today.

I’ll contact you every few weeks or so with It’s Not Easy — a very quick, curated collection of articles, posts, and uncategorizable things that might be interesting for agency owners (hopeful or current) such as yourself.

On LinkedIn, Fred Sarmento from the Portuguese studio Twistag wrote this really excellent post about how the quantum change in AI for developers is thinking more like decision makers than coders. I think he absolutely nailed it.

“They got better at system design, because AI still can't reason across service boundaries. They got more serious about code review, because that's where AI breaks down the most. They learned how to prompt like you'd manage a junior dev who's fast but has no context.

The best engineers in a couple of years won't be the fastest typers. They'll be the ones with the sharpest judgment, who happen to use AI to move faster.”

I watched this little interview on AdAge Insider about selling in 2026. This little snippet (timestamped) was particularly interesting, talking about the importance of educating clients, especially when it comes to things like AI. Most people don’t realize that this isn’t just touchy-feely client management, but a potential revenue opportunity.

A line I really liked: “Clients want agencies that are going to help them become self-sufficient.”

This is a pretty major reframing of how a lot of agencies tend to work — strategic educators, not just executors of a predefined plan. We are used to meeting clients where they are in terms of product or brand maturity, but what about in terms of their sheer understanding of a given topic… especially one that is causing them a great deal of stress?

I stumbled on AIWriteBook not long ago — a tool that will draft a whole book for you, up to 500 pages… right down to giving you the ePub and cover design. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Honestly, I was spiritually pretty horrified as someone who not just cares about writing, but has gone through the insane pain of writing even a portion of a book.

Even more horrified because I know a lot of people who make their living doing this work.

That said, I really couldn’t help but think about it would have been kind of nice to not have to go through the weeks and months it took to get a book together. Think about how many writers have talked about how much the act of writing sucks — how it is basically an act of self-flagellation to keep going. There’s the famous David Foster Wallace quip: “I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.” Personally, I can admit that I loved the editing a lot more than the writing.

Maybe AI is here to consume creativity… or, maybe it’s here to do something that we really, really don’t enjoy doing. Maybe it’s the first draft of that long email or proposal you didn’t really want to write. Maybe AI does the annoying part and enables you (or a contractor) to focus on the fun part. Maybe!

At this point, when clients ask where they should start implementing AI internally, I tell them to look at the things they like doing the least, and then, from that list, find the things that take up the most time. This keeps AI away from the things you actually like doing, and optimizes for time savings vs. importance.

Related to the above: if you consider yourself an expert at sniffing out AI writing… take this NYT quiz, and see if you don’t tell on yourself a little bit.

I said (blindly) that I preferred AI over Corman McCarthy, so I might just have to go walk into a lake 👋

On a personal note, I’m happy to let you know that my short eBook, You’re On Your Own, is now available on audiobook. I am always excited to hear feedback, so email me anytime. I also have promo codes for anyone who doesn’t have a copy yet.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.

If there’s anything interesting you’ve seen lately that you think other agency operators need to have eyes on, reply and let me know.

It's available today via PDF and Kindle here. It will teach you a huge amount about how to get your own agency up and running, and take about two hours to read.

See, I talk to A LOT of people at the very beginning of their agency journey — or maybe even before the beginning — who are looking for some rapid-fire tips on getting started.

They ask questions like:

How do I decide what my agency does?

How do I stand out?

How do I get my first clients?

How do I charge for my work?

What’s the best way to run projects?

Should I hire employees? If so, who should I hire first?

Am I even capable of running a company?

Maybe I’ve even talked to one of you about these questions. Well, I love talking to these people, and that’s who I wrote this for. I wanted to put all my combined 20 years(!) of experience working through those “day one” problems into one compendium.

Basically, it's the guide I wish I'd had in the early days of Metalab.

I really hope it helps you get started, and if you’re already started, I hope it keeps you going. It costs a small amount. I think it’s worth it.

I’m incredibly proud of this little project. Enjoy. Please share. And if you like it, email me and tell me :)

http://youreonyourown.xyz

We hate our agency’s website and haven’t updated it in years. Please, please, please tell us what to change.

At first, I tried to give practical advice, but I realized quickly that there are so many successful approaches I’ve observed, and that they are successful for so many different reasons that are often in conflict with one another. It’s unfair to pick one approach over another in a vacuum. A successful presence depends so much on your maturity as a company, but also on you as a person, and especially on what will best represent your team.

Anyway, one day along the way, I started a spreadsheet with all my favourite agency websites, and the reason I liked them. Today, I’m sharing the first batch—mainly because these are ones I have specifically referenced lately with clients. I did my best to succinctly capture the basic “theme” of each website, with some added commentary on how you might make it work for you.

Juliet

What’s your philosophy?

When people sit down to write copy for their homepage, they tend to keep the top-level messaging quite focused on the facts. We do blank. Or they play it super safe and pull out the old mission statement template: We are a blank who does blank for blank. Either way, it’s all about the we.

Juliet flips the script here, and leads with a bold, unique statement about their philosophy. Something that skips past the introduction to who they are, and starts bringing you directly into their creative belief system. It’s a nice way to break up the homogeny of agency websites, because it gives you a strong statement that either you can agree with, or disagree with. In this case, it’s a hard sentiment to ignore.

One thing I feel like I have learned from all my time selling agency services is that you usually have one or two lines in sales situations that potential clients really, really connect with. Maybe it’s a part of your process that is unique, or maybe it’s a contrarian point of view you have on how other people do things. These are usually the moments where it feels like you just vaulted forward with your chances of landing the client. If you’re an agency owner, I’m guessing you’ve experienced this too.

I think that’s what Juliet is up to here: the line their clients love to hear gets top billing. Find yours.

Zak

Find a way to do what you want to be hired for

So yeah, this is what you see before you scroll. A hypnotic, mind-bending, highly polished video… that doesn’t show any of their client’s work. It doesn’t have any words. It doesn’t even show “design” work, per se. So why do I love it?

Well, for one, it looks amazing. You can’t not watch it. And, as I’ll show in the next example, it is absolutely overflowing with personality. I think that there is a lot to be said for an agency that demonstrates their technical ability in fun ways, while also subtly nodding that their capabilities for brand expression are next level.

And I can’t say for sure whether this is their intention or not, but I do feel like more agencies should take the time to make things in-house that they’d like to be hired to do. Maybe there weren’t brands knocking at Zak’s door asking them to make stuff like this, but maybe they want to be doing more of it. So yeah, spend a cycle or two and make it.

Fuzzco

Your website is you. You are your website.

Ok, so I used to work here. Of course I’m going to point it out. But I truly believe that any conversation about brand playfulness and personality has to include Fuzzco.

One of the things that always attracted me to Fuzzco was their fully developed voice for their own identity. I think it’s a big part of why they are so successful at what they do: their website is a living demonstration of what a confident brand can do.

From their scrambled wordmark to the carefully placed gifs throughout the website to their goofy side projects like Typeople, they show over and over again that it doesn’t need to be all business to play with the big kids. It’s an observation that I feel uniquely qualified to make, but scrolling and reading through Fuzzco’s website feels very much like the experience of working with them, and knowing the wonderful people on the team. That’s a very hard thing to do, but having a consistent brand experience throughout the whole process of working together — starting with the website — is a huge win.

Ok, enough about companies I’ve worked for. Oh, wait…

Metalab

Occam’s razor for headlines

Ok, a brief story for you about this website, which I had 1000% nothing to do with. But I have something for the lore.

Back in 2011ish, MetaLab (as it was known then) was in a bit of a growth valley, and we brought in the great Blair Enns for a one day strategy workshop to hopefully kickstart some things with us.

One of the first things we did was pull up our website. We all sat there, just staring at it, and suddenly Blair said, “Hey, what happened to that old tagline you had?” We all looked at one another. We then explained that we’d done a big offsite and agreed that the old tagline — “We make interfaces” — was too generic and was basically a placeholder that we had become too comfortable with. We needed something that sounded like… well, like other agencies were doing, and we came up with some impressive sounding junk that was our new h1.

He shook his head, still looking at the screen. “You should change it back. ‘We make interfaces’ is perfect.” I remember looking at our CTO, Jason, and shrugging. We changed it back.

Well, here they are, 13 years later, and the same tagline still prevails. And it’s still great. It’s to the point, direct, and doesn’t mess around with unnecessary cruft about all the things they do. Simple is often best — in three words, you immediately understand what Metalab does. I find it generally true with messaging that the more you ‘massage’ it, the more diffused and unclear it becomes.

In this case, it’s the perfect answer to the dreaded “So what does Metalab do?” question. What may have been a 45-second ramble is simply “We make interfaces”. Like “I’m a plumber”, but for people who sit at a computer all day.

Jane Creative

Sometimes, the first draft is right

This one is a close cousin of the Metalab example.

There was something really important I learned as a copywriter: you can sit down and do your best to write compelling copy about your product or agency or whatever, but usually all you have to do is listen to people. Turn to the person sitting next to you (IRL) and ask what your company actually does, and they’ll probably give you a more genuine answer than the nice sentence you just spent weeks workshopping for your pitch deck.

When I look at the copy on Jane Creative’s site, I get the feeling that they somehow managed to override the urge to do the “something like this but not actually that” edit, and just went with what felt honest and true. Doesn’t that “We make people point, stare, click & buy” line sound like the answer to a distressed founder asking “Guys, what do we actually do here?”, and getting the most smartass quip he ever could have asked for?

Similarly, doesn’t saying you use their tactics to help companies “get super rich” sound like a thing you say when you brainstorm, but end up with something like “transform their brand”?

I think the lesson here is: sometimes the first draft is right. And sometimes the thing you think you can’t say because its unpolished is the thing you actually should say. I like to believe that this captures their attitude correctly, and would delightfully carry over into the process of working with them. And honestly? If I was hiring an agency, that’s what I’d want. A no-bullshit, easy to talk to group.

DEPT

Lead into the unknown

The future is “exciting”, I guess. Young people on the cutting edge have the luxury of having a hope for adaptation, unlike the rest of us middle-age grazers who are just trying to keep up. A huge part of our role these days, no matter what you do, is just trying to stay up to date. The smart people among us know this and accept it as fact.

For Fortune 500 companies and the like, the future is a very triggering concept. It means new challengers, new technologies, broken revenue streams, mass layoffs, and just generally things that challenge the current status quo that happen to be working quite well for them and has for forever.

So when a company like DEPT comes along and presents the future as an infinite set of possibilities — for your customer experience, for technology, and for your own identity — it changes the script quite quickly.

DEPT is another one of those smart agencies that knows leading with exactly what work they did for their clients is not the assignment. They feature big brands on their homepage — some of the biggest in the world — but maintain some mystery around what they do. The work matters, of course, but the important message is that they’re an agency that shepherds big, slow brands into an uncertain future.

It’s not a set of messaging for everyone, but for a company comfortably seeking a higher-end clientele, it’s powerful. There’s a psychological component to this approach that eases fears, rather than cultivating them.

PatientPartners

Start out by dominating

This is one of my favourite agency websites that I’ve been introduced to in the past few months. The specificity of their offering is so smart, and the word dominate is so perfect.

If you know me, you know that I am not much for business books, but one that I have come back to repeatedly over the years is Crossing the Chasm. It’s technically about selling software, but I think the overall thesis is worthwhile to master for anyone selling anything. In a nutshell, they suggest that the key to penetrating any market is to find a beach head. Think Normandy in WW2. Gaining mainstream acceptance (i.e., reclaiming Europe) is hard. What’s easier is focusing on a small target, establishing control, and then moving out to take over adjacent markets.

Put a different way…

By simplifying the initial challenge, the enterprise can efficiently develop a solid base of references, collateral, and internal procedures and documentation by virtue of a restricted set of market variables. The efficiency of the marketing process, at this point, is a function of the boundedness of the market segment being addressed. The more tightly bound it is, the easier it is to create and introduce messages into it, and the faster these messages travel by word of mouth.

So, looking at PatientPartners… If you want to be a prestige marketing agency, great. But prepare for an uphill battle. The better strategy is to look to niche markets you can dominate today, and use those to build your business. Your message can widen later. You don’t need to look further than their headline to understand that you’re in the right place… if you’re a part of their beach head market.

Contrast this with Human, a wonderful and mature agency reaping the luxury of specializing in a lot, and working with early-stage companies and later stage brands alike:

When you have market dominance, this is what you get to do.

Until then, start narrow. The best way to think about it is: How can you present yourself as the only option?

Playground

Start the conversation

If you’re a post-beachhead, mature company, there are still plenty of ways that you can get specific with your messaging. After all, what we all want is that moment in our copy where the buyer reads something and says “Oh, damn. That’s me.” One method that’s tried and true: If you keep hearing the same thing over and over again from your clients, find a way to put that language to work.

Take Playground, and their “I need to” section.

It’s very simple, but to understand this, it’s important to acknowledge why people need the “Oh, damn. That’s me” moment. It’s not a poignant moment of self-identification (exclusively, anyway). It’s the first of many moments of trust building, and an alleviation of doubt and anxiety. They see you’ve done it already, and that it can be done for them, too. Framing it as a first-person statement helps tremendously here, too — it mirrors back the exact problem this individual is facing.

I love stuff like this, because like with Jane earlier, it’s uncomplicated where others might err on the side of being too complicated. Your website really just needs to drive that first conversation. What better way than simply trying to hit the nail on the head with why they’re there in the first place?

That’s all for today. I hope this inspired some ideas for what you can do for your own website.

Seen any exceptional agency websites lately? Leave a comment and let me know.

2013. I was completely drowning. I was at the helm of Metalab’s consulting team and had been doing so for about 5 years. We had grown tremendously during that time, going from $5k to $100k in monthly revenue. The team went from 3 to 40, spread across multiple business entities. We had two floors in a very nice building in a very nice city. It was like a volcano that grew right under our feet.

As for me, in the very, very early days, I was a project manager. In fact, I was the project manager. As our clientele evolved and their needs changed, I added account manager to my role. And all the while, I was also doing sales alongside Andrew, a role neither of us were particularly interested in letting go of at the time (that’s a story for another day).

My job encompassed everything, and to be frank, it was starting to require me to run Metalab like a real business. A bit of a tall order for someone with no prior business experience aside from running a very small copywriting agency for a year.

Right when I was down to my last few gasps of air, I had an unforgettable lunch with someone who very patiently heard all of my gripes, and then said, “Well, you know, you might just not be the right person to run it any more.”

Wow. Gut punch, right? When I voiced my offence, they added the following.

“That’s not a failure on your part. You’re on a rocket ship. You got it here, and that’s amazing. You should be proud. But maybe you’re not the person to get it to the next level.”

I stood up and stormed out of the restaurant, hurling a plate against the wall as I left.

Ok, not actually. But I kind of wanted to. What I heard in that moment was, “Sorry, you’ve had a nice Cinderella run, but you’re just not good at this anymore,” which was my worst fear confirmed. But as I thought more about it over the coming weeks, I realized how completely right they were.

When your company is small (let’s say 5-20 people), chaos can reign—to some degree. You are often working with very tolerant small-to-mid market clients. You typically have a management team who is inexperienced, but eager. Systems and processes are starting to become important, but they aren’t essential yet. Your goal is to keep landing work and keeping people busy and just generally figuring out how to do the thing, and face problems head-on as they fall in front of your face.

But something very distinct changes past a certain plateau (it is not necessarily when you pass the 20 person threshold; in fact, it’s usually earlier, but you fight past it). You realize that your company is something that must be sustainable. You have an office lease and a big payroll. This can’t fail! I can’t let all these people down!

With that in mind, your lens moves from 10 feet down the road to 10 miles. Your next 10 clients, not just your next client. Growing the business from 20 to 50. 50 to 100. You hear other successful people doing things you have heard of before but never tried, like KPIs and quarterly rocks.

Whatever your role is, things must shift out of a purely reactive mentality.

This shift requires a tactician, not just somebody incredibly well equipped to roll with the startup punches (which is indeed its own precious skillset). This tactician is someone who hears your company’s goals, nods with familiarity, and is able to formulate a plan that is rooted in at least some grit and experience. This is the new you.

The hard part — as experienced by me during that tough conversation — is that even when you know in your soul that it’s the truth, it’s deeply unpleasant to hear. It’s very hard to not to feel threatened because of all the things this truth implies — failure, loss of job, loss of status.

But I knew it was true, and I made the decision to relinquish my seat to someone else, who indeed grew Metalab well beyond what I could have (and many more have since that person, each leader doing something the previous one could not).

It was only after ceding control that I realized the opportunity it presented: to focus on the things that I wanted to do, and relieve myself of all the stress I’d been previously feeling. For me, that meant more of a focus on sales and relationships—always the things that had brought me unequivocal joy and accomplishment. And someone else can do the work I was not equipped for: the scaling, the planning, the sweating of the books.

And hey, it’s worth noting that this doesn’t just apply to non-creatives like me. How many of you have elevated an incredibly talented designer or engineer or product manager to a management position, only to realize that their true value was as a contributor, not a manager? Someone who wants to do work, not sit in meetings all day?

I was the right person for awhile, and then very suddenly, I wasn’t. Asking “Are you the right person?” is a hard question to ask of yourself that leads right into a dark night of the soul. It’s equally hard to ask that of someone on your team who shepherded your company to this amazing, unexpected place.

But often, it’s the only way. And I think everyone involved will usually find that the decision is easy.

Is there a topic you’d like to see covered in my newsletter? Leave a comment, message me on LinkedIn, or email me at mark@tamaribuchi.xyz.

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