113 Bite-Sized Agency Growth Lessons for Busy Founders
Welcome to Peaceful Growth, where you will find actionable tips to grow your agency to $10M (without working overtime).
Over the years of running my own web agency, I’ve picked up some solid lessons and wisdom as founder—drawn from person experiences, from books and podcasts, and from conversations with other founders and experts.
This is my running list. It’s organized into key areas like Strategy, Decision-Making, Sales, Marketing, People, and Finance.
No fluff. Just lessons that hit hard, worked for me, or stuck with me.
Whether you're building something new or navigating the challenges of growth, I hope these lessons resonate and spark ideas for your own founder journey.
Let’s dive in!
Strategy
1: Anyone who says customers are #1 has lost their mind! Employees are #1. Employees are the source of all value creation.
2: Agency is 90% efficiency, 10% innovation business. Be a ruthless optimizer.
3: Unfortunately, growth and control work inversely. The more growth you desire, the less control you can have (and vice versa).
4: It’s important to know if your product is painkiller or vitamin. They both have different sale cycle, and strategy. Try to build more painkiller products.
5: Don’t hide behind the BIG shiny goals. Focus on simple, small and consistent improvements.
6: As founder, you need to find ways (aka purpose) to stay hungry even when you are full.
7: The price of entrepreneurial success is DISCIPLINE.
8: Old problems compound. Unresolved operational issues grow over time and become more costly—don't ignore them.
9: New products MUST be based on the current demand and not future growth.
10: You can do anything but you can’t do EVERYTHING.
11: Every business has chaos, confusion, and conflicts. No business is perfect.
12: When you keep delaying an important action, ask yourself: Is it a lack of courage or a lack of information?
13: Think from the Mind, Act from the Heart. Don't hesitate to make tough decisions but execute them with empathy.
14: Excellent Efforts > Perfect Results.
15: The biggest enemy of your agency growth is your own limiting-beliefs.
16: Act first and think later when starting something small; Think first and act later when scaling something big.
17: Don’t punish 95% of good people in your company because of 5% bad people.
18: Don’t try to fix something that’s not broken.
19: We are not afraid of failure; we are afraid of others’ judgment on our failure.
20: Be a proud copycat: If you copy the right people or right business ideas , you will be off to a great start in life.
21: Don't ignore boring, undervalued, un-sexy, but highly profitable ideas (with lots of upsides).
22: Pricing is one of the most powerful (and underrated) growth levers in business.
23: The successful people we admire are not the ones who made it. We admire the ones who kept it.
24: Speed kills. True wealth is built slowly. Speed and greed necessitate aggressive leverage and increase the odds of catastrophe. It is better to go slower and avoid the do-overs.
25: Not all progress is measured by ground gained; sometimes progress is measured by losses avoided.
26: It’s delusional to believe our ability, intellect, and work ethic can overcome a bad market.
27: You must keep a conservative strategy during the good times because you generally don’t know you’re in bad times until it’s too late.
28: Success doesn’t make you bulletproof—it makes you careless. Comfort and ego sneak in, and that’s when things fall apart.
29: Consultants have a recipe. Masters have a cookbook!
Decision Making
30: It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
31: Consider 2nd-order consequences—clarify the risks and the possibility/cost of being wrong.
32: Nothing’s worse than sprinting enthusiastically in the wrong direction. Misdiagnose the problem, chase the wrong priorities, and you’ll pay the dumb tax—every time.
33: A good idea that can’t be executed is a BAD idea.
34: Remember that just because other people agree or disagree with you doesn’t make you right or wrong—the only thing that matters is the correctness of your analysis and judgment.
35: There are three types of decisions:
- Hats: immediately change if you don't like it.
- Haircuts: more impact but not permanent.
- Tattoos: hard to reverse.
36: Many people are so worried about looking good they never do anything great. Many people are so worried about doing great that they never do anything at all.
37: Catching a big wave is not the same as being a good swimmer.
38: There is no way to fix a problem without divorcing the story and marrying the truth. Facts do not cease to exist just because you ignore them.
39: Time is the enemy of choices. The shorter the time, the fewer the choices.
40: Never delay taking corrective action once the problem has been recognized. Hoping for better conditions in the future so the problem will solve itself is a fool’s game. Procrastination magnifies problems.
41: Never rely on only your consultant’s recommendations. If you don’t understand it, don’t do it.
42: Don’t let what your competition is doing influence your decisions. They do stupid things sometimes too.
43: Riskiest moment is when you think you are right.
44: Recognize reality even when you don’t like it—especially when you don’t like it.
45: Don’t make big decisions when hurt, hungry, angry or tired.
46: Big decisions are the outcome of thousands of small learning.
Sales
47: Keep working all your alternatives until something closes. It hasn’t closed until the money is in the bank.
48: Doing a deal to keep the team busy is stupid. Do not do marginal deals.
49: Just because prices have gone up the last several years doesn’t mean they can’t go down 30% next year.
50: When the market is bad, there are NO buyers . . . at any price.