Loneliness 2am Doubts Getting Ghosted Indie Agency Founders Share Their Experiences Of Year One

Creative Boom: Insight Leadership Loneliness, 2am doubts & getting ghosted: indie agency founders share their experiences of year one What actually happens when you leave your comfy job and start from scratch? We chat to agency founders to hear their stories. Written By: Tom May 18 June 2026 Image licensed via Alamy Right now, something is shifting in the creative industry. Across the UK, senior creatives are leaving the relative safety of network agencies—some after decades of painstakingly climbing the ladder—to launch their own studios. The Drum has called 2026 the "Year of the Indie".

But what does going independent actually look like from the inside, beyond the tasteful brand identity and the optimism-laden "We're thrilled to announce…" post? To find out, we set out to uncover the real stories. The first client. The months when the money doesn't come in. The moments of doubt that hit hardest. Founders from Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, London and beyond shared with us accounts that were funny, raw, occasionally terrifying… but also useful. What emerged isn't a simple call to "follow your dreams." It's something more complicated, and a lot more interesting, than that.

The moment the penny drops What struck us most is how often the decision to leave a comfy job isn't driven by pure ambition, but disillusionment. These are typically people who were good at working within large structures, who rose to the top of them… then looked around at what they'd built, and found it wanting. Take Steven Bennett-Day, founder of B Corp creative studio Ourselves, who launched his agency in 2019 alongside a partner, after both had reached board level in global networks. "Our leap came as we found out just how little of a client's budget went on actual creativity," he says.

"We realised many of the business decisions made by those agencies were in support of an operating model that was struggling. Big ideas felt a bit like small print in that world." This feeling—that the machine has grown too big, too expensive and too distracted to serve the actual work—comes up again and again. For Steffan Cummins, who left Wolff Olins two years ago to start Lost Property (now a team of six), the shift is visible in client behaviour, too. "Clients are more interested in getting to know the specific people behind the work, versus the weight of a historic agency name," he says.

"Add, of course, the cost difference." Rich Pay, creative director and founder of MOKSi Creative in Liverpool, frames it in the simplest of terms. "People buy people," he explains. "Even at network agencies, there tend to be the faces that the client knows and trusts, then the rest of the team. With stretched budgets, the cost attached to that starts to sound unreasonable." Year one: the reality Here's where the bravado of those triumphant LinkedIn posts can start to ebb away. Almost every founder we talked to described year one as significantly harder than anticipated, and in ways they hadn't predicted.

Marianne Olaleye left ustwo three years ago to go freelance before founding Jaiku, a storytelling agency for purpose-led brands. "The hardest part of year one was overdelivering, but not pricing myself high enough," she recalls. By year two, a different problem had arrived. "It was the loneliness and relentless decision-making. "When you go at it alone, every week brings a hundred decisions and no one to sense-check some of them with," Marianne reflects. "You learn to trust your own judgment in ways that are both revelatory and terrifying." What helped?

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The article highlights a significant trend in the industry with the rise of indie agencies, which is relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals, though the concept of smaller agencies is not entirely new.