Let me be honest with you...
For the longest time, I thought "hustle culture" was the answer.
Work harder. Put in more hours. Be the hero who handles everything.
I was proud of being the guy who never said no, who stayed up until 2AM fixing client problems, who made myself available 24/7.
But slowly, I started to realize something was wrong.
I was missing out on life. The people I cared about were getting the scraps of my time and energy.
And the worst part is that my agency wasn't even growing proportionally to the hours I was putting in...
I was working 70+ hour weeks to maintain what I had, not to build something bigger.
That's when it hit me: I wasn't building a business - I was building a job that owned me.
So I made a decision that changed everything:
Instead of working harder, I'd work backwards.
I reverse-engineered what a successful agency that could run without the owner being a bottleneck would look like, then built the exact systems to make it happen.