Why Your Agency Goal Isn’t Making You Happy (And What to Chase Instead)

I once made up a goal to keep my coach happy.

This was back when I ran my own agency. Peak Simon Sinek era. My coach had clearly read the book, because the first thing he asked me was: what's your purpose? What's your why?

I told him the truth. I wanted my own agency. I wanted to make the decisions. I wanted the freedom.

Not enough, apparently. The business needed a why. He pushed, really pushed, and between us we manufactured something I didn't believe for a second.

Then came the goal. And that's where a lot of agency owners are quietly stuck.

The goal that was really homework

I didn't have a goal. I said so.

He pushed again. We got there in the end, wrote it down, and it looked perfectly respectable on the page. It just never felt like mine. It felt like something I'd produced so the session could move on.

Every book was singing from the same sheet back then. BHAG. Vision. Ten year target. Pick the mountain, then climb it.

And look, if you've got that mountain and it genuinely lights you up, brilliant. Go. A strategic endpoint you actually want is one of the most valuable things an agency owner can own.

Mine wasn't that. Mine was homework I'd done to get a tick.

Eight years I didn't much enjoy

Here's the part I'd want you to sit with.

The first three years of the agency were great. Every hire was new. Every sale was new. Every decision was new. A dopamine hit a week.

Then the honeymoon ended. And I spent the next eight years not enjoying it much at all. The goal was written down the whole time. It changed nothing.

Roughly a third of the founders we work with are sitting in exactly this spot right now. Not failing. Not in crisis. Just flat.

And the apathy doesn't quietly sort itself out.

You can grow the business. Shrink it. Buy another one. None of those levers make you fall back in love with running a service business.

When it doesn't lift, it hardens. You take a little longer to return the sales call. The deck goes out at 80%. You're shorter with the team than you'd like to be.

Then the business wobbles around you, and it's far easier to blame the market, the client, the hire, than to look at your own substance.

It was never the goal

I only worked out what had actually been wrong years later. And it wasn't the missing goal.

It was that nobody, me included, had ever checked whether I liked the work.

Ikigai gets this about right. Four circles: what you love, what you're good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. Get all four overlapping and something settles.

I've got all four now. I read about this stuff for fun. I listen to the podcasts on the way to things I've chosen to go to.

When I ran the agency, I dreaded going to events with clients. I never felt like one of them. I go to agency events now and I feel part of the tribe.

I hope I never retire. I'd happily still be walking into board meetings at 75, because it doesn't feel like a job.

And the goal? The goal doesn't matter to me any more. I'm more content with those four boxes ticked than I ever was when I thought I was supposed to be chasing something enormous.

Start at the wrong end on purpose

So here's the flip.

We're told to start with the goal and work backwards. Decide the mountain, then reverse-engineer the climb.

For a founder who's lost the love, that's the wrong order. The goal on the wall won't rescue you. It'll just sit there looking respectable while you get quietly more fed up beneath it.

Start at the other end instead.

Work out which parts of the week you'd do for free. The parts where you lose track of time. The bit of the job that, if you're honest, is the reason you started this in the first place.

Then build more of the week around those, and hand off, systemise or kill as much of the rest as you can bear to.

That's not soft. It's the most practical thing an apathetic owner can do, because an owner who likes their week makes better decisions in it.

A harder question than "what's your goal?"

Most coaching starts with ambition. What do you want, where are you going, how big.

The more useful question, if you're in the flat middle years, is smaller and more uncomfortable.

Which parts of last week would you have happily done for nothing?

If you can't answer that quickly, no ten year target is going to fix it. That's the conversation worth having, and it's the sort of thing we spend our time on with agency owners over at gyda.co.

The goal can wait.

Or tell me I'm wrong. I'd genuinely like to hear it.