My Story: How My $38K/Mo Agency Became a Trap

My Story: How My $38K/Mo Agency Became a Trap

The hustle porn culture is an epidemic that is killing our brothers and sisters. I myself have lost close friends due to mental health issues that have come at the result of this dangerous, outdated approach to work. 

However, the good news is that a new decade and new era is upon us, and people are finally waking up to the fact that hustle porn is dead. 

With that, I bring you the story of my first experience with the agency trap:

“Bro, I’m sorry, I can’t afford to pay you and have to let you go bro...” 

I told Shubham, my right hand man who had helped me grow the company from a 1-man freelance business to a global design agency with . 

This was my first experience with the ‘agency trap’. 

I literally could not grow my business without doing more and more work and because of that, my entire business came crashing down, seemingly overnight.

After about two years since quitting my job, I had transitioned from freelancer to agency with a small team, growing our monthly revenues from $10K to $38K per month.

Then I got the wake up call. 

We lost our two biggest agency clients (50% of our business) overnight and our monthly revenue went from nearly 40K monthly to a few thousand dollars in a few months.

We had no prospects in the pipeline, no predictable methods to grow that pipeline, our referrals dried up and we only had a few months of expenses in the bank.

Within a few months I had to let go of my entire team.

Damn yo, that remains one of the hardest things I’ve ever done to this day. I still choke up when I think on it.

However, as usual, the universe was simply blessing me with a lesson. Trust me when I say sh!t like that will wake you up and inspire you to take action.

After I got objective about the situation, instead of being a wreck, I was able to clearly see the harsh reality I refused to admit for so long… 

I didn’t have a business, I had a job.

My business was too reliant on me and because I couldn’t grow without investing more of my own time or resources, I was trapped by the old model philosophy.

While it was painful as hell to go through this process, it was essential to adopt a new philosophy and model for how I operated my work and life.

After a few depressing months, I started my next agency and in two months we had grown from 0 to $17,750 monthly recurring revenue with over $10,000 monthly profit while the business only required a few hours of management time per week.

So what changed? This was the key shift that I made to escape the trap...

The agency that came crashing down relied on manual labor from myself in order to grow. While I had effectively outsourced delivery, growth was entirely on me. Meaning I had to do more and more work in order to earn more and grow. This is the “old agency model” that leaves you trapped.

My next agency, relied on automation using tech and repeatable systems for my team to implement. This resulted in a highly profitable, highly scalable business that allowed me to take weeks off at a time. This is the concept of  the “new agency model”.

Shifting from relying on you to relying on your systems, tech and team is required to make to escape the agency trap and create an agency that provides the profit and lifestyle you truly desire.