Six years ago I wrote a blog post about why I started Reform Digital during a global pandemic, with a baby on the way, having just been made redundant. The short answer back then was: “why not?”
I still believe in that same energy, but if I’m being honest with myself and with you, that post was written by someone with a lot of conviction and not a lot of scar tissue. This one is a little different. This is the version I wish someone had handed me back then.
Revenue Is Vanity. Profit Is Where It’s Actually At.
There is something intoxicating about watching your revenue number climb. In the early years, I was absolutely guilty of chasing it. There is also something kind of arrogant in saying to industry colleagues “We have a huge head count, look how great we are” – I fell for this quite a bit.
New client? Great. Bigger retainer? Even better. Top line growing? Let’s go!
What I didn’t fully appreciate was how little that number actually told me about the health of the business. You can be doing $5M in revenue and still be completely stressed about making payroll. You can win a massive account and actually go backwards because of the resource drain that comes with it. Revenue is the number you put in Instagram captions. Profit is the number that determines whether you’re building something real.
It took a few painful moments of looking at the books and asking “where did it all go?” before this truly sank in. Now, profit is the first conversation, not an afterthought.
Scaling Is Exciting. It’s Also Where Things Can Fall Apart.
Growth is the goal, right? More clients, more staff, more offices, more markets. To an extent – yes, all of that is genuinely exciting. I’m proud of how Reform has grown over the years.
But there were stretches where we were growing faster than our foundations could support, and I felt it everywhere. In the quality of our work, in the stress levels of the team, in client relationships that weren’t getting the attention they deserved. A couple of clients left and gave me horrific feedback, that was warranted and it definitely gave me some much needed perspective on how we approach all of the above.
When you scale without the right systems, processes and people in place, you aren’t actually building something bigger. You’re just creating more ways for things to go wrong – and trust me, they do go wrong. The lesson I kept learning the hard way: slow down the growth conversation until you can answer the question “do we have the team and the infrastructure to actually deliver on this at the next level?” If the answer is anything other than a confident yes, that’s where your energy needs to go first.
Growing As A Father Made Me A Better Leader. And Vice Versa.
When I wrote the original post, I mentioned having a baby on the way as one of the reasons people thought I was crazy for starting an agency. To be honest with you, I still think I was a little bit crazy to this day making that decision. That kid is now six years old and becoming a dad has probably shaped the way I run this business more than any course, book or mentor ever could.
You learn patience in a whole new way when you’re a parent. You learn that people need consistency, not perfection. You learn that the way you show up in the hard moments matters more than how you show up when everything is going well. You also learn pretty quickly that you can’t pour from an empty cup, which is something I ignored for too long in the early years of running the business.
Being a present father has forced me to be a more intentional leader, this includes in the community around me, not just specifically my work life. I can’t be in the office until 10pm every night, so I have learned to empower and trust my team, more than I have in the past and something I should have been doing a long time ago.
That trust, built properly, has become one of the best things about Reform.
Change Is Not An Event. It’s The Job.
I think when most people imagine running an agency, they picture getting to a point where things are “figured out” and then just executing. I used to think that too.
The reality is that the pace of change in digital marketing is relentless. Platforms shift, algorithm updates wipe out strategies overnight, AI has completely reshaped how we think about content, search and creative. The clients who were winning in 2020 aren’t always winning now and the tactics that worked then often don’t work the same way they used to.
The hardest part isn’t keeping up with the changes themselves. It’s bringing your team and your clients along with you and evolving rapidly and constantly. Change management is genuinely one of the most underrated skills in running any business and it’s something I’ve had to develop deliberately with help from those around me. People need context. They need to understand the why before they’ll commit to the how and they need to see you leading from the front, not just sending a memo from time to time.
So, Would I Do It Again?
Every – single – time!
Not because it’s been easy. It genuinely hasn’t. There have been moments of real doubt, real financial stress and real personal cost, along with burnout. There have also been moments where I’ve watched a client’s business completely transform because of what our team built for them or a staff member has excelled in their role past anything I could have imagined – there is nothing quite like the feeling you get from those successes.
The version of me who wrote that post in 2020 was running on optimism and adrenaline and rightly so, things were in my opinion, much easier back then. That was what the moment called for at that specific time, but this version of Reform, the one we’re building right now, is running on something more durable: a clear sense of what we stand for, a team I genuinely trust and a much more honest relationship with what it actually takes to build something that lasts.
Honestly, through the thick of it all, I’m proud of what we continue to build.
Here’s to the next six years. I suspect they’ll teach me just as much.
Dave Hyman – Founder – Reform Digital
