Lifestyle is a Plan podcast is for agency founders who are done with the growth hustle, and want profitability over pressure instead.

In this episode of Lifestyle is a Plan, Kelly Molson is joined by Claire Hutchings.

Claire worked in independent boutique and global networked agencies for almost 20 years. She also built her own business, Chime Agency to help agencies with the one challenge they all face - their own marketing. Chime Agency produced game changing research into agency marketing and supported more than 40 agencies grow their businesses. Claire now combines her business knowledge from building Chime Agency with her experience working with agencies as a The Agency Adventure Guide.

She specialises in supporting independent agency owners and leaders to make great decisions and get the best out of their businesses. Claire is passionate about mental health and supporting women in the industry, she therefore loves working with female and minority founders plus those with limited previous agency experience who want to scale successful businesses while maintaining a work-life balance.

Claire Hutchings and I met in 2021 when I called on Chime Agency’s brilliance to help me create my agency's ‘hero moment’ - an annual benchmarking report that sat at the heart of our marketing strategy.

On the pod today we’re talking about the mental health toll of agency ownership and her successful exit from Chime as a positive alternative to traditional and often disappointing, agency sales.

You’ll discover:

• The mental health toll of agency ownership
• How to combat creating the ‘owners show’
• What an alternative successful exit could look like
• The importance of a well-managed wind-down
• Why building a support network around you is vital

Guest details

Website:www.agency-adventure.com/who-we-are

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/claire-hutchings

Podcast recommendations:

Grab a paintbrush and book an art class instead!

Agency Exits - Ali Newton-Temperley

Brought to you by:

Lifestyle is a Plan is brought to you by me, Kelly Molson - an agency advisor on a mission to support solo founders build the agency they want. I’m here to show the agency world that ‘lifestyle agency’ is not a cop out. It’s the future of our industry’s sustainable growth.

You can join my Lifestyle is a Plan newsletter at kellymolson.co.uk

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave a glowing review and share it with your founder friends.

Edited by Steve Folland. stevefolland.com

Kelly Molson

Claire Hutchings

Yeah, so Chime was a marketing agency for agencies and its whole reason for being was to try and address this challenge that happened pretty much throughout the industry where agencies are so busy delivering great work for their clients, managing this kind of rollercoaster of new business, that they find it really difficult to stay consistent with their own marketing, and they have a good base knowledge of what marketing is, but actually doing it for themselves is really difficult. As a founder, you're often too close to it yourself, it's your baby. And it can be really difficult for a founder to be able to see things from their client's perspective. So we built a whole business around that really. And we did everything from positioning and marketing strategy all the way through to the execution of that. But one of the things that I was most proud of and enjoyed the most, which was how we worked with you and Rubber Cheese, Kelly, which was on these 'hero moments' as we called them. Which were big, often thought leadership led, research led, big meaty kind of campaigns really, that would really ladder back to an agency's positioning, but give the founders something to stand on a stage and talk about... but something that the whole agency could get behind and they'd become campaigns almost that would run annually and all of your other marketing would fall off the back of this sort of one big meaty hook. And so we loved doing projects like that. And we were a team of five or six plus freelancers at our biggest, and it was a lot of fun.

Kelly Molson

It was a lot of fun. Yeah. we absolutely loved working with you. And I think you were, and still are a big personality within the agency space as well. What I enjoyed watching from your agency journey was how you carved out this space for you in a sector. You really made an impact in it. Great networker, you loved being at all of the agency events. You were a key figure in it, you spoke at events, you ran your own events, et cetera, et cetera. It was great to see. It's kinda the journey that we're told to go on, right? We should be doing all of these things. But I guess like sometimes that stuff can become quite overwhelming as well. So things started to change a little bit for you and for Chime. Can you tell us about that?

Claire Hutchings

Yeah, so the business kind of took off exponentially and grew really quickly in the first sort of year and a half. I'd started freelancing after I'd been made redundant in the pandemic. And that freelance business went from being me to five of us in just over a year.

Kelly Molson

Wow.

Claire Hutchings

So it went from me to us doing, I think in that first year we did something like a quarter of a million in turnover in that first year. So it was almost too fast and unsustainable to keep growing at that rate. And the things I did, I really heavily invested a lot in building really good relationships in networking and building my profile, but was really conscious that I didn't wanna build an agency that was all around me. So we did a lot of our own marketing and our own events. I wanted the business to be something that everyone in the team could get behind. And it wasn't always gonna be the Claire show. But necessarily when you are starting a business, it kind of is to a certain extent and it has to be. And people buy into you as a founder, and I did that really hard for a really long time. And I think probably looking back, I didn't, I didn't... even though I added other things to my marketing mix into the business, but I never stopped doing that. And I probably didn't check in with myself and my family along the way to see how that was affecting us along the way. There were times when I'd be out three or four nights a week at networking events and there's alcohol and late nights involved. So it was a real sort of burning the candle at both ends when you've then gotta deliver for clients, look after young children. And my kids, my, at the time my kids were younger, and both quite poorly a lot of the time. They both got asthma. They were in and outta hospital and every time they went into hospital, I'd then be dragged out of the business for a week, 10 days, however long it was. 'Cause it wasn't just the time that they were in hospital, it's the pre-hospital and post hospital time, and they're off school too. So the being needed, the weight of being needed by clients, by your team, and by your family. That weight of responsibility on top of the trying to keep this sort of persona and the networking stuff going, like at some point something was gonna have to break and snap... and it was me. (laughs)

Kelly Molson

Unsurprisingly, with all of those things that you're trying to juggle at one time. What you said there about, being away from your family as well. It's such a tough... I always feel like one choice that you make is, you say yes to something you say no to something else. And it's a tough weight to carry because I think there's a lot of guilt, especially if you are a parent in business, because you're often missing like bedtimes or school drop offs or whatever that might be to go and do the thing that you need to do for your business, which effectively gives them a better life in the long run.

Claire Hutchings

And it's the thing that you wanna do as well.

Kelly Molson

Yeah, absolutely.

Claire Hutchings

I wanted to do it. A part of my identity was being an agency founder. I really believed in what we were doing, what we were building, and I wanted to do it. I wanted to be at those things. And I still do. And I'm still really proud of the work that I do, and I think it's great for my kids to see that I run a business and all of that kind of stuff. So loads of good stuff comes with it and it certainly didn't feel like I was being ripped out of my family. It was just really difficult to balance everything, and you can't do it all. It's impossible. You have to make the choices each day, each week of what you are gonna do and what you're not gonna do, but getting the balance right. I don't think anybody can ever get the balance... And, do you know what it is? It's when everything works. It's fine. When everybody's well, when business is rolling in, when everything works, it's great. But it just takes one thing in the ecosystem to fall down and everything falls down. It takes your partner to be poorly or the school to shut because it's a snow day or one client stop working with you and all of a sudden... Oh no! And if you've not got robust enough foundations at the bottom, everything can topple.

Kelly Molson

Yeah. Do you think that's an element of what happened with Chime when things started to go wrong? Do you feel like your model was right? Do you feel like you had those foundations or...

Claire Hutchings

I think part of it was that we'd probably grown so fast, and I was really conscious of that in the first sort of six, 12 months. And I got, a business coach Chris, who I still work with now. And he was pretty instrumental for helping me stabilize the business, which I think we did do. I think for me it was that my mental health had taken such a knock that I just didn't have the energy in me anymore to fight and change the model when it needed changing. I think had I have protected my mental health a bit more, I know exactly what I would've done with that business. And it wasn't a bad business by any stretch of the imagination. It was really successful in lots of ways. But I would've changed the model. I would've leaned more heavily into the research hero moments that we were doing. I possibly would've ended up working in some adjacent sectors to agencies with more professional services businesses. Because at the time when I ended up closing the business, and still now, is pretty tumultuous in agency world. So I would've probably worked with some slightly adjacent sectors as well. And I would've looked at how we delivered our work in a more efficient way, particularly with AI and everything that we've got now, that was only really starting when I started closing the business, which is... it's crazy just how quick that's moved. But if I'd have had the energy, I would've shifted things about the model. And I would've protected myself. And I think part of it was that when I set up the business, I had a very clear kind of personal vision for what I wanted out of it. Like it had to provide for me and my family. My husband had been diagnosed with MS, and so I needed something that was gonna provide for us financially should he not be able to work. I mean, he's the breadwinner and he works full time and he's fine right now. But that was like, that was my guiding star. And I think I probably got slightly lost from that in this sort of growth at all costs mentality, which I think has definitely been around... I think it's starting to shift now in the industry... But I think I got swept up in it a little bit, of to be successful, I had to get the agency to a certain size and a certain turnover. And actually, if I went back to my guiding principle, it was that I needed money and stability for my family and growing a business to 10 people and a million pound of turnover doesn't necessarily bring you that and that that's the big kind of wake up call I've probably had over the last year or so.

Kelly Molson

Yeah. This is such a good point because when we talked previously, we talked about the advice that you've been given, which was literally to underpay yourself, reinvest everything for profit. So that you are preparing yourself for growth with the goal of exiting the agency at some point, and then recouping all of that money. Which I can understand that advice, but it also is not a one fit for everybody. I think that strategy is... it's unsustainable.

Claire Hutchings

It's totally unsustainable.

Kelly Molson

You also have to think about you... You have to be of a certain privileged position to be able to do that as well, right? You've got to have either savings, significant savings. You've got to have either really minimal outgoings, which maybe, you know, if you are younger. When I started my agency, I was 24. I was living at home with my parents. I had minimal rent to pay and minimal overhead. I didn't have a family, I didn't have children, I didn't have a partner at the time. Or you've got to have a partner that can sustain you and pay for everything whilst you do those things. I'm not in that position. Like, we're not in that position.

Claire Hutchings

No. And it's not really the real world anymore. I think it probably was like that 20, 30, 40 years ago when you could have one parent families and live off one salary and the world just isn't like that now. And I do think that advice was out of date. I think it can work if it's for a short period of time, you know, three to six months because you know you want to invest in a new hire or a new piece of technology or whatever it may be. If it's a strategic decision for a short period of time, that's very different to it being like a mindset almost. And, that's how it was built to me when I first started out. And so I did, I took as little as I could out the business in order to invest into people, systems, building, growth. Which was great. The flip side of that is though, that when I came to end the business, there was actually still a lot of money in the business that I hadn't taken out because I needed a good runway, because I had a sizeable salary, cost base every month. So I needed a decent runway and I had about five to six months worth of runway in the business of overhead. So it was a sizable amount of money, which actually means that I didn't need to sell my business and have a traditional kind of exit, because actually the money was already there. It was in the business anyway. So I've been able to step out of that, use that pot of money to fund me now and take on projects and work that I want to work on. And I've got about two years of not needing a proper job.

Kelly Molson

Which is actually a really successful exit right?

Claire Hutchings

Which is amazing. Yeah. So I kind of joke it, it feels like I sold my agency, but I didn't have to go through any of the like, legalities, heartache, logistics, rigmarol with it. And I've completely changed my life really in the last year. I go to a gym now. I do an art course for three hours every week. I pick the kids up from school at normal school time twice a week. So all of these things have like completely flipped and changed. And slowly, my mental health is getting much, much better because I've changed my life and I am aware that I'm privileged to be able to do that. Very very much so. Part of it was because of how I ran the business. And if I'd run it a different way, I wouldn't have been able to have done that. And if I hadn't made the decisions that I made and decided to stop when I did, I wouldn't have been able to have done that. It would've been really easy to have lost that runway into the ether.

Kelly Molson

The exit conversation in this circumstance is really interesting because it's not the conventional exit. But I was looking at some of the stats as well, because if we go back to that advice. That if you go back to this kind of underpay yourself, invest in profit, invest in growth, eventually we're gonna exit, recoop it back. Ali Newton-Temperley's book Agency Exit states that only 4% of agencies actually successfully sell their agencies. 4% is so small. Like such a small percentage. And then I was thinking about of that 4%, how many of those have actually been building for exit and have done that successfully to get what they want back? Or how many of them have been in the position where actually they have to. And because it's been a breakdown in communication, relationships with partners, et cetera, et cetera, and so it's an enforced sale. Those people, and I guess like I would probably cast myself in this, my co-founder and I just decided that we couldn't work... it would just... it just needed to end, We just weren't aligned anymore to where the direction of the agency was gonna go and the best thing that would work for both of us is if we exited. We weren't building for exit at that time, so I guess it was an enforced exit. You are not gonna get any of that money back. You're not gonna recoup it. Yeah, I just... it's wild.

Claire Hutchings

Yeah. Even if you are building for exit... the majority, we're a massive pyramid our industry where there's very few, very big agencies and very many, very small agencies. So the majority of sales aren't going to be for life changing amounts of money anyway. So if you are running your business over a 10 year period and you know that you want to leave with million pounds, actually think about how you can take that money out over a 10 year period, or at least get 500 grand, you know of that money out. Because it's unlikely... like you're not gonna be getting millions. It might be hundreds of thousands, but the majority of those agencies that do sell, it's not going to be, I can now sit on a beach and drink cocktails for the rest of my career. And depending on how old you are when you sell your agency, lots of agency owners kind of wanna try and exit in their fifties maybe... you've still got a period of time, a long period of time until you can draw a pension. What are you gonna do with your time after you've exited as well? Like you go from this crazy intense way of life. We're not really made to sit on beaches and drink cocktails, I don't think. So you've got these two things, are you ever gonna get enough money to... when you could have been, if you've been paying yourself hundred 50 grand or hundred grand a year, actually over a 10 year period, that's quite a lot of, that's quite a lot of money. Rather than paying yourself 30 grand a year, that gap is pretty substantial. So I think if I were to, it's probably the one of the only things I'd do differently is that is like making sure that I was taking out exactly what I wanted and earning the salary that I wanted and needed before paying other people.

Kelly Molson

Yeah. Which effectively would've made it into a lifestyle agency, right? Because you're facilitating the lifestyle you want now, not building for growth to exit at some point and hoping that we'll get what we want for it.

Claire Hutchings

Look, I think particularly with the way that the industry's moving. There are so many more efficiencies that can happen now, and I think there's a lot of chat about, how can you have a 10 person agency but do the work of a 50 or a hundred person agency using different systems and tools. And it may well be that, we can get some bigger margins of... our industry as a whole isn't known for having... it's not a high margin industry. Yeah, looking at the model and how we could have a more flexible work base and how I could take the more money out that I needed, whether it was as a salary or in other clever ways that more clever people would tell me how to, do it. But I would think more about the now rather than a future that even if it does come, it's not gonna necessarily be life changing. I'm not gonna necessarily recoup the loss of earnings from if I was to have a salary and an employed job.

Kelly Molson

So that's what you would do differently? What do you think that you would do the same? You said you wouldn't change much about your approach.

Claire Hutchings

No, I don't think I would like... the bit that I'm really proud of, still really proud of is the relationships that I built with clients and my team. The fact that we're here having this conversation now and you were one of our clients is testament to that and building a really strong network and nurturing those relationships. I'm really proud of when the agency ended and my team went off to do their own thing. I passed retainer clients onto Rachel, one of my team members who you know, and she still works with them now on a freelance basis. And I'm so proud of that. Like I'm so proud that I was able to manage that really difficult time for all of us, emotionally charged, and everyone came out of it probably better. All of us actually. So yeah, the building of relationships and networking I wouldn't change. And I guess the other thing that I wouldn't change would be the having a really clear industry and niche. And it meant growing and scaling really easy... easy... but easier because I was able to talk about one thing over and over and over again. Part of that was because we had, as one of our values was practice what you preach. 'Cause we were telling agencies that they needed to do this stuff and so we had to do it ourselves and we stuck really true to that value. So I'd definitely do that again and I'd try and do it now, that I'm doing what I'm doing now as well. But yeah, sticking to values, building good relationships.

Kelly Molson

I'm gonna hope that all of my clients do listen to this because that is the advice I keep banging on about myself to them. Focus, niche, narrow. Makes it so much easier.

Claire Hutchings

So much easier. And I have the same conversations on a daily basis too. It's hard. It's hard. I get that it's scary. It also doesn't stop you from doing work with other people as well. Like we worked with recruitment consultants, recruitment agencies, for example. Similar, really similar, but basically the same model as an agency. We just didn't talk about it externally.

Kelly Molson

Yeah. Okay. Throughout this process, was there any kind of one piece of standout advice that anyone gave you as you were going through this transition?

Claire Hutchings

Oh, one piece of standout advice. I had loads from loads of different people, and I think that was one of the best, most illuminating things about running a business was the community of other agency founders, I would say. And how most of us didn't really see each other as competitors. We were very much collaborators, and I was just like welcomed with open arms. I thought that I'd be seen as, oh, trying to sell all the time to agencies and I was really conscious not to do that, but I wasn't, I was seen as a peer and welcomed very openly. And being part of that community meant that you got advice from all sorts of different people at all sorts of different times, just when you needed it. And it goes back into that building great relationships and if you are vulnerable and open up about what's going on in your business world, other people will share. And that was one of my biggest learnings. So I know that's not like a single piece of advice, but actually collaborating with your peers was really valuable to me.

Kelly Molson

Yeah. Build a network.

Claire Hutchings

Yeah.

Kelly Molson

Making sure that you are actively building out your kind of community around you of people that will support and be there for you when you've got questions and you can support them back.

Claire Hutchings

And that's what I was gonna say, equally supporting them back. And I always try and be as giving as I can with my time and with like introductions and referrals to other people. It's something that doesn't cost me anything other than the time takes to write an email, or whatever it is. But I know when shit hits the fan and someone asks for a referral, they really need it. People don't ask for help willy-nilly. And people were there for me when I needed it, and I will always be there and give back and make intros. Because if the industry succeeds, we all succeed. And that's always been my mantra and the way that I've looked at this.

Kelly Molson

So the unconventional exit that you took, the choice that you made to end the agency, it gave you, you said, I think you mentioned it gave you like a two year runway really. So you could step back a little bit, start to focus on feeling well again. You know your own mental health, mental wellbeing. I know that the lure of the agency world though, is quite strong having exited my own agency and suddenly back in it again. So what are you actually doing now? Are you back in it?

Claire Hutchings

Yes. (laughs) So I took a good four months off and the first months of that was like, couldn't get outta bed on the sofa for a month, couldn't put a wash load on, like it was pretty bad. And then slowly, I started coming out of my little hermit crab safe cocoon. And Chris who was my business coach, he's the founder of the Agency Adventure. And he approached me and said would you fancy doing some coaching and advisory work via the Agency Adventure, you could be really good, you've got an interesting story. So that's what I'm doing now. I'm helping him to build a kinda strategic advisory consultancy for agencies. There's seven guides now, all with completely, really varied backgrounds, but we've all run agencies, either owned them or been on leadership teams. Some of us very small agencies, some of us really big agencies. Together, we've got this hive mind that can cover the whole industry. And we were just really passionate about helping founders to build businesses that really serve their personal goals and personal ambitions and aren't following a kind of programmatic, growth as the only way. Because growth is something different to everyone, and success is something different to everybody. So yeah, that's what I'm doing now. And I also do some fractional CMO work. I'm working with non agencies at the moment too, which is... like also really great. And I'm learning stuff there that I can bring back into my agency clients. So I've got a really nice mix at the minute of part marketing CMO strategy stuff, and then working one-on-one with founders. Usually I tend to work with founders of up to kind of 10 people. Often they might be freelancers wanting to build a business. And often working with female agency founders, or under represented talent in the industry. I'm pretty passionate about that too. So yeah.

Kelly Molson

I don't know if you have found this through this agency advisory coach journey that you're on. It's that people really resonate with the reality side of what's happened. So I think a lot of the clients that I work with, in a very similar, like very similar kind of demographic, are really interested in the personal experience that I've had running an agency. And not necessarily the success of the agency. Like they're really interested in how you have built your resilience around certain things that have been going on in your personal life or like the really shit stuff that happens that you just have to learn and understand how you get through it. That I think makes you a stronger advisor. So the fact that you've been able to turn what was essentially your kind of rollercoaster of a journey around the agency world into a really strong advisory offering is amazing. I think you would be excellent at it.

Claire Hutchings

Yeah. Thank you. I hope so. I hope that it resonates with people and that they find it interesting and useful, and I think with a lot of the clients that I work with now, it's about having an accountability buddy because it can be pretty lonely when you are running your business. And none of us have... well, some people have done it before, but most agency founders, when you first start out, you've not run a business before. See, a lot of the agencies I work with haven't even worked in agencies before. They might have a craft of some description or they've worked in the sector that they're now running an agency for. And so they don't know what they don't know, number one. But having someone that each month, or every other week or whatever it is, is gonna hold you accountable to the things that you said that you're gonna do is really, really useful. And it's something that I needed. I know I needed it. So yeah, if I've got someone else telling me what to do, I'll... if I've got a deadline, then I'll do it. And if it's just for me, I probably won't. But if I feel like I'm gonna please somebody else

Kelly Molson

(laughs) As people pleasers, yes.

Claire Hutchings

There's a bit of that, that like they wanna come each month to be like, 'look Claire, look what I did, are you proud of me'? So proud of you!

Kelly Molson

Oh God, I feel that deeply for myself, but I know that's exactly what my clients need too.

Claire Hutchings

But you never have anyone give you a pat on the back when you're the big boss. The buck stops with you. No one ever says, good work, well done. And actually sometimes having that is important.

Kelly Molson

It's so important. I've got like a Hype Squad WhatsApp group. It was founded by my gorgeous friend, Sue Keogh, she set up a WhatsApp group and there's five of us in it. And we are literally like each other's Friday little Boost buddies. Where we all just put like our win of the wink in there and everyone's yeah!! God, it's just, it's such a powerful group. Like it's so nice someone saying you've done a good job. Well done!

Claire Hutchings

Yeah! You just don't have it on the day to day, do you?

Kelly Molson

Listen agency founders. If you need your Hype squad, come chat to us. We've got you! Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, then there's a few ways that you can support it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a glowing review and share it with your founder friends. You can even sign up for my Lifestyle Is A Plan newsletter at kellymolson.co.uk. This podcast is hosted by me, Kelly Molson, and edited by the excellent Steve Folland. Have a brilliant week.