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F2F #9: Sell out or die out

A lot of entrepreneurs realise too late that they don't love running businesses.

F2F #9: Sell out or die out
Photo by lucas Favre / Unsplash

In the last 24 months, most of our competitors have disappeared.

The pandemic, and its rippling effects, have completely obliterated the landscape of boutique agencies. A lot of them hired too much during the crazy growth of 2020 and 2021 and they couldn't keep the growth going when it all went down the shitter in the summer of 2022.

Others, they were reliant on some kind of big dependency like a specific market, a specific big client or a trend that never materialised and they ran out of business. Some just had a big fight between founders and parted ways.

Whatever the cause, I have found a common denominator in all of the companies I have talked to: they didn't love doing business.

Boutique agencies usually are founded by a group of people with high love for what they do and a lot of expertise in their specific field. That's big part of why they decide to create their own business: now I'm going to do it on my terms and earn more money.

You start with your partners and start raking in money from the clients that know you well. If you do a good job, projects keep popping up through recommendation, inbound marketing or because you have a prominent face everybody knows.

As you grow, you start hiring people, and slowly you start drifting away from your craft. Instead of managing projects, you manage people. You manage budgets, contracts, reports, hiring processes and emergencies, but you know that the time you spend working on the projects is time you don't use to generate new leads for your sales pipeline. In doing so, the quality of your outcome dilutes, but it's a trade-off we all soon or later have to face, and it's a great sign: it shows that you're growing.

And here comes the breaking point: everyone I talked to, they missed working on their craft and they eventually either hired an external CEO or went back to coding assuming projects would keep coming on their own. But they didn't.

The music stopped and it was too late for most of them. Some shut down, some sold their company (most of them for pennies in disguised acquihires).

Why didn't it affect me or MarsBased? We love doing business.

Of course we'd rather go back to coding and designing, and being hands-on on the projects, but we know our time isn't best spent there. Working on the craft is in and of itself a huge opportunity cost we can't afford to pay.

We prioritise to keep the business going so we can continue working the way we love in the short-, mid- and long-term. We enjoy the sales process, the negotiation, the contracts, procurements, hiring and so on.

In short: if you don't love all aspects of running a business, you might only survive in fair weather. You cannot work on the business and on the craft at the same time.

If you really want to work only and exclusively on your craft, stay small and/or become a contractor, but you can't build a business if you don't love building businesses.

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