Why I Walked Away From My YouTube Agency (no one talks about this!)

One of the biggest problems in this online business space and the marketing gurus is the incredible lack of transparency. And you may not even notice it or know it until you show up in a room and you really hear what people are struggling with and you realize that person is dealing with that. I thought that person had the best business ever. Like that's how they're showing up online. But no, they're struggling with the exact same things that you are. And so in an effort for me to share my experience and hope that I can help somebody realize you aren't an imposter because you're struggling with something, most of us online business owners, entrepreneurs, are struggling with the exact same things. So I wanted to start a series here on my YouTube channel and test it out. Basically a transparency series where I not only share the lessons I learned, but I get real about the experiences and what's going on in my business. So if this is something that you would like to see here on my channel, I've got a few episodes that are going to come out, but I want to know if it's something I should continue doing. Make sure you like this video and tell me you want to keep seeing it in the comments so we have kind of confirmation y' all are interested. This first video in the series. I want to share the transparency behind why I basically burnt my agency. So from pretty much 2019 to 2023, I had a YouTube production agency. I worked with entrepreneurs that were selling courses, softwares, coaching programs, one on one services, and I planned their content for them, their YouTube content for them, edited their YouTube videos, uploaded, optimize it, made their YouTube channel beautiful. And I went from just myself doing all of this in 2019 to at the end of 2020, I full time employees, I had three video editors and we had almost, I think around 10 clients. That means we were pumping out around 40 videos a month for our clients. And that's not including the videos I was creating as well. This business model was lucrative. We were making over half a million dollars each year in this business model. And the reason why I thought I needed an agency is because you hear the marketing gurus tell you, you agency, you need an agency. Agency life. Agency life. But when I got into agency life and I started to talk to other people in agency life who were willing to open up and talk about truly how agency life is, I realized how much it freaking sucks. Not only the grind of constantly bringing on new clients to continue to scale, which I currently now have PTSD around the word scale, but the hustle behind going from having no real boss because you're working for yourself to having 10, 12, 15 bosses because now your clients become your bosses. So before I get into the nitty gritty's, I want to break this down into three main reasons why I completely tore down my agency and I don't offer this anymore. The biggest reason was my agency was at a crossroad. Yes, it was doing well, but it needed changes. If I was going to continue doing what I was doing, I needed to hire, I needed to create more standard operating procedures which make me want to rip my hair out. And I was going to need to find new video editors, which was one of the hardest things that I had come across was finding video editors that were editing the way I wanted them to on YouTube without having to teach them. If I wanted to take it from that half a million, you know, 6, $700,000 mark to over a million mark, that is what I was going to need to do in to driving even more leads and clients to the agency, which again meant more employees. Or I could have took it another direction and set it up to sell it. I had had a friend that had just sold her business. I was talking to another friend about the idea of selling a business and I thought, you know, I had this one number in mind that if I could sell it for that, I was like, I'm good. I could walk away from that. But thinking through and looking at the things that I would need to do, almost like how you need to prepare a house for sale, I would have had to do that for my agency. And I did not want to put that time into it because by then I was just over it. I just wanted to cut my losses at that point in time. So because we were at the crossroad, that's one reason why I decided to just dump it. The second reason was I hated agency model. And nobody talks the facts or the truth about how agency model sucks. Because you're constantly getting, trying to get new leads, you're doing sales calls, and you're working for these clients that are basically now your boss. And my clients were amazing, absolutely great people. And I'm still friends with many of them. But we had to make sure they liked the video ideas. When were they creating the videos? Could we stay on time? Could our video editor get the content and enough time to get the video out on time? Because I am very specific on if we were going to post a video, we're going to post it every week at the same time. So constantly Being on that cycle and having to check on weekends and making sure everything was going not the lifestyle that I had planned for. I don't even know how I got to an agency model because that was never the intended goal. And during this time each year, my agency grew and I made more money in my business. My mental health continued to dwindle. Being on edge 24 7, making sure your business is running and things are hitting due dates, not worth it. So that was the second reason I ended my agency. The third reason I ended my agency is because I wanted to love my work again. When I started my business in 2016 and 2017, I had a one year old and I had my second child and I even dealt with postpartum depression after my second child. But I still loved the people I was working with and what I was doing in my business. But as more of my attention went to agency work, it tended to become a freaking drag. When I started my business, I was working with other entrepreneurs that were like me. They were just getting started, they were seeing some success, they were excited about their business and they just wanted to start a YouTube channel to help more people, to reach more people. And that's what I wanted to get back to. Those were the people that I felt I was making a difference with. I wasn't just another check on their list to get another YouTube video out. Their YouTube channel was actually changing and affecting their business, which was helping them have a better life. During that time, I had had some bad experiences with coaching. And that can be another transparency video for another time. Let me know if you're interest in hearing it. But at the time I just thought coaching was a load of crock. And so I didn't want to become a coach because I didn't think that was something that could be done. Well, that is until I actually had a great experience with my current coach, Julie Chanel, and I realized how coaching can actually be done, that I would be happy to do. Working with her is honestly why. And the real reason that I've got to a point here in 2024 that my life is feels 1000% better even though I'm making less money in my business than I did two years ago. And that's when I had the realization that I could be a coach without being slimy. So over the last 20 months, I've been working and formulating and getting feedback on my coaching program and working with clients one on one in a coaching capacity. And the light in my work has come back again. My excitement became being able to get dirty my hands dirty with my clients being available for them when they need to. Seeing them post their wins in our Slack channel is why I continue doing this business. It is what has gotten me through the disaster that an agency is that no one actually tells you about and realizing that I can just focus on one thing and do it well and not have to do 20 different things to grow my business has been so amazing. And so when it comes down to it, agency life is not all it's cracked up to be. It is a grind. It is going to be a lot of work. If you are wanting to do agency life, you need to make sure you have great sops. You need to make sure you have great automations in place. You need to make sure you are ready to scale it to make actual good money from it and figure out early on how to take yourself out of it so it can run for itself. Otherwise you're going to burn the freak out I have some more topics that I'm planning to share in this transparency series, like the truth about Facebook ads and why I just do one offer in my business. If there are any topics that you would like me to open up this transparency series to, let me know in the comments below. And again, if this is something you want to continue seeing here on my channel like this video, subscribe let me know because we are using these first three videos as a test. Thank you. And I hope this sheds some light on something that you're working on so you're not constantly feeling like a failure when everybody else is struggling with something.