Brett Stone

Felt very anxious for a while. Realised it was a combination of doom-scrolling and caffeine. So, 10 days ago I deleted Twitter and haven't touched it since (plus reduced coffee to ~60mg caffeine per day) Huge difference in mental mood. Only downside. I do like to share my work and life. So, I added a mini Twitter tool inside my personal OS. It let's me do the three most important things. 1) Post tweets 2) See tweet stats (nice to have) 3) See replies and interact with them. That way, I can use Twitter as I want, without seeing all the doom the world has right now. Took about 2 hours with Ralph. (This runs on my old MacBook)

It's bitter pill time. My recommendation for someone looking to start or scale an agency in 2026 is: Don't. Running an agency is not for the faint of heart. At scale, the cashflow is great. Getting there is an absolutely miserable slog. I started with $300/mo clients, and unless you have a reputation or a couple of plum clients due to your connections, you're going to start at the bottom too. You're going to work with clients with bad businesses that don't work. You're going to eat endless amounts of shit. The plum clients, the ones that already have product market fit figured out and great operations? They won't work with you. Not until you prove yourself. There's very little loyalty to agencies. It's a what have you done for me lately business. You can crush it for a client for years, but all of a sudden you have a month where things don't go well, you're done. Loyalty exists, but it is the exception and not the rule. You scale them up and they bring in a new person to manage you? You're probably getting replaced by that new person's preferred agency even if you're still killing it. If performance is bad whether it is your fault or not, you're fired. If performance is great and they're scaling, they start balking at your invoices and want to renegotiate or fire you. Everybody is posting on twitter about how great their work is, how much better their clients performance is, and other agencies are always sniffing around your clients saying they can do a better job than you're doing. Hiring talent is brutal and costly. The median salary for people who manage accounts on my team is $130,000. You're always in danger of losing 20% or more of your revenue in any given month. Doesn't matter how good you are. Doesn't matter if every client is killing it. We were doing our best work ever in Q2 of last year, and we still lost 40% of topline which required me to write a six figure check to keep the business running. I'm happy that I've made escape velocity with my agency, and I make great money with a great team. We're 18 right now. We'll be 30+ before the end of 2026. But if you told me what it would take to get here 7 years ago, I would have done something else. There are much less stressful paths to making lots of money. And I bet there a bunch of people reading this right now who will read all of this and say, "I don't care, I'm going to do it anyway." That's the kind of psychotic confidence and IDGAF attitude that you'll need to make it.

I’d probably still be making 50-70k a year if it weren’t for my kids. Got married at 25 and my wife and I had 3 before I was 30. After our first was born I began an intense job hunt, stayed up late every night updating my portfolio and applying. If you have any agency whatsoever, nothing motivates you like having a kid. I want them to thrive, not just survive.

I recorded 215 sales calls, uploaded all transcripts to Claude, told it which calls turned into retainer work and added extra context on which projects were our ICP. Based on that I was able to create 3 ICP profiles with different budget ranges, needs, typical POCs, etc. This was by far the best hands-on approach to creating our ICPs and from there, I knew exactly who to target, where to find them, how to start the conversation, and what to say on sales calls to close them. Highly recommend you to start recording all calls, even the internal ones with your PMs, team mates, etc.

You know what's wild? Nobody warns you about the crushing loneliness of being a solopreneur. My friends just smile and nod. Family means well but doesn't get it. Some days I'm carrying 100 decisions solo. Who else feels like they're on a lonely island?

How would you handle a client that is 15 days late on their net-30 invoice and says "our client's pay us late, so we are delayed in paying you" My thoughts on handling it are a bit rude 🤐🤐🤐