2024 Reflections: Why I Chose Simple Over Scale
Yearly Review from a Freelance Media Buyer
In 2024, I fell into an unconscious trap - the typical freelancer’s growth plan:
More clients, more systems, more people. Build something so big that you can “work on the business, not in it.” - Don’t be a freelancer, be an agency.
Sounds great, right?
But somewhere along the way, I realized that chasing big without a clear purpose wasn’t just exhausting - it was counterproductive. Instead of freedom, I found burnout. Instead of feeling in control of something external to me, I felt frustrated and disappointed.
This is my reflection on the highs, lows, and lessons of 2024 and why I’m planning on taking a leaner, more intentional path in 2025.
What happened in 2024?
February: Strong start . Added lots of new clients, felt the momentum. Loving life.
March/April: Hired contractors help to manage workload. “These guys are cool!” Exciting.
May: Distraction. Started an e-commerce side project to diversify income, driven by my love for physical products and a “future-proof” plan against AI disruption.
June to September: Coasting now, but could be starting to lose focus a bit?
October: Suddenly hit a wall - cracks show in delivery quality, constant decision fatigue, burned out, got sick, and stopped working out.
November: “Ugh, it’s easier to do it myself” feelings with some contractors. Realized I should also focus my services to where I do my best work. Transitioned non-fit clients. Want to get my balance back.
December: Realized I transitioned too many clients too early and hit with a big client pausing. Now cashflow is tight and I’m reeling.
Then I read a Reddit post by Gil Gildner on agency finances reminded me that many ad businesses don’t exit successfully. Most grow large, cumbersome and stressful with lower take-home profits for their founders than tightly run freelancer/micro-agency operations.
This reframed my focus: take-home profit over scale. I re-read Building A Successful Micro-Agency and became reinspired for a small, intentional, profitable 2025.
Now the question is, will I recover in 2025?
The Highs
Revenue: Hit some stretch target revenue goals for a few months. Not consistently, but enough that I was happy and feeling like “Yeah, I’m finally making it.” Haha.
Rediscovered the joy of working in a team. Fun in-office chats, the natural mixing of personal and professional camaraderie. We worked 2 days in office, 3 days at home. So you love coming into the office and have something to look forward to, but still have the peace of working from home most days of the week.
Formalized some processes. This was a huge thing that brought quality of life. Making clear ‘how we do it’ and the tools/setup we use, making each client feel like ‘business as usual.’ It has taken probably 3–4 iterations of the process to get there. I made things like:
One SOP doc.
Client questions FAQ and replies.
A protocol of which set of tools (I.e. Landingi, Systeme, Zapier) and why/when we use them.
A curated list of winning ad formats we test first before trying new formats.
Side Quest: A fun physical project. I made a D2C brand for sleep products. It was fun working through physical product problems vs digital ones. More about that later though.
Got stripe working! lol, after 2 years 😂. It’s hard to get verified as a digital nomad.
The Lows
Burnout. Too many different problems, too many new client setups with dynamic differences. So many changes at the same time and maybe even too many decisions needed to be made at once.
Getting help. Dealing with the inevitable variances of people helping. Sometimes the quality of work is good, you love life, and you pass it directly to a client. Sometimes the delivery is not what you asked for and you’re stuck in a short window to redo it (or late)!
Confusion. Naturally I’m a curious person, so I often ask broadly and widely what people think about the work I’m doing. But then I get stuck - there are so many smart people I respect deeply. Who‘s advice do I follow?
Side quest flop. I’m not new to eCommerce as I’ve had some level of success in the past. And I had so much great, experienced advice from others. So I’m extra embarrassed that the direction I took didn’t work and the project flopped (but not gone forever).
Experiments
Tweet-fluencer
I took Justin Welsh’s courses on LinkedIn and content and loved them.
I followed the idea of a hub-and-spoke strategy where you create hub content (long-form) like a podcast, video or blog and then promote it using spoke content (derivative short-form) on social media.
I create long-form on YouTube / Substack and promoted it using short-form via Twitter. The strategy does work. I could see more profile visits and a little bit of blog traffic to my Substack.
I managed to give it around 45 days before stopping, though.
The social media component felt like a total grind and not something that comes to me relatively smoothly.
YouTube
I started my YouTube channel because I wanted a long-term inbound channel that didn’t diminish so quickly like social media posting.
I hit about 18 videos in the year simply making how to and Q&A content.
What I like is that the viewership does indeed continue even when I don’t post. I have gotten 3 inbound enquiries, too 😂. So to some degree, it’s looking plausible.
Newsletter
Everyone ‘needs to have one’ - this advice is as old as the hills. I tried to combine this with the Justin Welsh approach of making it your long-form content using my Substack as the base for long-form.
But I didn’t get any responses or inbound enquiries. It could be people think it’s boring. It could be too soon to judge. Who knows?
Then I read this post by Josh Spector on How to get Clients with Email Newsletters.
He reminded me that clients don’t really care about your technical work. That’s what they hire you for.
Instead, curate valuable resources, keep it short and to the point. Encourage responses and interactions via email.
This makes sense to me so I’m looking at trying this approach for 2025.
AI Copywriting
I cut through the hype to find the way to write ad drafts using AI using Grok, Claude and ChatGPT.
I think it deserves its own guide so let me know in the comments if you would read that.
Key Lessons
Don’t simply delegate, buy back your time. Dan Martell’s book about the topic showed me that building an operation is not just about offloading work but focusing down your workload to the jobs that are important AND that you enjoy doing. So you’re building an operation you love to do, not building a machine you hate to administrate. He suggests 5 rungs, seen below.
If you have an abundance of mentors, be selective. Admittedly, a champagne problem to have too many credible mentors. But a lesson learned. Be careful who you let mentor you, because their guidance is not just about reducing mistakes and becoming more effective, there is also an element of who actually builds you up.
Lean beats big. If you watch Matt Shields interviews on YouTube you’ll see many big $ number SMMA founders are still in the weeds. Few are on the beach in Bali. I’d rather take home more and be small, than big with more drama.
Great communities motivate you. Alex Becker, a top performing media buyer, said once that you need to get around the ‘Level 60’ people in your community to feel that environmental motivation to press on. I joined one great PPC community and the conversations on leads, the media buying business and how to handle clients have been inspiring.
Over-communicate. In the book Beyond The Agency Box, author Frankie Fihn encourages building a culture with clients where you over-communicate in the beginning so that they can trust you. Send more email updates, looms, etc in the beginning. Even the tiniest update can build trust - and I’ve found that it works! I used to get bombarded with questions and now I get less questions and requests for calls.
Plans for 2025
Do more myself but buy back my time. Don’t just try to build an operation, delegate the parts that aren’t my favourite and invest time becoming better at my craft. I.e. I like building ad strategies, refining my knowledge on creative, media buying, landing pages, funnels, etc and putting that into practice.
Change the default from scale to focus. I can handle 10-15-ish clients at a time before my focus is tapped out. That’s enough for me and can be comfortably handled micro.
Narrow efforts to YouTube and Newsletter. Building off last year’s finding, I’ll keep trying with the fortnightly newsletter (link) and Q&A YouTube channel (link). I figure, of the things I’ve tried (blogging, social, etc etc) these are likely to pay off this year and I’ll be glad I did them 5 years from now.
2024 taught me that chasing scale without thoughtfulness lead to burnout and backfire. In 2025, I’m choosing to stay lean, operate simply, and focus on what really matters.
What would your freelancing look like if you stopped chasing growth and started building for joy and sustainability instead?
Focus, the elusive white buffalo of mental energy... Trying so hard to learn this. Your newsletter is so good. I'll stop by more often now that I realize
Really enjoyed reading this, it was served up in my feed. I built a big business and burned it down and talk a LOT now about lifestyle business defining your enough — sounds like you had the same learning!