Mark Sullivan is an agency owner who has also spent over 22 years in public safety. He has seen people in the best and worst of times. When he’s not working as a firefighter, he is the founder and creative director of the 7-figure agency he started in 2014. Mark is on the show to talk about the similarities between fighting fires and running an agency. He’s also sharing the #1 lesson he wishes he had known much sooner. 3 Golden Nuggets Running an agency can be like fighting fires. Your clients are trusting your agency with their livelihood, the same way firefighters rely on each other to get out of a fire. Everyone has to have trust in order to be successful. Trust your gut when a client doesn't feel right. One thing Mark wishes he had known sooner is that it's OK to walk away from a client that is a bad fit. You don't have to take on every prospect. It's better to take a chance at offending them than add stress to yourself and your team. Empower your team to make decisions. Stand behind your team on the decisions they make. When they feel supported and appreciated, they will make smart decisions that support your agency vision. Sponsor & Resources Wix: Today's episode is sponsored by the Wix Partner Program. Being a Wix Partner is ideal for freelancers and digital agencies that design and develop websites for their clients. Check out Wix.com/Partners to learn more and become a member of the community for free. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Is Owning an Agency Like Running Into a Burning Building? Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with a firefighter who also has an agency and has built a really amazing agency. And we talk about one of the number one lessons that he wished he could go back over. He actually learned the lesson from listening to the show. As well as what you can do in order to really keep and build an amazing team and really be that right leader and what you should really focus on in your agency that can make all the difference, not only in your agency but also in your life. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Mark, the firefighter slash agency owner, and now let's get into it. I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? Mark: [00:00:45] Well, my name is Mark Sullivan. I'm the founder, creative director of Lime Biscuit Creative. We're a branding and design agency, just outside of Atlanta. We do a lot of web design, logos. We love to do startups or total rebrands for companies. Have been doing that for six years now, working on year seven. And I also serve full-time as a Lieutenant at a fire department, just outside of Atlanta and been doing that for 23 years. So stay pretty busy. Jason: [00:01:11] Yeah, it's a definitely interesting story. So what made you want to kind of do the agency biz? How'd you get into it? Mark: [00:01:19] Well, it was kind of a backward, a way that we got into it. I ran a music agency where we basically would help bands and speakers get events and get into like car shows, where they would sign autographs and stuff and get reimbursement for it. They would do a concert, or stuff like that. That kind of rolled into us, working with some talent from A&E and the History Channel. And through that process, we learned real quick that, uh, those guys become divas really fast and it's not worth the hassle to work with them. But in that process, we learned that so many of them didn't have any kind of brand awareness. They didn't have any kind of design, uh, understanding of how it worked. And so we pretty much started learning on our own, how to create a brand for someone, a personal brand, a company brand. And from that, we started doing what we're doing today and as they got more difficult to work with, uh, we decided we were just going to kind of abandon that part of our business and strictly focus on the