Burnout IS just a symptom. And I know this to my core.
I spent the first part of my career inside agencies holding many of the different roles. Designer, AM, AE, sales, ops, founder, partner, etc. And there’s a pattern present across each one, and it’s this:
We treat burnout like the problem. So we take the vacation, the time off, the PTO, set the boundaries, talk about self-care and protecting our energy. And then afterward, we go back to work.
And burn out again. Because burnout isn’t the problem.
It shows up when something structural in your business is broken and nobody has fixed it yet.
My version of this looks like…
Burned out three times.
Laid off three times.
Worked with good people, and not-so-good people
Had the weird boss.
Been the boss.
Guess what? All of this (and I mean allllll) comes back to communication (surprise!).
Because we don’t always have the language to communicate what’s wrong to our team, and our team doesn’t have the language to talk to the leadership.
Finding that shared language so that teams can say “hey, we see a problem” and the leadership can actually hear it, and vice versa, is imperative to the success and growth of agencies.
What does that look like in the day-to-day?
Find that shared language. I like to use the 5 Ps (pricing, positioning, pipeline, process and people). It gets easier to pinpoint what’s wrong if you can tie things back to these areas.
For example - team feeling burned out and overworked? Maybe your pricing is off - you’re pricing too low, the team doesn’t have the bandwidth to do good work, etc. They can come to the owner and say “hey, I don’t think this was scoped correctly b/c we don’t have room to do great work” and the owner/leadership can start to make some changes at the business level. And so on and so on.
It gets easier, and it also helps to have an outside perspective (someone like me!).
👋 I’m Clint. I help your right-hand person step into confident decision-making, freeing up space for you to focus on your agency.👋 I’m Clint. I help your right-hand person step into confident decision-making, freeing up space for you to focus on your agency.
Work with me!