I sold my agency.
That's a strange sentence to write. Still wrapping my head around it.
Early on, I thought about this moment a lot. First because I naively thought it would be easy.
After that, because I had long given up on it.
Upon much reflection, selling the agency wasn't the milestone…the real milestone happened almost two years earlier.
That was when the business stopped needing me.
I slowly became less involved in the day-to-day. The team made more decisions without me. Clients still got great results without needing access to me.
The agency kept improving whether I showed up or not.
By the time the acquisition happened, the business had already become something I'd been trying to build for years: an agency that didn't depend on its founder.
That's the part I keep coming back to.
We often think an exit starts when someone wants to buy the business.
I don't think that's true anymore…it starts the moment your business gives you a choice.
You can sell.
You can hire a CEO.
You can take a month off.
You can start something new.
Or you can keep running the business because you genuinely want to. Not because you have to.
That's optionality.
And I've realized that's what we’ve all been chasing all along.
Over the next little while, I'll be sharing more about what this process looked like, what surprised me, and the lessons I'm taking into this next chapter with Agency Uplift.
I don’t really care about the ins and outs of how to sell an agency.
What I do care about is helping founders build businesses that no longer require them.
The sale is just proof that it's possible.
More soon,
Sean