Why I Left Agency Life
I built a digital agency from scratch, watched it get acquired, and walked away. Here's what I learned about building something of your own.
In 2012, I started a digital marketing agency. The timing was perfect — Facebook ads were still cheap, mobile was exploding, and every SME in Sydney needed a website yesterday.
Within three months, I had six clients. Within two years, I had a small team, a pipeline, and the kind of revenue that makes you think you’ve figured something out.
Then in 2016, the agency was acquired by Leap Technologies. On paper, it was a win. In practice, it was a lesson.
What agency life teaches you
Running an agency teaches you speed. You learn to ship fast, communicate clearly, and manage expectations across multiple stakeholders simultaneously. You learn that a deliverable is only as good as the client’s ability to act on it.
But agency life also teaches you something harder: you’re always building on someone else’s foundation. Your best work gets deployed into systems you don’t control, for audiences you’ll never meet again.
The shift to product
After the acquisition, I made a deliberate move toward product companies. First EHPlabs, where I managed a $700k annual ad budget and watched a company grow from $3M to $15M in revenue. Then RoseRx, where I helped launch a telehealth app from zero to 10,000 users.
The difference was immediate. In product, your work compounds. The landing page you optimize today generates leads for months. The analytics infrastructure you build becomes the foundation for every decision that follows.
What I’d tell someone starting out
Start with agency work if you can. It compresses decades of learning into years. But know that at some point, you’ll want to go deeper. You’ll want to own the outcome, not just the deliverable.
That’s when you leave. And that’s when the real work begins.