I Chased Freedom... But Built Another Job

I left my job to build a marketing agency, chasing the freedom that entrepreneurship promised. Eighteen months later, I realised I’d built another job, one that was more stressful, harder to switch off from, and left me completely burnt out.

In this episode, I share the honest story of why I decided to walk away from my business, what running an agency was really like behind the scenes, and what I learned about freedom, work, and success. If you’re building a business, thinking about entrepreneurship, or questioning your career path, I hope my experience gives you a different perspective.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright guys, hope you are doing well. So in this video, I'm just gonna talk about why I've decided to walk away from my business and I'm just gonna be transparent about why. So 18 months ago, I thought I had it all figured out. I was working at a marketing agency. I was I'd been a paid ads manager at marketing different marketing agency, three different marketing agencies over the span of like six years, um, doing lead generation, funnels, e-commerce, and it was a great place to build experience. Um, but eventually I always knew I wanted to work for myself, so I started reaching out to people on the side offering to manage their ads. A few clients said yes, and at the same time I was living in the UK at that point, and I'd spend my weekends playing guitar in bars. Music has always been a massive part of my life. I've played guitar since I was like 14 years old, and uh those gigs helped me pay the bills whilst I figured everything out, and eventually I looked at my situation and thought, you know, it's now or never. I didn't have kids, didn't have a mortgage, so if there was ever a time to take a risk, it was it was now. So I quit my job, I went all in, I gigged on weekends, I had three marketing clients at that time as well, um, which I'd accrue just from doing doing outreach. Um I was doing cold calls, DM outreach every day. I was making content, I hired a VA to help me with prospecting. Slowly but surely, clients started coming in. It was an absolute grind, but slowly it started working. For a while, it felt like things were moving in a positive direction. I had some um I changed tact of niche a few times. I started off working with landscapers, and then one of my clients who was a coach who worked with other coaches kept referring me coaches. So naturally, I leaned into that niche because the uh common advice in the business space is to pick a narrow niche, so I decided my niche was high-ticket coaches. So looking back, I think that might have been the wrong decision, choosing to work with coaches because the referrals are great, of course. Like I was getting referrals through this client of mine, but the retention wasn't great. Most clients stayed around three months before leaving through no fault of my own, purely down to cash flow issues on their part. My churn was high, so every month felt like I was replacing the clients I just lost instead of actually growing. So for 18 months, I managed to survive, but I never really reached that escape velocity, and the business depended entirely on me. I wasn't building a company, I was building myself another job, and unlike the job I'd left, this one followed me everywhere. At least with my job before, um I was able to take weekends, I was able to switch off at five o'clock and just focus on my hobbies. With this, it was every day, all-consuming. Uh, I was always working, constant pressure to find the next clients before the current one disappeared, and the clients who were I was working with would always, you know, I'd always wake up to a string of WhatsApp messages asking for updates, you know, I was putting out fires. Uh, this is the reality of running a marketing agency. It is pretty pretty intense. And uh even when I wasn't working, I was thinking about work, I found it really hard to switch off. At the beginning of this year, in January, I made a decision to move to Brazil and do spend six months there, and I carried on running the agency from there, hoping that the change of scenery would help my just help my business. Because in the UK, although you know I was I was making money, it was okay, but like I just was not happy in the small town that I was living in in the UK. I wanted um, yeah, I wanted to I've always wanted to go to Brazil, so I went to Brazil, and then in May, uh everything started unraveling. My Google Ads account was hacked, someone actually gained access into my account, uh, started spending money across all my client accounts. It was a nightmare to deal with, to get back the access, to get luckily we got the lost spend reimbursed, but and then I had I lost four clients in the space of a month. Whether it was directly because of that incident or simply bad timing, I don't know. But um the clients decided that they weren't getting um a return on investment essentially, so they decided to leave. Um so just like that, my income dropped off a cliff, and for the first time I had to ask myself a difficult question: Do I rebuild? Do I and I started questioning, do I want to be an agency owner anymore? Like, is this actually the life which I want to build? And I realized that it was actually making me super stressed and unhappy. I was considering, do I pick another niche? Do I do I just get back on the cold calls every day again and try and sign some people in like local businesses, or do I admit that I actually don't want to keep doing this? And the truth is, you know, it's quite disheartening when you put your all into everything and then it doesn't work out, and I started becoming a bit demotivated and just a bit disillusioned by the whole by the whole thing, and I started losing my passion for it. When I first got into paid ads and marketing, I I still love marketing, I still have a love for creativity, making the ads, the psychology behind the messaging and testing different landing pages and copy and ad variations. And eventually, though, I realized that I was spending most of my life behind ads manager and I was working alone. I was talking to Facebook pixels instead of people, um, and I really missed human interaction. I missed I missed structure, to be honest. I missed actually being able to switch off and have a and have a weekend. And that there's a you know, like there's a thing online, a lot of people say online uh that they demonize the nine to five, they demonise jobs, employment, and you know, on entrepreneurship is the only way. I don't think it's true anymore. Like I think for some people it is the case, some people are really incapable of working for someone else, and I thought I was one of those people. Um I've worked a lot of jobs over the years, and some I was happy I was happier in than others, but ultimately, when you work for yourself, you work for your clients, so you still have a boss, essentially. Um, you know, the course is plenty of terrible jobs. I've had some rubbish jobs over the years, but that there are also careers where you can be surrounded by people, awesome people, learning, progressing, earning more over time, and not carrying the entire weight of a business on your shoulders. You know, running your own thing, it sounds freeing, but really a business only gives you freedom when you can really when the business operates without you working in it. So if you can build a business which you've used, like like for example, a software business, right? If you get a soft, if you grow a software, like a monthly membership subscription, the software is the service, so you're not actually having to manually trade time for money anymore. When you're trading time for money and the clients are always messaging you problems, then it's not freeing, it actually is a trap, it's another job, it's a job which you can't get away from as well, you can't take a holiday from until you can reach the point where you can hire a manager to then step away from it. So it running your business sounds freeing, and and that was actually the reason why I I I wanted to do it. I wanted location independence, which which it granted me, it did. Uh, I wanted to earn good money, which some months it did, but some months I made less um at my agency than I did working a job. Um the reality is you are responsible for every decision, you have to manage every minute of your time well. Every client, you have to chase invoices, um, you have to deal with every problem, put out fires on a Sunday. Sometimes you don't just do the work, like you essentially are the business. Unless you've been through running a business, uh, it's literally hard to explain how mentally exhausting that that can become. And I hit a point last month where I just hit burnout, and I was just like extremely unmotivated to do anything. Um, so I made the decision to to walk away from from running the agency, from offering this as a service anymore. It kind of happened organically over the last few months, you know. I lost the majority of my clients, and I've made the decision I'm not gonna rebuild it. And it's not because I don't want to be an entrepreneur anymore. In fact, I'm sure like I I do plan on uh starting other ventures, but this model, the agency model, um, somewhere along the way, I realized I was building a life that I actually didn't enjoy living. So this year I've made I'm making a decision to pursue things that I genuinely am passionate about that gives me energy. Um, playing guitar, making content. I love making these videos, working out, training jujitsu, meeting people, socializing, building social skills and travel, more travel, and building something that actually excites me. Um I've been working on some app ideas recently, and I'm finding that quite interesting. Will it work? I honestly have no idea, but I'm not honestly just pursuing my passions and my curiosity. Right now I'm writing this from Paraguay, and I honestly don't know what then what what that even the next month holds for me. Uh part of me is considering moving back to the UK, part of me is thinking about uh getting into sales and becoming a closer. You know, it'd let me use the skills I've developed over the last year, a few years building my own business whilst giving me more stability, the ability to earn commission, and more importantly, actually more interaction with people, which is what I realised I actually I actually want. So I'm fine with not having a a five-year plan for this for the first time in a long time. I don't have a five-year plan, and uh for a while I thought that uncertainty meant that I was falling behind, and now I think it might just mean that I'm being honest with myself, and this has only come through experience, you know. Like you can think you want something, but then you try it and you actually live it, and sometimes the reality is not really what you expected. So maybe this chapter was about discovering the kind of life that I actually want to build, so we'll see how it goes. If you're going through like a similar thing, just uh comment below. I'd like to hear from you. Uh, subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you on the next one. Peace out.