I love my journey as a digital marketing agency owner and I love my team and most of my clients. My start and growth as a digital marketing agency owner have really fueled the burning desire for me to continuously learn and improve myself. It has changed my life!

Now, I am living on a sunny island in Thailand. I am managing my fully remote businesses with over 30 people on my team, and it was my agency business that has helped me achieve that.

But It’s not all rainbows and unicorns.

Here, I will go through some of the difficulties I faced and the times I contemplated shutting down my agency. You will also learn why running an agency sucks.

Don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t mean I don’t love what I do. I’m very thankful and fortunate for being able to live where I live and grow as I’ve grown. But there are parts there are things about running an agency that is very difficult. Sometimes, these things have had me thinking about closing everything down and going back to my nine to five.

Disadvantages Of Running A Digital Marketing Agency

Long hours

When you first start your digital marketing agency, there is a lot of work for you to do. There is no such thing as 9-to-5 anymore. You probably will not have any investment and will have limited capital and resources, so you need to do everything on your own.

It’s a different game from working nine to five at a different business office or agency to running your own business or agency. You go from 9 to 5 to 9 to 9. Well, I’m not talking about 12 hours. I’m talking about twenty-four hours.

Moreover, while you work a 9 to 5, you are getting a guaranteed salary and you have that safety net. You are getting a certain amount of money into your bank account than when you are running your own business. When you run an agency, and you don’t close clients and you don’t retain those clients, you’re going to have a hard time earning.

Nightmare Clients

Getting clients for your digital marketing agency is also not easy. You’re bound to run into nightmare clients and there are ways to avoid them. When you’re just starting out, it’s difficult to gauge what leads might turn into nightmares – and even if you could, beggars can’t be choosers. You need to close clients!

Your contracts might not be tight, you might be too much of a giver when you start, and your clients will want everything and then some from you. There may be no pleasing them and even if you think you made all the edits they asked or hit all the milestones they wanted, they will do a 180 on you.

If you know how to figure out who might be a nightmare client when you first start out your agency but you don’t have investment, you don’t have that choice but to close them. Even with that nightmare client, you’ve got to push through. Well, that’s what I did and it really helped me be where I am today.

Welcome to HR Life

As you start to grow, you will need to start hiring more employees. If you’ve been working an office job and you have not experienced being an HR, welcome to the game. It’s extremely difficult to find the right people and if you’re remote, even more, difficult to build out your company culture and workflows. As your digital marketing agency grows, you need to start delegating work. There’s no way you can do everything on your own especially if you’re starting to get more clients.

For me, this was one of my biggest difficulties. I’ve had a terrible time hiring. It’s why I had worked so long and for so many hours. This caused me to even had health problems. Even though I have a team of thirty, it’s still difficult finding the right people for our company and for me.

As somebody that had no experience most likely, you better start learning. If you think you are not good at hiring, make sure to have your checklists and SOPs, and guidelines ready. These are all things that you will hopefully learn along the way, but you can avoid a lot of mistakes by having things prepared.

My Philosophy When It Comes To H.R

Now, when it comes to H.R, scaling, and growing a team, I believe it’s good to hire fast and fire fast. Hiring fast was one of necessity but firing fast is just as important as hiring, in my opinion.

Another thing is for you to keep business a business and keep personal as personal. You have to refrain from having too much emotion when it comes to work and your employees. As for me, I put too much personal investment into every connection and every relationship with our team, and so I let the wrong people stay for too long and gave bonuses all the time.

With that, I realized H.R. is not something I’m good at. And so one of the first things I did as we grew and I learned from other bigger digital marketing agency owners was to put somebody in that position so that I do not screw up my business.

The Hard Work Is Still For Others

You work very hard on your client projects and put your all into them, but when the contract ends, it’s over. Sure, you can get case studies, testimonials, and client logos for your agency to help build legitimacy, brand trust, and to close future clients, but the work you put in has gone to the client. It’s different from building your own product where all the work you invest can compound.

With this, I think about why I am not putting all of that hard work and effort into my own product or into my own brand. That’s actually I am on YouTube.

Why I’m Still Here?

Well, those are some of the things that I thought about and some of the things that made me a little sad while I was working on a lot of client projects. But that being said, would I take it back? Would I change anything?

The answer is, no! I still love building brands. I like helping clients. And I really love to see the performance of the hard work and dedication that I, my team, and all of us have put in for our clients. In fact, part of the fun for me is really performing so that we can build out case studies and things like that to help build up our legitimacy, our brand trust, and close future clients.

I know I am not where I want to be when it comes to being successful. I’m still trying to grow my digital marketing agency and that is what I’m doing today. I am trying to build out all of these case studies and have a whole library of them and continue to build our agency’s legitimacy. That’s a big part for any agency owner or any agency business from the start.

The Key Takeaway

If you’re thinking about opening an agency and you have some doubts, focus on your goal. For me, even with the difficulties that I faced and all the difficult nights that I’ve had, I would not change anything. I still love running an agency.

I got to be honest. Running an agency sucks sometimes, but there are ways to avoid a lot of the problems that I initially faced. However, I think at the core, these four issues do come up with for any agency owner, probably even the bigger ones. Anyway, as I mentioned in the beginning and I mentioned in all of my videos, I am still a struggling entrepreneur. I am still a small business or small agency owner.

Would I change anything? No. I am a proud agency owner and I love what I do. If you understand these difficulties before starting your agency, you may be able to avoid any and all of the problems that I have faced while growing my agency.