Building the Machine I'm Inside

Happy Sunday.

I've been thinking a lot this week about a question that sounds simple but isn't: am I building a business, or am I building a job that happens to have employees?

That's not a philosophical exercise. It came up because I spent the last two weeks restructuring the entire agency into three pods. Different account ownership, clearer lanes, less of everything running through me.

On paper it looks clean. In practice I'm still the one putting out fires.

The Restructure

Here's what actually happened. I took our client roster, split it across three pods, and gave each one a lead. The idea is that clients talk to their pod, not to me.

Strategy, execution, communication, all of it lives inside the pod. I also started ramping one of my team members on a two-month sprint to take over the client-facing work I've been holding onto. End of May is the target.

After that, I told the team I'm shifting my time toward marketing and sales. Building the pipeline instead of servicing it.

When I said it out loud to the team it felt real. Like we were actually turning a corner.

Then I went back to my desk and ran three audits.

The Honest Part

The highest-leverage work in the agency still runs through me. Audits, sales calls, strategy. I'm the one on the Loom walking prospects through their Klaviyo account.

I'm the one catching deliverability issues before they become client fires. I'm the one who knows why we'd recommend one flow architecture over another.

That's not a flex. That's the bottleneck.

I started building automation this week to speed up audit generation. If I can get the repetitive analysis handled by a system, I can focus on the judgment calls and free up hours I don't currently have. But even that work takes time I'm borrowing from somewhere else.

Running and Building

There's this tension that nobody really talks about at this stage. You're not big enough to have a COO or a department head who owns operations. But you're too big to do everything yourself without dropping things.

So you're building the machine and running the machine at the same time. Some weeks it feels like you're doing both badly.

This was one of those weeks. Pod reorganization, deliverability fires, automation that broke, a client escalation that needed a real conversation. And underneath all of it, the nagging question of whether the sprint will actually work or whether I'll get to June and find myself right back in the middle of everything.

What I'm Betting On

I don't have a clean answer. I'm betting that if I invest these two months into building the right systems and getting my team to the point where they can run accounts without me in the room, I'll come out the other side with a business that doesn't need me in every meeting.

That's the bet. I won't know if it worked until it's over.

The thing I keep reminding myself is that the discomfort isn't a sign something is wrong. It's what it feels like to go from doing the work to designing how the work gets done.

Those are two completely different skills and I'm learning the second one in real time. Either way, I'll let you know how it goes.

If you're in a similar spot, building the plane while flying it, I'd genuinely love to hear how you're thinking about it. Just hit reply.

Enjoy your Sunday.

- Raymond