I have a heavy, heavy heart tonight. Today I learned my friend Norm Thomas passed away. He was a great guy, loved cooking, loved marketing, loved his dog and was always willing to help people. He will be sorely missed. Via Con Dios, Brother.

Every agency owner hits this wall. You start the day with a plan. By 10am you're solving a client crisis, fixing a report that broke, or answering "hey quick question" for the fifth time. The plan is dead. You're just reacting now. That's firefighting. And here's the uncomfortable part: it's not bad luck. It's a design flaw in how you built the agency. 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗣 Most owners think firefighting is a workload problem. Too many clients, not enough hours. So they hire. They add a VA, then an account manager, then a fulfillment person. And the fires keep starting. Here's why. If your agency has no clear systems, every new hire is just another person who needs YOU to make decisions. You didn't remove the bottleneck. You cloned it. Challenge this in your own business right now. Ask yourself: if I added three more clients tomorrow, would my week get calmer or worse? If the honest answer is "worse," you don't have a capacity problem. You have a systems problem. 𝗦𝗬𝗠𝗣𝗧𝗢𝗠 𝗙𝗜𝗫𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗩𝗦 𝗥𝗢𝗢𝗧 𝗖𝗔𝗨𝗦𝗘 𝗙𝗜𝗫𝗜𝗡𝗚 Owners love symptom fixes because they feel productive. A client is mad, so you personally jump on a call and smooth it over. Great, that fire is out. But nothing changed about why the fire started. Root cause fixing looks less exciting. It's writing the onboarding checklist so the thing that made the client mad never happens again. It's boring work. It's also the only thing that actually reduces fires over time. A useful gut check: every time you put out a fire, ask "will this exact fire happen again in 30 days if I do nothing else?" If yes, you just bought yourself a rerun. 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗘 𝗟𝗔𝗬𝗘𝗥𝗦 𝗢𝗙 𝗔 𝗡𝗢𝗡-𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗔𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗬 Think of your agency as needing three layers working together. Miss one and the other two can't save you. 𝐋𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫 𝟏: 𝐃𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬: If a task lives only in your head, it's not a process, it's a personality trait. Every recurring task needs a written SOP. Not a novel. A checklist someone with average skill and zero context could follow and get 80% of the result you'd get doing it yourself.

Go check. I'll wait. Here's my take: you don't need 300 tabs open to get real work done. You need about 5. Maybe 8 on a chaotic day. Every extra tab is an open loop. Your brain knows it's there, even when you're not looking at it. That's not multitasking, that's just background anxiety with a favicon. The agency owners I see actually shipping work aren't the ones with 12 browser windows and 40 tabs each. They're running tight: one client's dashboard open, one doc, maybe Slack. Close it, open the next thing when you need it. So here's the question: how many tabs do you have open, and be honest, how many of them are actually doing something for you right now versus just sitting there because you're scared to close them? Drop your number below. Let's see who's a minimalist and who's basically running a digital hoarder's museum.

Client has this thing persisting on the bottom right of every page on thier site. Does anyone know what is causing it? Seems familiar but I dont recall what it is.

Please critique this for me. I've never used Divi 5 but use Divi on my agency site so can easily get access to the lifetime benefits. Would be a learning process for me to develope a site on it. One that i might be able to repeat. Give it to me straight friends!