Case Studies

These are real pieces of work with real agencies. Some of the founders are still clients, so I’ve kept them anonymous, and a couple of the stories combine more than one engagement to protect who’s involved. The situations, the work and the outcomes are all real.

If one of them sounds like where you are right now, that’s worth a conversation.

FOUNDERS PULLING IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS

Two founders who’d stopped talking

Two founders who built something good together. Still committed, no blow-up, no falling out. But the honest conversations had quietly stopped. Each had a different idea of where the business should go and neither had found a way to say it. So decisions slowed down, and the energy that used to drive the place drained away. Nobody was angry. They’d just gone a bit quiet with each other.

I worked with each of them on their own first, to get clear on what they actually wanted, from the business and for themselves. That’s usually the part that’s never been said out loud. Then I got them in a room together, in one case a pub, and helped them have the conversation they’d been avoiding for a couple of years.

It turned out their goals were closer than either had assumed. What differed was how they wanted to get there. Once that was on the table, we could redraw the roles, sort out who decides what, and give them a cleaner way of working together.

Neither of them left. They found a shared direction again, but with clearer lanes. One took the growth side, the other stepped back from the day to day into the work that suited them better. The business got its momentum back, new services came out of it, and the partnership is still going.

When founders want different things

Two equal shareholders, years in together, now pulling in opposite directions. One wanted to grow hard and sell. The other was happy with a steady business and had no interest in scaling or leaving. That kind of gap doesn’t fix itself. It sits there for months, sometimes years, frustrating both of them and holding the whole business still. And because they were equals, neither felt able to make the first move.

I worked with both of them to get the real picture of what each wanted, and to put a proper value on the business. Then I helped them agree a buyout that reflected that value and let one of them leave with their dignity intact.

The money side matters here, but so does the ending. These are people who built something together. I spent as much time on how the partnership closed as on the numbers, because a deal that leaves one person feeling done over isn’t a good deal, whatever the spreadsheet says.

One founder bought the other out and took full control, with a clear direction for the first time in a while. The other left with a fair deal and moved on well. The tension went, the business started moving again, and a split that could have turned ugly stayed clean.

GROWTH THAT OUTRAN THE FOUNDER

Six-figure losses to a full year in profit

When I came in, this agency was in a hole. Around a million in revenue, twelve people, and losing money in half the months of the year. The losses had run into six figures. A shareholder change had added to the uncertainty, and the founder left holding it was capable but quiet, more comfortable behind the scenes than out front setting direction.

That was the real issue. She could see what needed doing, she just found it hard to consistently communicate it or build momentum in the team. Without a clear rhythm coming from the top, the business had settled into survival mode.

We worked one to one, every week, to shift her out of reactive survival thinking and into leading the place. We set a vision for the business, and I helped her find a way of communicating it that fit her, one that didn’t ask her to act out of character but did ask her to be visible and consistent. Structure, repetition, showing up. Not dramatic, just steady.

It turned. The business went from losing money half the time to profit every single month for a full year, and it’s kept growing. The team is clearer and better aligned, and the founder has grown into the job without having to become someone she isn’t.

Doubled in size without losing the margin

This one had grown to around twenty people and then started to creak. The informal way of running things that had worked in the early years was falling over. People were duplicating each other’s work while other things got neglected. Margin was hovering around ten per cent. They’d outgrown their own systems and it was quietly costing them.

The turning point was leadership. We promoted someone internally into the MD role, and brought real operational discipline into the business, which it had never really had. The critical piece was the management information. The founder couldn’t properly see what was happening inside his own business, and once we fixed that, the decisions got a lot easier.

Since then, revenue and headcount have both more than doubled, and net margin has held consistently above twenty per cent throughout. That’s the part worth pausing on. Growth usually eats margin, because you hire ahead and things get messy. Doubling the business twice over while lifting margin at the same time is hard, and it’s a sign the structure underneath was actually working.

The founder was the ceiling

A profitable agency, around nine full-time people plus roughly the same again in freelancers, and completely capped by the founder’s own bandwidth. He was in everything, drowning in the urgent and neglecting the important. The strategic work, the stuff that actually grows a business, kept getting pushed to a tomorrow that never came. He knew the model wasn’t sustainable but couldn’t see a way out of it.

The way out was building a leadership team that freed him to do the high-value work only he could do. The honest part of this was recognising that we couldn’t get there on internal promotions alone. He needed MD-level experience the business didn’t yet have, so we brought it in from outside. I helped define the role, supported the hire, and coached both the founder and the new MD through the handover, which is the bit that usually goes wrong.

Revenue has since tripled and headcount has doubled. The founder has stepped back into the work where he genuinely adds value, and the business no longer lives or dies on his personal capacity.

A place to think, with nothing held back

A young CEO leading a fast-growing, investor-backed agency, around forty people and heading toward sixty. He had strong instincts and a leadership team he’d built and led himself. The pressure was the one that comes with investment: keep growing, keep the margin, don’t let either slip.

The interesting problem was his team. It was good, but every one of them was an internal hire. Plenty of talent, very little outside perspective. They were all thinking from inside the same box. What he needed was someone from outside it who’d seen how a lot of different agencies handle the same problems.

That’s what I gave him. A weekly rhythm built around voice notes, where he’d talk through the week and we’d use it to go deep on what mattered. I didn’t judge him, so he could air any idea without worrying how it sounded, and my experience across a lot of agencies meant I could challenge him or offer another way of looking at something. But he wanted to find his own answers, so it was never me telling him what to do. As it happens, I think he was a more talented agency leader than I ever was.

He led the business through a successful sale and moved into a senior role in the group that bought it. He scaled it with stability and grew into a genuinely composed leader under real pressure.

(The voice-note approach is something I’ve carried forward since, now with AI added into it.)

DEALS DONE WELL

He could see what to do but couldn’t move

A founder with an agency of around forty people, ready to sell, but stuck. His burnout showed up as inertia. He could see exactly what needed doing to prepare the business, he just couldn’t push through to actually doing it. Knowing the answer and being unable to act on it is its own kind of exhaustion.

Underneath it were two real fears. He didn’t fully trust his leadership team, who were inexperienced and would need coaching through both the preparation and the sale itself. And he was frightened of doing a deal that locked him into a company he hated, watching the business he’d built fail to thrive under someone else. Those aren’t small fears, and most people going into a sale carry a version of them.

Three things helped. First, replacing the phantom scenarios in his head with what might realistically happen, so he could stop reacting to disasters he’d invented. Second, and this sounds small but wasn’t, simply having someone to say “I want to sell” to out loud. He’d been carrying it alone. And third, knowing I was there purely to support him, with nothing to gain from the deal. A sale can feel like everyone in the room is grasping for something. I wasn’t, and he knew it. No broker or corporate finance adviser can offer that, because they’re paid on the outcome.

He faced the fears, did a good deal, and has been able to walk away happy.

Buying the skills they couldn’t build fast enough

An agency of fifteen to twenty people, profitable and stable, that had maxed out its own specialism. They’d spotted adjacent verticals that fitted them well, but were honest with themselves that they didn’t have the experience to compete there by building from scratch. So they decided to buy the skills instead. And they made the call while still strong, before the handbrake on revenue growth started to bite, rather than waiting until it did.

I’ve done deals on the buy side, so my job was to stand beside them through it. That meant helping them work out what kind of company would actually be a good fit in the first place. It meant helping them know when to appoint experts and when to trust their own judgement, so they neither winged the bits that needed a specialist nor over-delegated the calls that were theirs to make. And once the deal was done, it meant helping them communicate the benefits internally.

Then integration became an issue, as it always does. That’s the phase where acquisitions quietly lose their value, because focus drifts once the deal itself is signed. My job there was to keep them honest and keep the attention on it.

It worked. Revenue in the new vertical doubled, including their largest ever client win, so the bet on that space more than paid off. And the integration went well enough that staff moved in both directions between the two businesses, opening up development for people on both sides, and in some cases the chance to work in new countries. An acquisition that grew careers as well as revenue, which is rarer than it should be.