I made a mistake that cost me 30% of a team

I made a mistake that cost me 30% of a team in three months.

A few years back, we acquired an agency with 20 employees and the first thing I did during due diligence was what I always do - I sat down and interviewed every single employee we were inheriting. One-on-one. Just conversations to understand who I was about to work with and where the cracks were.

Within those interviews, three people raised every single red flag I know how to spot. They were optimizing entirely for themselves while using all the right team-first language. They were skilled at sounding collaborative while telling me, in subtle ways, that they didn't really answer to anyone. The previous owner had let them operate with zero accountability for years. They could say "I don't have time for that" and nobody ever pushed back. They'd built an entire identity around being too important to be questioned.

I went back to the team after those interviews and said, very directly, that these three people could not make the cut. That if we were going to run this business properly post-acquisition, they had to go before we closed. I was overruled. The argument was that we needed continuity, that they had relationships, that disrupting things this early would create chaos.

That was red flag number one, and I should have listened to my own gut harder than I did.

I let it slide.

Weeks three and four - the first two weeks after we officially took over - we started introducing basic accountability. Nothing extreme. Time cards so we could see what people were working on. Utilization tracking. A capacity forecast so we could stop guessing about who had room and who didn't. Just the foundational data layer that any healthy agency needs to operate.

The three people I'd flagged immediately started pushing back. They framed every measurement system as an insult, every accountability conversation as micromanagement, every basic operational request as some kind of corporate overreach. That was red flag number two, and again, I should have moved on it then. I didn't.

By month two we were assigning work based on capacity instead of just taking people at their word about how busy they were. The three of them completely lost it. "You think we're robots." "You don't understand how we work." "This isn't who we are as a team." They pointed fingers in every direction except at themselves. None of them - not one - was willing to look at the data and admit that they'd been coasting for years under a system that never asked them to perform.

By month three, all three were gone. But not before they convinced three more people to leave with them on the way out. So in 90 days, we lost six people from a 20-person team. A 30% exodus, immediately after an acquisition, in front of clients who were already nervous about the transition.

It hurt. It cost us money. It cost us momentum. And honestly, it cost us some clients in the short term because the chaos was visible from the outside.

But it taught me something I'll never forget, and I want you to internalize it before you ever find yourself in a similar situation - whether that's an acquisition, a leadership transition, or just the moment you finally try to bring real accountability to a team that's been operating without it.

Three lessons.

First: trust the due diligence. If someone raises red flags in early conversations, that's data. Real data. Don't override it because the seller wants a clean handoff or because you're worried about disruption. The disruption from keeping the wrong people is always worse than the disruption from removing them upfront. Always.

Second: cut before you close. If you're acquiring an agency, make it contingent. Specific people don't pass the bar, they don't come over. Period. It's a much harder conversation to have after the deal closes than before, and the cost of doing it later is exponentially higher. The seller will push back. Push back harder.

Third: expect the blame. When you introduce accountability to a team that's never had it, the people who've been coasting will never self-reflect. Not once. They will call you the villain. They will tell their colleagues you're a tyrant. They will frame basic operational expectations as some kind of personal attack. That is the cost of fixing a broken culture, and you have to be willing to absorb it without flinching, because the alternative is letting the broken culture continue to drag everyone else down with it.

Most agency owners I work with have at least one or two people on their team right now who are exactly what those three were. Skilled at sounding collaborative, allergic to measurement and utterly convinced they're indispensable.

The longer you let them operate without accountability, the harder the eventual reckoning becomes. And there is always a reckoning. You either choose it on your terms or you wait until the business forces it on you.

If you want help building the accountability infrastructure that surfaces who's performing and who's just been coasting - without losing your good people in the process - book a call here.

Nick