The biggest mistake I made moving from a big agency to running my own (small) studio

A.K.A., my path to total physical and mental annihilation, and the reason I still have a shaved head

This is part business advice, part an extremely personal confession of what overworking did to me.

It’s pretty personal, but there are enough years between me and the worst of it that I’m ok sharing about it. I watch lots of people fall into similar patterns when they head out on their own. I watch myself nearly fall back in sometimes, too.

So here goes. Please feel free to skip this week if you’re more interested in practical naming advice. It will be back next week. (Sort of. I’ll be whining about naming styles I hate next week.)

I used to work for a branding agency called Interbrand.

At the time, its tagline was “The World’s Largest Brand Consultancy.” (Creative stuff!)

I met a lot of very talented people at Interbrand. I learned to be incredibly rigorous in the work that I did.

But a big lesson I learned from “The World’s Largest Brand Consultancy” was that doing this work required big teams—huge, sometimes.

These teams often included many disciplines, like program management, design, analytics, strategy, and implementation. Sometimes, even the CEO was on the team.

On my own practice-area team, verbal identity, I led the naming practice, but I would also get to work on projects with people who specialized in copywriting, messaging, voice, and content strategy.

Then, in the first few months of 2016, after seven years there, I left to start my own studio with a business partner.

We thought we needed to seem big

Big was good for Interbrand.

Big meant we could say yes to all sorts of client requests: Last-minute requests from a CEO, at superhuman turnaround times, even when the ask was massive.

Those yeses came at great personal expense to every single person on these teams, of course. Travel schedules that ate up nights and weekends. Late nights at the office, forgoing exercise, meals anywhere other than a desk or a conference table, and personal relationships. My houseplants died.

But big was essential! It was what the clients we wanted to work with must have wanted, because why else would Interbrand focus so much on big?

Small, therefore, was weak. We had to act big.

This belief was THE big mistake.

I am capable of a lot. So I thought that meant I should do a lot.

Working on big-agency teams that were constantly over capacity meant I learned a lot by picking up the slack from my over-committed team members:

• Yes, I can write that statement of work on the plane.

• Yes, I can take your interview notes and put together the first draft of the brand strategy.

• Yes, I can brief the design team to get them started on initial logo exploration.

(And trust me, I have dozens of people to thank who picked up the slack and took on work for me, too.)

While we launched our small studio as a brand-language studio, we were used to having to do a LOT on every project. So we offered a LOT (brand strategy, voice, messaging, copywriting, naming, content strategy, internal comms development, podcast development…).

We would also say yes to all sorts of additional requests that came in (creative direction, culture and employee value proposition work, audience research).

We offered the same work that teams of five to 12 people would tackle at Interbrand, on the same timelines, for far less money.

I cannot emphasize enough that we were just two people.

It took my health falling apart to realize that I needed to lean into small

I have a shaved head. It’s a very distinctive part of ~my whole vibe~ now.

But for most of my adult life, I had very long hair, which I wore in a bun.

In 2017, a year and change into running a small studio, I noticed that my hair was just…not there anymore, in certain spots.

But I had no time to worry about it. I had four or five projects to run, a weekly podcast to record, a nonprofit board to be on, a strongman competition schedule to adhere to, and a personal life (just kidding, I had no personal life).

Eventually, my body had had enough.

I got shingles, I developed an ulcer, I spent weeks where I couldn’t stay awake for longer than an hour or two, and, finally, my hair loss got so bad that I had to shave my head.

Multiple trips to hospitals and specialists surfaced a common theme: you need to chill the fuck out, and now.

Among a slew of other health problems, I was diagnosed with alopecia areata, an autoimmune disruption in my hair cycle. One of my triggers was stress.

It’s so obvious in hindsight, but I genuinely didn’t think I was doing too much

I thought I was just doing what anyone who runs a small branding studio does.

And I was watching a lot of my peers do similar things: Run huge ambitious projects as though they were still had the resources and budget of a massive agency team.

It turned out that many of them were also struggling behind the scenes. Things were slipping, either at home or with their health or with the relationships in their life.

It took a couple of years to connect with people about what was really happening in my life during that time, and it was weirdly reassuring to learn that other people couldn’t actually do it all either.

(I’m happy to say that I have a lot of important friendships with other small studio owners where we talk very candidly about managing our lives and our health, and I’d encourage you to build that kind of community too.)

How could I bring some order to the chaos I’d very eagerly invited into my life? Look for the places where I could feel a little bit of calm.

Our best client relationships felt like true partnerships.

They valued our expertise.

They listened when we spoke about what it took to do things right.

Even if they were the type of client we had at Interbrand (think: large enterprises, professional services, financial services, big tech companies), most weren’t actually asking us to act like that.

They didn’t need a partner available around the clock, they were ok if we told them we couldn’t get on a phone call on a Sunday. They could see that we were just two people and could imagine what two people—even two talented ones—could actually accomplish.

When I left that studio and started Wild Geese Studio in 2023, I got even more focused on the types of clients and projects I could reasonably support

This led to me to the focus on naming services, and to examine every assumption I had about what “needed” to happen for a project to be successful.

While Wild Geese Studios as a wider range of naming services than I’ve ever offered in the past, they’re all built on the same set of core beliefs about naming and what it takes to make naming successful That makes it easy for us to know how to apply our expertise, and where the scope of what we’re available for ends.

At a big agency, you rarely are in a position to say no to work, so it had never occurred to me that it was even allowed. Now, a big part of my client/project fit is a sanity check: Would saying yes to this work harm me or my team members, even if I knew we could do great work?

Even as Wild Geese Studio gets bigger, I am clearer than ever about the fact that we’re small

We’re not your one-stop-shop for all things brand.

We focus on projects that center on naming, with exceptions for other brand-language and brand-led strategic initiatives with highly aligned clients.

We write sane timelines.

We’re definitive about what we can and cannot do.

We’re upfront about what we do and do not know.

We don’t have client meetings on Fridays.

We’re open about when we’re bringing in additional help—and we often do, from our deep bench of exceptional namers around the world, and our trusted partners in project management, research, and content.

My hair still tells me when I’m doing too much

As much as I would love to tell you that I keep my shaved head as a rejection of societal norms, the real story is that it’s just easier to spot when a bald patch is emerging.

When I notice what my first barber generously called “light spots,” it’s time to say no more, bring in more help, breathe more, do more jiu jitsu, be human with our clients when they want us to be superhuman, and to remember that truly great work comes from people who are able to walk and sleep and dream and live in the world—not just work in it.

Happy naming!

Caitlin

Want more naming resources?

Take an upcoming Naming for Everyone live small-group class, or check out our new self-guided series.

Download free booklets from the Truth in Branding series on naming and trademarks.

Check out an episode of Big Names in Naming, the podcast where I interview namers about…naming.