Following on from the DFTL origin story
I wanted to talk about something I hear all the time that friends, family and clients are searching for but that’s hard to find and sustain:
Work-life balance
After burning out in 2018 and taking a lot of time to reflect on my career and what I wanted – and more so – what my body and mind needed, I realised that my number one metric for personal success needed to be work-life balance
And it was scary because I was brought up with the mindset of grinding, being tough and resilient, to keep going and going and pushing and pushing
But I had to look in the mirror and realise that wasn’t serving me.
It was effectively time for some tough love with the man in the mirror. Life re-design to create time and space while doing what I love and what I’m good at.
Knowing how many agencies – my new clients from 5 years ago – were also facing over-burn, scope creep, low margin and low-love work with clients, I dived really deep into creating programs that taught agencies how to craft and manage scopes of work – programs and products – that broke free of tracking and reporting hours, focusing on deliverables and results that answered client needs: creating mutual value without being paid for how long everyone estimated the work would take, but what they do and its impact on the client’s business
Now I only work on fixed fees based on agreed deliverables, sometimes with bonuses for performance. There are commercial principles and guardrails around what I do, and what I don’t do, in any job.
I try to be clear about what I’ll deliver, and in doing so, part of what I teach clients comes through simply in how I set out my own proposals:
3 options with 3 price-points, based on discovery discussions with clients… choose which one you want, or negotiate a hybrid that fits you better.
As Caroline Johnson said recently: ‘As a creative agency, you have to be commercially principled on behalf of your client.’
When your only pricing option is based on roles and rates, aiming for retainers which don’t link to outcomes, you leave the door open to be pushed around because of sub-par scope of works that accidently incentive and target time spent over solving business problems.
If you want to scale your agency profitably, and achieve work-life balance, you need a tight scope of work, you have to be firm (from the deal-making phase onwards) on deliverables, and then you might just achieve scope creep and your talent burning out.
You have to be unafraid to say ‘that’s not in our deliverables.’ In doing so you move from being a servant, a supplier, to respected and strategic consultant.
I’d be lying if i said my scopes of work always achieve the above. I recently missed a couple of important points in a scope which led to a crossed wire on deliverables.
But from this tough moment of mutual frustration with a client, has come an important learning about continuing to improve how I communicate and land my work and what I’ll deliver, on a relatively new program I put together in 2024 and delivered to several clients now. The upside being it won’t happen again, and that I learned even more about my niche and what (and how) I teach, deepening my expertise through a difficult moment.
For agency leaders who are serious about learning more progressive ways to craft deliverables based on value instead of time, the upside is you might just save your team and your client a lot of sleepless nights.
You can’t be afraid of messing it up. Change isn’t easy. But on the other side of change is life and the work that you really want. And I’m here for it.
