Before Venture Forge came Squeeze Digital. My first agency, and my first proper failure.
It started well. Too well, in some ways. We won clients quickly, grew quickly, and I remember feeling, for a while, like I’d cracked it – like building a business was mostly a matter of energy and hustle, and I had plenty of both. What I didn’t have was any real idea of what I was doing.
I was the founder, the developer and the client services team all at once, because there was nobody else to do those jobs. We were growing the client list faster than we were growing our ability to deliver for the clients already on it, which is a particular kind of trap – every new sale felt like a win, but each one added weight to a structure that was already creaking.
I was naive about what it actually takes to build a business, and I found that out the hard way, under pressure I hadn’t budgeted for and didn’t know how to ask for help with.
Then my first child was due to be born, and I was, honestly, in a very bad place. Spinning plates that were already close to falling, with the biggest change of my life arriving on top of it. Something had to give, and eventually it did – I had a breakdown, and I made the call to close the agency down.
The cost
I want to be straight about what that decision cost, and what it protected. It cost the business – Squeeze Digital closed. It also cost the small team we’d built by that point, four people who’d joined us to help grow something, not to be let go a few months later. That’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s stayed with me.
What I could control was how we handled it: we paid everyone extra months’ wages to give them a proper bridge, and I spent time helping find each of them their next role rather than just wishing them well and moving on. It didn’t undo the disruption to their lives, but it mattered to me that we did right by them on the way out, not just by the clients.
We wound the rest of the business down as respectfully as we could too – paying back everyone who had work in progress, even though that left some people disappointed and the timing was far from ideal for anyone involved.
It wasn’t a clean ending. But it was an honest one, and I think that mattered, both to the people we let down and to how I was able to look back on it afterwards.
I took six months off work after that. I didn’t feel properly myself again for closer to 12. That’s a long time to be rebuilding, and I won’t pretend it was anything other than one of the hardest periods of my life.
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The value
It’s also, looking back now, one of the most valuable. Venture Forge is six years old this year, with 21 staff and a growing portfolio of nationally recognised brands as clients, and I don’t think that business exists in its current form without Squeeze Digital falling apart first. Here’s what I took from it, for what it’s worth to anyone earlier in their own version of this.
Build a business, not a sales line. Winning clients feels like progress, and it is, but only if you can actually deliver for them once they’ve signed. I spent too long treating new business as the whole job. It’s only half the job.
Hire brilliant people who are better than you, and do it early. I tried to be every department at once, which meant every department was run by someone with no time and limited expertise in most of it. The moment I started bringing in people genuinely stronger than me in their areas, the business got better and I got my evenings back.
Get a business partner if you can. Someone to share the load, the decisions and the pressure with – and, just as importantly, someone to share the wins with too. Doing it entirely alone isn’t a badge of honour. It’s just a harder, lonelier way to build something, and it leaves no one to notice when you’re not okay.
Get the work-life balance right, properly, not as a phrase you say in interviews. Work to live, not the other way round. I learned that lesson at the worst possible time, with a newborn and a collapsing business, rather than the best possible time, which would have been about three years earlier.
And enjoy the journey, not just the destination. I was so focused on what the business might become that I stopped noticing what was actually happening in front of me – which, it turns out, is most of what your working life is actually made of.
Survival
None of that makes the failure worthwhile. But it made me someone who could go on to build Venture Forge properly, with a much clearer sense of what actually matters – both in a business and outside one.
If you’re in the middle of your own version of this right now, I’d say only that it doesn’t feel survivable while you’re in it, and it usually is.