Getting Off the Treadmill

The Unforget Yourself Show is about the honest side of building a business. On my episode with Mark Adams, I shared the part of my story I don't dress up: running a Google Ads agency for years until I hit near-burnout and had to rebuild.

What pulled me out wasn't working harder. It was letting go of the idea that everything had to run through me.

When doing it all stops working

For a long stretch I was the business. Every client, every problem, every late night landed on me. It felt responsible. It was a trap. A business where you're the bottleneck can only grow as far as your own energy, and that runs out.

Near-burnout forced the lesson. I rebuilt around pricing, process, and client fit, and I stopped treating my own effort as the only lever I had.

Hand work off before you're ready

The move that got my time back was simple: give work away sooner than felt comfortable. Don't wait for a perfect system. Record a rough Loom of how you do something and hand it over.

Bucket your tasks, find the one that drains you most, and hire against that first. Rough and delegated beats perfect and stuck on your plate. For more on that rebuild, here's a piece on rebuilding a team without the back-office blues.