I never wanted to be unemployable.
But COVID changed everything. One day I was the last person put on furlough, the first brought back. The next, I realized job security was just an illusion controlled by whoever ran the company.
So I chose control over comfort.
Five years later, Brand Ambition is growing from strength to strength, but there is no doubt about it, this has been the toughest year yet. We’ve survived what kills 50% of UK small businesses by their fifth year. But here’s what nobody tells you about building a “successful” agency: I’m no better off financially than I was as an employee.
That’s not humble bragging. That’s the brutal math of putting people before profit.
The Family Business Paradox
Starting with family sounds romantic until you’re making decisions that affect the livelihoods of those closest to you.
My father Jonathan connected me with my uncle Robin, who’d freelanced successfully for a decade. We shared values about what we wanted to build. But values don’t pay mortgages when clients are cutting budgets and economic uncertainty looms.
The upside of family was trust. It gave us the confidence to take calculated risks early on. The downside was weight: every business decision had a personal impact beyond the bottom line.
That tension shaped how we grew…cautiously, transparently, but always with people at the centre.
When AI Forward Means Falling Backward
Everyone talks about being “AI forward” like it’s a magic solution.
We learned the expensive way that it’s not.
Our biggest misstep was Apollo. We built an email marketing service around it, believing the hype that it would outperform traditional tools. The data was rich, but the execution flopped. The effort to integrate was too high, and results too low.
Most agencies would quietly phase out failed initiatives. We don’t. Our core value is “brutally honest, consistently constructive,” which means having uncomfortable conversations about what’s not working.
I told clients exactly what happened: “This isn’t delivering what we promised. Here’s what we learned and here’s what we’re trying next.”
The lesson? AI tools are like Photoshop was when first introduced to designers. They change everything, but they don’t eliminate the need for skill and strategy. We pivoted Apollo from client-facing email to internal intelligence for B2B targeting.
Clients appreciate honesty more than perfection. While 44% of digital agencies struggled in 2024, our transparent approach to failure kept clients loyal.
The Silver Bullet Myth
Marketing managers are under constant pressure to find “the one thing” that solves everything.
We tell them the truth: there is no silver bullet.
SEO was supposed to be the silver bullet. Then email marketing. Then PR. Then paid advertising. The real silver bullet is multiple channels being constantly tested and optimized toward the right lead generation funnel.
Marketing managers fighting for their jobs appreciate brutal honesty over false promises. Lying wastes time, and time is the one thing they don’t have.
So we show competitor insights. We run gap analyses. We demonstrate that their competitors are succeeding because they’re using three or four channels together, not betting everything on one magic solution.
We are honest when we say “we are still working this out”, marketing is rarely a one-size, one route formula that immediately pays off. It is a mixture of data, gut feel and consistent testing, that continually moves and changes depending on a hundred different factors.
One of Robins favourite sayings comes from Lord Leverhulme (founder of Lever Brothers, later Unilever)
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
The Expensive Lessons
We’ve made mistakes that hurt.
We hired too quickly. Multiple times.
We took on the wrong clients. Multiple times.
The worst mistake was accepting e-commerce clients when our entire model was built for high-value B2B lead generation. We’re fantastic at creating multi-channel strategies for companies selling complex services. We’re terrible at driving volume for 60-pound basket values.
These failures put us on downward trajectories. When you’re a small agency that’s hired too many staff and clients aren’t working out, the math gets brutal fast.
The lesson isn’t about avoiding mistakes. It’s about recognizing them quickly and adapting before they kill you.
When Values Meet Reality
This year, for the first time. we had to make the team smaller.
For a company built on “people before profit,” laying anyone off felt like betraying everything we stood for.
I reconciled it by accepting a harsh truth: the company wouldn’t exist if we carried on as we were. We had good clients, we did good work, but the economics weren’t sustainable.
I told the remaining team we were shifting from focused growth to controlled consolidation. Work hard on existing clients, rebuild the foundation, then grow again.
Nobody left. The team bought into the journey because they’d seen us make difficult decisions transparently before.
We became a tighter team with better structure, doing better work. Now we’re back on a growth trajectory.
The Inevitable Cycles
Looking ahead to our training academy and the next five years, I’ve accepted something: growth, consolidation, and rebuilding cycles are inevitable for agencies like ours.
The key is having the right partners, ensuring revenue is committed before hiring, and making sure everyone understands the risks.
But sometimes you have to take risks anyway. Otherwise, you stay stagnant.
And that’s where the payoff comes. I can pick my son up from school every Friday. I can take days off when my family needs me. The one thing I didn’t realise, was that the business would always be there with me during that time.
If someone asks me what the main difference between being an employee and and running your own business was, I’d say that it was that as an employee you get to (if you choose) to turn your back on the business for holidays. For business owners, it is always there, its part of your thought process.
The flexibility of owning my own business is incredible, even when the math doesn’t add up on paper.
Money isn’t everything. But survival requires making decisions that feel like contradictions to your values.
The real lesson from five years of building Brand Ambition? Success isn’t avoiding difficult decisions. It’s making them transparently, learning from them quickly, and building something worth the sacrifice.
That’s what 76% of companies miss when they talk about staff retention and company culture. It’s not about avoiding hard choices. It’s about making them with integrity.
