Herbert Digital

GATED

Rebuilt from named Google Drive coaching sources on 1 Jun 2026 (four real documents: three Gemini session notes from Jan, Aug and Sep 2025, plus the April 2026 onboarding-plan feedback). Honest and qualitative — no figures beyond what the notes explicitly state. Sensitive material (named staff performance, a contractor dispute, client contract values, candidate ratings) deliberately excluded. Pending review. approved:false.

Where they started

Adrian Hoess runs Herbert Digital, a digital agency delivering web and application development and marketing-automation work (including Salesforce and, increasingly, the Braze platform). Like a lot of agency founders, Adrian was the engine of his own business — and that was the problem.

His days were full, but full of doing. As he put it in his own words, the work was “busy, but it’s the doing stuff” — deep in delivery, briefing developers, jumping into implementation and testing himself. An earlier attempt to bring in a support hire hadn’t worked out and, critically, had left no systems or processes behind for the next person to run on. That meant every time Adrian tried to step up to work on the business — planning, quarterly projects, growth — he got pulled straight back into the weeds.

There was a second exposure underneath it: the project pipeline leaned heavily on a single major client. Good work, but concentrated risk.

The real problem

This wasn’t a marketing problem or a sales problem. It was a classic owner-dependence bottleneck — the business couldn’t move forward because the founder was the constraint.

Two things kept that bottleneck locked in place. First, there was no supporting team able to take real delivery load off Adrian, so strategic time never materialised. Second, the previous hiring attempt had failed not just on the person but on the setup — no documented systems, no clear role definition, no accountability structure for a new hire to succeed inside. Without fixing the system around hiring, the next hire would fail the same way.

As Adrian framed it himself: until the supporting roles were in place, any planning or quarterly project would be “a struggle,” because he was “too stuck in the weeds.”

What we worked on

The coaching focused on the few things that would actually break the cycle:

• Reclaiming the founder’s time. Early sessions set a concrete target — find roughly 15 hours a week of delegable work and get it off Adrian’s plate — so there was time to lead rather than just deliver.
• Fixing the hiring system, not just the hire. We worked through what the right role actually was (a delivery-capable support role rather than another mismatched hire), and changed the approach: country-agnostic on talent, collaborative hiring with a partner in the loop rather than going it alone, and clear role boundaries defined up front.
• Building the systems a hire can run on. The lesson from the failed attempt was explicit — new people need documented processes and accountability to succeed. That became a deliberate piece of the work rather than an afterthought.
• Setting direction and measuring it. We put a project-prioritisation tracker in place to define clear, measurable objectives so Adrian could stay anchored on a few priorities instead of being “buffeted about” by whatever landed that week.
• Reducing single-client risk. We worked on diversifying the pipeline, including a productised-service direction built around a Braze marketing-automation partnership, to open opportunities beyond the one large account.

Where they are now

This is honest, in-progress work — not an overnight turnaround.

The meaningful shift is real: Herbert Digital moved from a failed hire and pure founder-delivery to actually bringing on a strategic hire — a Business Analyst — supported by a structured 100-day onboarding plan that the coaching helped pressure-test before day one. That plan deliberately defines what the new hire owns and doesn’t own, builds quality standards into the function, and is designed to make the role repeatable rather than dependent on Adrian.

In other words, the agency is converting a single hire into a function — the first concrete step out of the founder-in-every-job trap. The team and systems are being built; the next stage is letting that function carry real delivery load so Adrian can hold the higher-value work. The direction is set and the foundations are going in. The results that matter now are the ones that come from sticking with it.