If you feel like the whole agency runs through you, the advice you’ll hear everywhere is to buy back your time. Hire an assistant. Offload the admin. Free yourself up an hour here and there.
I did the opposite. And I’m convinced it’s the reason the business eventually sold.
I want to tell you about an owner I started working with a while back. When we first spoke, he was doing just under £40k a month and completely buried. Every quote, every team question, every sign-off, every problem landed on his desk. He was shattered. The first thing he wanted to talk about was hiring someone to take the small jobs off him.
I told him to park that. Because that hire feels like progress, and it’s the thing that keeps you stuck longer than almost anything else. If that’s you right now, stay with me, because the order you do this in changes everything.
A quick bit of context first. I spent thirteen years building a creative agency from a bedroom in Belfast up to £2.2 million a year, and I sold it in 2020. Since then I’ve worked with over a hundred agency owners around the world, and this is the single most common place they get stuck. The owner is the bottleneck, and they genuinely can’t see the way out.
The trap of buying back your time
I get why everyone reaches for the assistant hire. It’s the advice in every book, and it feels like progress. You hire someone to take an hour of admin off you. Grand. But that hour doesn’t stay free. It fills straight back up with delivery, because delivery is the thing pulling at you all day. You’ve spent the money, and you feel exactly as busy as you did before.
You haven’t changed the shape of your week. You’ve just got one more person to manage, on top of still doing everything that actually matters yourself. It’s tiring, and I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count.
My first hires weren’t assistants
When my agency started to grow, my first proper hires were designers and developers. People who could do the work clients were actually paying for. They were revenue generators.
It felt risky at the time, of course it did. It’s a bigger wage, and now the pressure was on me to keep them busy. But that pressure was the whole point. It forced my job to change.
Once I had people who could deliver, my day couldn’t be about delivery any more. It had to be about filling their diaries. Winning the work. Keeping the pipeline full enough to pay for the capacity I’d just built. It also became about giving the team the systems and processes to deliver to my standard or better, without me being the bottleneck.
The ninety-ten flip
In coaching I call this the ninety-ten flip. When you run an agency you tend to spend something like ninety percent of your time in delivery and about ten percent on everything else. The move is to flip that round. Ninety percent on sales, marketing, operations and the work only you can do, and ten percent in the delivery of the work you actually love.
I’m not telling you that happens overnight, and it’s not a number you hit exactly. If you go from ninety-ten to sixty-forty over a few months, you’re winning. The direction is what matters. Build the capacity, then become the person who feeds it. That’s what got me out of the day-to-day. Not offloading my small jobs. Building a team that made money, and turning myself into the engine that kept them fed.
The director’s hourly rate test
So how do you decide what to actually hand over, and in what order? You can’t drop everything at once, and you’ll send yourself round the bend trying.
I use my director’s hourly rate test. Work out what you effectively earn an hour as the owner of the business. Or take what you want the business to pay you, divide it down, and get to a rough number per hour.
Now look at your actual week. Look at what’s filling your day. If you’re a director sat doing the bookkeeping, or formatting proposals, or chasing invoices, you’re paying director money for a fifteen pound an hour job. The clue is in the job title. Manage and direct. That’s the role.
Every task in your week that somebody cheaper could do goes on your delegation list. And you do them in order, most expensive use of your time first. That’s the ladder you follow. That’s what comes off your plate, in sequence, as you build the capacity to absorb it.
The five times rule
Before you tell me you can’t afford the hire, let me give you the other number I use. A good hire should generate around five times their cost. If someone costs you £40k all in, they should be capable of driving £200k of value or revenue through the business. If they can, that hire more than pays for itself. It buys your time back properly, instead of an hour at a time.
There’s training time needed, and maybe a false start or two. But a year from now, when your clients are getting work delivered without you sitting at your desk until 11 or 12 at night, that cost will be worth it.
What the other side looks like
A lot of owners have never actually let themselves picture the other side of this.
Remember that owner from the start? Fast forward a year. He’s hired a designer and a studio manager. He’s never been happier. The team are clearing the decks. He’s been able to go away for two weeks and not come back to a pile of things nobody would touch. His team make decisions without waiting for him, because they have the skill and the authority to do so. The business is scaling.
For me, free looked like a week that was mostly selling and thinking. Talking to clients and helping them with the next stage of work. Working on the next twelve months instead of the next twelve hours. The bit of the job only the owner can do, and the bit I actually enjoyed.
The order that actually works
Here’s where people get it backwards. They think they’ll get free by removing themselves a task at a time, slowly handing bits out until there’s nothing left. It doesn’t work like that, because the work just refills the gap as fast as you empty it.
You have to be intentional. You get free by building capacity that’s bigger than you, and then changing your own role to feed it and lead it. The freedom is a by-product of the capacity you build. That’s the order it happens in, every single time.
The reason my agency was worth buying when I sold it was that it didn’t depend on me to run. That engine, the team that delivered and the pipeline that fed them, that’s what a buyer pays for. A business that needs the founder in the room every single day is a hard sell, because what you’ve really built there is a job you can’t leave.
So let me say the order out loud, because it really is the whole thing. Build your delivery capacity first. Then move yourself into sales and leading the business. Then delegate down your list, the most expensive use of your time first. Get that order wrong, start by offloading your small jobs, and you stay exactly where you are.
What to do this week
First, run the director’s hourly rate test. Work out your number, look at your week honestly, and write the list of everything you’re doing that someone cheaper could do. That’s your delegation list, in priority order.
Second, ask yourself what your next hire should actually be. If you’re the constraint on delivery, your next hire is someone who can deliver, so your time can move to sales. If sales is the gap, it’s someone who frees you up or helps you to sell. Either way, that hire is there to change the shape of your week, not to nibble an hour off the edges of it.
Third, the moment you start to free up time, protect it. Block it out for sales and for working on the business, and guard it. If you leave it open, it’ll just refill with delivery, and you’ll be right back where you started.
If you want to know exactly where you’re the bottleneck in your own business, I built a free tool that shows you. It’s my Agency Valuation Scorecard. It takes two minutes, and it scores you on owner independence and seven other areas, so you can see in black and white where the business leans on you too much. You can run it at moveatpace.com/agency-valuation.