You’ve heard it a hundred times. “Don’t work in your business. Work on your business.”

It’s the rallying cry of every Instagram agency guru and half-baked mastermind.

But here’s the truth no one’s telling you: that advice is poison if you’re in the early stages of building your agency.

If you’re running a digital marketing agency doing less than a few million in annual revenue, you should be deep in your business. Not just touching base once a week with your OPS team. I mean shoulder-deep in sales, client delivery, billing, and service fulfillment. Every single day.

Until you’ve built a team that can reliably run each function and lead, you stepping back is a recipe for missed frustration. Think lost revenue, client churn, and operational chaos.

When I started my first agency, I got caught in that same trap. I thought that becoming a “true CEO” meant pulling myself out of the day-to-day. So I rushed the process. I hired too quickly, assumed others could handle things I hadn’t even figured out myself, and lived with my the clouds instead of in the trenches. It set me back years.

What I eventually learned is that your business isn’t ready for you to step back until it’s been stress-tested in your absence. For most agencies, that won’t happen until you’ve at least crossed the $3M mark. You just haven’t laid the groundwork yet.

You don’t earn your way out of working in your business. You build your way out. That takes time. Years, in fact. You need tight processes. Leadership you trust. Financial clarity. Clients who love you. And when all that’s in place, only then can you start working on the business more than in it.

Until then, go deep. Live in the CRM. Pitch every deal. Deliver the work.

Yes, you should work on the business at this stage. But not too much. Most of your time will be in the business and in deep. Think one hour of working on it vs. ten hours in it.

That’s where mastery is developed.

~ Erik

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