“I didn’t start this business to feel like this”

Running an agency is supposed to be fulfilling. Creative. Even fun! But what happens when your team feels stuck… your energy is gone… and the business you’ve built no longer seems to serve you?

You’re not alone…

Transform is a special one-off event that creates a space for agency leaders to talk openly – about making redundancies, restructuring teams, and reshaping a business when it stops working. You’ll learn from founders who’ve done – or who are doing – just that. Those who have carried the emotional weight, and who’ve come through it stronger.

You built a business that doesn’t serve you anymore.

This might be the most common, most painful truth we’ll explore together.

“Somewhere along the way, the business drifted into something I no longer recognised. And I realised, I have the right to change my mind,” recalls one agency leader.

So many agency founders build businesses around who they were five or ten years ago. And then one day, they wake up and realise… this isn’t it anymore.

At Transform, you’ll meet people who understand that’s not failure. It’s evolution.

When you’re so close to the team it feels horrific.

“We’ve run the business for 20 years and never made anyone redundant. So to be in this position now – it’s devastating. Especially when you’re close to the team. It feels horrific.”

Agency leaders don’t talk enough about the mental load of leading through change – particularly if you’re a solo founder. The guilt. The second-guessing. The loneliness of being the one who has to make the hard calls and deliver bad news.

“I like being liked. I don’t want to upset people. But I knew if I didn’t make the change, I’d resent myself – and them – for not doing it.”

At Transform, you’ll hear intimately from other agency founders who’ve carried this weight – and learn how they processed it, communicated it, and moved through it.

It’s not always about cutting costs. It’s about unlocking growth.

Many assume that redundancies are about cost-cutting. And sometimes they are. But just as often, it’s about creating space to build something better.

“Sometimes you look around and think, ‘If I was building this business from scratch, would I hire the same people into the same roles?’,” says one agency leader.

Another explains: “We weren’t losing money. But we’d lost our momentum. The team had got comfortable – and so had I. We were falling into repetitive patterns, and I realised the only way to break free and move forward was to reset the whole thing.”

The conversations at Transform “pull back the curtain” into the courage it takes to reshape and rebuild – a courage that may prove invaluable in your own journey as an agency leader.

“We put it off for as long as we could”

It’s a story we hear again and again: agency leaders who’ve spent months – even years – delaying hard decisions.

It’s not because you’re naive or slow: it’s because you care. Agency leaders tend to be loyal and want to protect people. And sometimes, you just keep hoping that one more good quarter will turn everything around.

“For the last 12 months, we’ve been putting off making hard decisions… hoping the tide would turn. You want to be a good person first – and leave the hard calls until it gets critical. But eventually, you run out of road,” says one agency MD.

But when revenue slips and confidence falls, when contracts get pulled and clients go quiet – you reach the point where waiting becomes the greater risk.

“We only need a couple of big projects to land and things would turn quickly. But we can’t build a business on maybes. We’ve had to start making decisions we’d hoped to avoid.”

At Transform, you’ll be among peers who understand the instinct to protect and the pain of finally having to make those hard calls.