What Kathryn Strachan learned stepping out of delivery to build and sell CopyHouse

Kathryn Strachan left an agency job after asking for a small pay rise and being told no. She went freelance, the work kept coming, and within five years CopyHouse was a specialist B2B technology content agency with a 32-person team and over two million in annual recurring revenue. In 2024 it was acquired by a larger agency group.

I have sat across the table from a lot of owners over the years, and most of them never manage what Kathryn did. The business grows, but it grows around them, and by the time they want to step back or sell, everything still depends on them. When Kathryn joined me on the Business Answers Podcast, she was remarkably open about how she got herself out of the middle of the business, what it cost her personally, and what she would tell an owner thinking about the same road. The lessons apply to any owner-managed business, whether it is an agency, a distributor or a manufacturer.

Like most agency founders, Kathryn started as the person doing the doing. The turning point came, as she put it, "when the work started to outstrip what I could do individually." Rather than lean on a pool of freelancers, she decided to build a permanent team she could invest in and develop, and at the end of 2019 she hired four people.

She chose those first hires by looking at what was filling her own week. She was doing most of the copywriting, so one of the first people in was a copywriter. She was also managing every client, so she hired an account manager at the same time. Her rule from then on was simple. "If the goal is to sell an agency, you have to get yourself out of it, which means constantly looking at your workload and what you can move off."

Even so, about a year in, with around twelve copywriters on the team, every piece of content was still passing through her before it went out the door. She had become the bottleneck. "I wasn't leading the company. I wasn't looking after the company's larger vision or strategy."

The lesson for owners. Hire to take specific work off your own desk, starting with whatever fills most of your week. Then keep checking, because the bottleneck tends to move back to you as the business grows.

Kathryn's answer to the bottleneck was to bring in a creative director some twenty years her senior. In her words, "he pretty much pushed me out the door and said, you know, I have this. Let me do this."

She is honest that this was harder than delegating tasks, because it meant giving up how she saw herself. "It really required an identity shift from myself because I had to stop thinking of myself as the doer." She had to stop being the great copywriter and become the chief executive.

The other key figure was her head of operations, who built many of the agency's systems and processes. He was not a co-founder, but as she said, "he ran it like he was a co-founder." He was beside her through the whole sale and the due diligence, which she describes as "quite a cumbersome task, and definitely isn't something that you can undertake on your own." Because the business was set up so that he could run it, Kathryn was able to leave when the deal closed.

The lesson for owners. Your senior hires decide whether you get your time back or end up doing two jobs. Bring in people experienced enough to take real ownership, give them room to do it, and be prepared for the change it asks of you personally.

What surprised me most was how early Kathryn planned the exit. About four or five months into the agency, she was already working with two specialist agency M&A advisers who had built and sold agencies themselves. Selling was the goal from the start, and the business was designed with that in mind.

That meant she was talking to investors, agency groups and potential acquirers for the whole journey. When the time came, the right buyer came through those same advisers. "Have those conversations long before you need them, because then you are ready, rather than doing a fire sale or needing to exit really quickly and not having any of these relationships."

I asked what a founder two years out from an exit should be doing now. Her answer was to get advice from people who have been through it, and to build the systems, processes and documentation as you grow. "To wait until you're ready to exit and then try to do all of it would be a nightmare."

The lesson for owners. Even if a sale is years away, run the business as though a buyer will one day look closely at it, and get good advice early. The same work that makes a business easier to sell makes it a better business to own in the meantime.

When CopyHouse expanded into the United States, Kathryn made a deliberate decision not to hire there. Payroll is an agency's biggest cost and US salaries are much higher, so billing at US rates while delivering with a UK team kept the profit margin strong.

It came at a personal cost, which I come to below, but the commercial logic is one I make to almost every owner I work with. Turnover is easy to celebrate. Margin and net profit are what make a business valuable, to you and to a buyer.

The lesson for owners. Watch your gross margin as closely as your sales line, and know your biggest cost. If turnover is rising and profit is not following, something in the structure needs attention.

By the time CopyHouse passed the two million mark, Kathryn was working 70 to 80 hours a week, flying to New York every other month and living in London while her husband and daughter were in Scotland. She lost weight and some of her hair, and had an eye twitch that never went away. "It's amazing what stress will do to your body because it impacts like every element of you."

She turned down a higher valuation so that she could walk away cleanly when the deal closed. "I think you can't put money on some things like my health," she told me, and she describes her marriage as priceless. She is proud of what she built, and she made the decision to leave for the right reasons.

The lesson for owners. A sale price is only one part of a good exit. Be honest about what the business is costing you, your health and your family, and let that shape the timing and the terms you accept.

Kathryn describes the day the deal closed as "a whirlwind of several different emotions all at once that are both amazing and awful." It was also the day the team was told, including the people who would not be moving to the new group. Deciding who went and who did not was, she says, the hardest decision of the whole process, and she used her own network to find new roles for those who were not going.

The first six months afterwards felt like grief. When your introduction has always been "Hi, I'm Kathryn Strachan, CEO of CopyHouse," you have to work out who you are without the second half of that sentence. She compares it to a breakup you know was right, which still leaves a huge gap in your life.

Her advice to an owner afraid of losing their identity is to start with what you really want, remembering that selling outright is only one option. If you do want to exit, speak to people who have done it, have a plan for what comes next, and make sure you have a strong support network around you.

The lesson for owners. Owners plan the financial side of an exit in great detail and give very little thought to who they will be the Monday after. Preparing yourself is part of preparing the business.

I asked Kathryn whether there was anything she regretted. Her answer was about a person rather than the deal. Her head of operations stayed with the business when she left, and the closeness they had built over five years had to change. "If I could change one thing and still have my current situation be my current situation, it would be that I still had him."

We also talked about whether a phased handover or earn-out would have made the transition easier. For some owners it could, she said, though it means working under someone else in a business you no longer control. For her, a clean exit was the right choice.

Kathryn did the hard part brilliantly. She built to sell from the start, surrounded herself with good advisers and created a senior team strong enough to run the business without her. Very few owners I meet get that far. But if I had been sitting beside her along the way, there are three conversations I would have wanted to have with her.

The first is about the personal brand. Kathryn was the face of CopyHouse, with a large following on LinkedIn and speaking invitations that came to her by name. That brought in business, but it is also a risk a buyer will notice, because some of that goodwill leaves with the founder. I would have encouraged her to build up a second voice in the business much earlier, someone like her creative director or head of operations, so that clients and the market knew the agency as more than one person.

The second is about her own time. Not hiring in the US protected the margin. What it did not show on the profit and loss account was the cost of the founder working 80 hours a week and crossing the Atlantic every other month. I always ask owners to put a value on their own time and health. Once you do that, a senior commercial hire in the US, even a part-time one, can look very different. A founder close to burnout is also a risk in a sale, because the business depends on that person holding together until the deal closes.

The third is about timing. Kathryn chose her health and her family over a higher valuation, and I would never argue with that. My thought is that the best exits usually start a year or so before the owner feels they have to go, while there is still energy to negotiate and to plan a proper handover. A short, clearly defined transition period might have let her capture more of the value she had built without the long earn-out she rightly wanted to avoid. And her head of operations was central to that value. I would have looked at whether he could have been given a stake or a formal role in the deal earlier, both to protect the sale and to recognise what he had built alongside her.

None of this takes away from what Kathryn achieved. She built a business that could stand without her, step by step, and that is what gave her the freedom to sell on her own terms. Most of the owners I meet are somewhere in the middle of that journey, often stuck at the point where everything still runs through them. The steps are the same ones Kathryn took, and they can start this week.