As advisors and consultants working closely with founders of agencies and B2B service providers we see a familiar pattern play out time and again.
Founders are ambitious. They’re driven. They want to build something meaningful, valuable and successful. That ambition is often expressed in very clear business terms: revenue targets, EBITDA margins, headcount, valuation, exit timelines.
All of that matters. But it can’t sit in isolation.
The defining point for any sustainable, fulfilling growth journey is this: starting with the end in mind. And crucially, not just the business aspect and lens – but the life element too.
Why Start With the End in Mind?
When we ask founders “What are you doing this for?”, it’s a deceptively simple question. But it unlocks everything that follows.
Starting with the end in mind forces clarity. It helps answer:
- What is this business meant to facilitate in my life?
- Where do I want to be in 3, 5, 10 years’ time?
- What does “success” actually look like for me – not for my peers, not for the industry, but for my life as a whole?
When you gain real definition on those questions, two essential things happen:
- You can set an ambition that is truly yours.
- You create meaningful benchmarks to measure progress against.
Without that clarity, it’s easy to stay busy, hit milestones and make progress that’s measurable on a P&L.
But it’s also possible to do that and still feel strangely dissatisfied – or burnt out – because you’re climbing a ladder that’s leaning against the wrong wall.
The Common Trap: Business Goals in Isolation
Most founders naturally start with the business context. That’s understandable. The business is demanding, visible and measurable. Revenue, growth rates and valuation multiples are tangible.
Life goals are often messier, harder to articulate, and easier to postpone or neglect entirely. As John Lennon said, ‘life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans’.
But ignoring those wider life goals – pressures, responsibilities, values and lifestyle aspirations – creates parallel tracks that can quietly drift out of alignment.
When that happens, we often see:
- Chronic overwork and eventual burnout
- A plateau in business growth or a loss of momentum
- Stagnation, frustration, and a creeping sense of “Is this it?”
- In the long term, a falling out of love with the business itself
- And the familiar question: “Why am I doing this again?”
A business that is not in service to the founder’s life will eventually demand too high a price.
A Story From the Mentoring Room
Let me share a real example from my leadership coaching and mentoring work.
Two founders of a small but established and growing digital agency came to work with me at a pivotal moment. They were highly experienced operators, had built a solid business with strong foundations, and were entering the first phase of true scale-up. They were moving beyond SME territory.
As I do with every founder I advise, we started by defining both their current position and their ambition state.
Collectively, their ambition was clear and confidently stated:
- Scale the agency to circa £5M in revenue
- Achieve £1M+ EBIT
- Sell the business within four years
It’s a classic response – one shaped by prevailing narratives about what constitutes a “good” or “valuable” agency from a trade sale or corporate finance perspective.
On paper, it made perfect sense.
But, as is often the case, that didn’t tell the whole story.
Digging Beneath the Headline Ambition
As we went deeper – working individually as well as together – more context emerged.
Both founders were in their early 40s. Both had young children and shared childcare responsibilities with their partners. Both had spent their 20s and 30s working hard in senior agency roles, earning good salaries and building financial security.
They were not chasing survival. They were already comfortable.
So I began asking different questions:
- What sort of lifestyle do you actually want to lead?
- How present do you want to be with your children over the next decade?
- When do you want to retire?
- What do you value most outside of work?
- If you did sell the business, what would you do next?
- And do you truly understand what will be required of you – personally – to hit the growth and exit targets you’ve set?
That last question is often the most confronting.
Because scale doesn’t just demand better systems – it demands more from founders: more time, more emotional energy, more cognitive load, more difficult people decisions, more pressure.
The Realisation: Misaligned Ambitions
Over the course of several conversations, a clear truth emerged.
The original ambition – rapid scale to exit within four years – was fundamentally at odds with their real life goals.
What they actually wanted was:
- Steady, incremental growth
- A business that supported flexibility and presence with family
- A longer-term horizon, with less intensity and fewer all-consuming demands
- And, importantly, options
The idea of a trade sale was no longer the singular goal.
It became one option among many – alongside alternatives that might better support their lives, values and energy over the long term.
Nothing about this meant they were “less ambitious”. In fact, the opposite was true. They were finally being honest about what ambition meant to them.
Misaligned Ambitions Are the Enemy of Progress
When ambition is borrowed – from industry norms, peer comparison or external validation – it creates friction.
You might still grow. You might still hit numbers. But the journey can become heavier, less enjoyable, and ultimately unsustainable.
Being true to what you really want – not what you think you should want – is far more likely to:
- Deliver on your actual ambition
- Maintain momentum over the long term
- Protect your energy and relationships
- And make the process of building the business genuinely rewarding
The irony is that clarity often accelerates progress. When the destination is right, decisions become easier, trade-offs clearer, and strategy more coherent.
Final Thought
Starting with the end in mind is not about lowering ambition. It’s about defining it properly.
A great business is one that grows, scales and creates value.
A truly successful business is one that does all of that in service to the founder’s life.
If you don’t take the time to define the end, you risk waking up years down the line having built something impressive – but misaligned.
And that’s a far harder problem to fix than a missed revenue target.
