“I Lost My Place In My Own Company”
• As your agency’s path changes, there’s a chance your role within it can change too…
• …but how do you find your place when everything is moving along nicely without you?
• In this session, Andy Blason from JBH shares his experience of being ‘bored out’ of his own company for years, and how he got himself back on track as a boss.
“I wasn’t burned out; I was bored out of my own company. I didn’t know my place, and I didn’t know what I was bringing in…”
When the tech side of his agency started to suffer, Andy Blason began to lose his way.
“Before, I was often the one bringing in the ‘big ticket’ invoices, and it felt good,” he says. “But then my team started to let me down, and it left me feeling quite jaded towards people.”
It all kicked off when they had a big project for a recruitment company in London.
“Towards the end of the project, our developer quit the company to set up a business similar to ours – which I’d caught him doing on our time,” Andy says.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, JBH then got sued.
“There and then really my love for websites and tech just faded,” he says. “When it came to going out there and pitching for other projects, I didn’t really want to do it. I’d lost that motivation to go out and really sell what I do.”
A decision was made to close the web side of JBH, streamline the agency’s service offering, and move up north.
And although niching the company offered Andy some relief, it also left him with a big question hanging over his head: what do I do now?
“I went into one of those weird cycles of, ‘This is fine, I can cope’. Nobody on the outside knew what was going on,’ he admits.
“I spent the whole time under immense pressure. Every morning I’d wake up every morning, be sick, go to work, put a brave face on, come back and then just drink until I passed out.”
One day, a conversation with one of his co-founders forced a change in mindset.
“I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, and I said to Aran, ‘Well, I just do what you guys tell me to do’,” Andy admits.
“He told me, ‘No, mate, you make your own way in this world. You decide what you want to do. No one else does.”
Join us to hear how Andy got his career path back on track, and why the past six months have been the most cathartic in his entire working career.