I started that Monday with a clean slate. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

The weekend had been necessary. Not the fun kind of necessary, where you come back from two days off with a tan and fresh ideas. The survival kind. The kind where your body forces you to stop because your brain already quit three days earlier.

The week before had broken something.

The Letting Go

We let someone go that week. A senior team member. Someone I’d invested in, coached, given feedback to, built plans around.

The call was prepped. I had the business arguments lined up. I’d even reframed it into something that was genuinely true: this was better for everyone. The role wasn’t a fit. The direction had shifted. Continuing would’ve been unfair to both sides.

But then he gave me his feedback.

He told me he’d felt like a fly on the wall. Not in those exact words, but that was the feeling. Like he was just extra help. Not really part of something. Not really seen.

That hit.

Because I see myself as the empathetic guy. The one who keeps an eye on people. The one who cares. The dad of four who’s figured out some things about showing up for others. And here was someone telling me that despite all of that, he felt invisible.

I took it personally. Not because he was wrong. Because he was right.

He was right, and I’d missed it. Not because I didn’t care, but because I was running so fast that the things that really matter to people, the human stuff, got lost in the noise. I was in survival mode. And when you’re in survival mode, your skills disappear. The empathy, the leadership, the presence. It all goes somewhere you can’t reach.

That feedback made me question my role. Not just in the team. In the company.

The Switch

Two days later, I was on a call with a prospect. A big one. A brand doing serious volume, global ambitions, a real opportunity.

And I was electric.

That’s how it works with ADHD. There’s a switch. If I sense excitement, if I feel like my skills are being used, if the person on the other side of the screen actually needs what I bring, I can flip it. Instantly. I become the version of me that people love to be around. Sharp, energetic, strategic, present.

It’s not fake. It IS me. But it’s a specific version of me that requires a specific trigger. And the trigger is never a long meeting where everyone needs to give their opinion. The trigger is urgency, novelty, and the feeling that I’m creating something in real time.

The problem isn’t turning it on. I can turn it on in seconds.

The problem is turning it off.

After those calls, especially the late ones, I’m buzzing. My brain is still running through scenarios, follow-ups, angles, positioning ideas. I need to actively wind down. Breathing exercises. A walk around the block. Meditation. Something, anything, to convince my nervous system that the call is over.

Without that, I stay on until midnight. Building things nobody asked for. Tinkering with tools. Starting new projects because the momentum has nowhere to go. And then I wake up the next morning running on empty again.

The same brain that makes me magnetic in a meeting is the one that won’t let me sleep after.

The Kitchen Table

My wife told me something last week. She said she doesn’t like being around when I have those calls.

Not because she doesn’t support me. She does. She gets excited for me. But she also feels the pressure. She picks up on the energy, and she worries. Will the call go well? Will he come out frustrated or fired up?

She stays away. Gives me space. And when it’s over, we reconnect. I tell her how it went. Sometimes I ask her if we can just sit for a bit so I can talk it through. That helps.

That’s the good version.

The bad version is what she gets after the draining calls. The long meetings that went nowhere. The discussions that should have been decisions. The feedback that felt like criticism at the worst possible moment.

That version walks into the kitchen and is immediately annoyed by noise. Impatient with the kids fighting. Snappy. Sarcastic. Short-fused.

I hate being that person. And I know exactly what causes it. It’s not the kids. It’s not my wife. It’s that I walked in already empty, and the first demand on my remaining energy tips me over.

My wife sees the wired version after good calls. The kids sometimes get the crashed version after bad ones. And they don’t know the difference. They just know dad is grumpy.

The Content Paradox

Here’s the part that’s hard to admit.

Every morning, there’s a LinkedIn post going out. Something about leadership. About showing up. About asking better questions. About being the kind of consultant who sees the whole picture.

And in that same week, I’m not showing up the way I want at home. I’m questioning whether I should even be leading this team. I just heard from someone I managed that they felt invisible on my watch.

Is there tension between the person I write as and the person I actually am?

Yes.

But not in the way you might think.

The tension only exists when I write because I have to, not because I want to. When content becomes a checkbox, the gap between what I’m saying and what I’m living gets obvious. To me, at least. I feel it. I know when a post came from obligation and when it came from something real.

The posts that land, the ones people actually screenshot and send to their teams, those always come from a real situation. A real mistake. A real moment where I saw something most people miss.

The ones that feel hollow are the ones where I’m performing. And the weeks where I’m already performing just to get through the day, adding content performance on top of that is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain.

The Iteration Tax

There’s a pattern that drives me up the wall. And I only recently figured out what’s actually happening.

I move fast. I always have. I get an idea, I run with it, I build something, and I ship it. Most of the time, I know it’s not perfect. I know there are rough edges. That’s the point. I’m iterating.

I’ve coached myself on this. I use AI to challenge my thinking. I review things multiple times before I share them. And then I share them, and people still have opinions.

That’s normal. I know that.

But there’s something that happens when I’m tired that turns normal feedback into something that feels personal. Something that triggers a reaction I can’t always control.

When someone catches a mistake I missed, my first thought isn’t “good catch.” My first thought is: Why did I miss that? Should I not have relied on the AI for this? Am I just not good enough anymore?

And then the thing that annoys me even more: when I sit with the feedback, really look at it, they’re usually right. The adjustment makes sense. The change is reasonable. And now I’m not just annoyed at the feedback. I’m annoyed at myself for not seeing it first.

This is where the snappiness comes from. Not from the feedback itself, but from the gap between how fast I want to move and how much I expect from myself when I’m running on empty.

I need room to fail forward. Ten bad proposals had to happen before the one that closed the deal. The client never saw the ten. They saw the polished version and said yes. But the people around me, my business partner, my team, they see the drafts. The messy ones. The ones with the mistakes.

And sometimes, especially when I’m tired, their feedback on draft number 6 feels like judgment on the whole process. Even when it’s not.

The Reframe

So here’s where I am.

In the same two-week stretch, I closed a major new client. Restructured a full ad account for another. Shipped ten LinkedIn posts. Ran a security audit across our infrastructure. Held a product strategy meeting. Let a team member go with as much grace as I could manage. Did a zero-inbox email cleanup. Imported a new set of professional tools into our operating system.

And I also snapped at my kids. Was impatient with my wife. Doubted my role in my own company. Built things nobody asked for at 11pm because I couldn’t turn my brain off. Got annoyed at my business partner for giving me feedback I knew was correct.

I used to think these two lists were in conflict. That the second one was evidence I wasn’t doing it right. That if I was really performing, the personal stuff wouldn’t slip.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think this is what it actually looks like when you’re doing it. Not the curated version. Not the “CEO morning routine” post. The actual, operational, daily truth of running a lean business with a small team, four kids, a marriage you’re actively protecting, ADHD that gives you superpowers and takes them away in the same afternoon, and a level of ambition that doesn’t fit neatly into a 40-hour week.

It’s messy. It’s contradictory. It’s exhausting.

And you’re still moving forward.

What I’m Learning

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here. That would be dishonest.

But there are things I’m starting to see more clearly.

The switch is a feature, not a bug. I can walk into any room and be the person that room needs. That’s a genuine skill. But it costs energy that has to come from somewhere, and if I don’t actively refill the tank, the people closest to me pay the price.

Running on empty doesn’t make me a bad leader. It makes me a human one. The difference between a bad leader and a tired one is whether you can see the pattern. I can see it now. The question is whether I act on it before the crash, not after.

Feedback feels personal when you’re depleted. When I’m rested and present, I can hear “this needs work” and think “cool, let’s fix it.” When I’m running on fumes, the same words sound like “you’re not good enough.” The feedback didn’t change. My capacity to receive it did.

The “fullest potential” framing is a trap. I’ve let go of the fantasy of selling the agency for millions. That was never really what I was chasing. What I am chasing is showing up well for the people who count on me, doing work that matters, and building something sustainable. Some weeks that looks impressive from the outside. Some weeks it looks like me doing breathing exercises on the couch at 10pm so I don’t snap at my wife. Both are the work.

I need room to iterate in peace. This is the hardest one. The people around me are trying to help. Their feedback makes things better. But I need to get better at saying: “I know this isn’t finished. Give me space to finish it.” Instead of shipping early and then getting defensive when someone points out what I already knew was wrong.

I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it out. I’m writing it because the version of entrepreneurship I see online, the one with the clean offices and the morning routines and the “I was broke now I’m rich” story arcs, has nothing to do with what’s actually happening in my house on a Wednesday night.

This is what it looks like. The week everything happened at once. And somehow, we’re still here.

Still moving.

If this landed, you can find me on LinkedIn.
I write about running an e-commerce ads consultancy, building systems, and trying not to be a terrible dad in the process. No hype. No playbook. Just the work.

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On paper, everything looks great.

On the call, the founder looked exhausted.

The fire-fighting trap

She runs operations. Finance. Logistics. Supplier coordination. Inventory. Returns. Customer service escalations. And somehow she’s also the person everyone asks when they need a number, a decision, or a green light.

Her co-founder handles creative and product. Brilliant at it. But when she needs to know how yesterday went, she asks the operations founder. When the team needs context on a campaign, they ask the operations founder. When the warehouse has an issue, guess who gets the call.

This is what happens when a brand grows faster than the team around it.

You don’t notice it happening. Revenue goes up. You hire people. You add tools. But the founder stays in the middle of everything because nobody else has the full picture.

And at some point, she’s not leading anymore. She’s just keeping things from falling apart.

What I was supposed to talk about

I had a meeting planned to discuss our next phase together. New channels. Budget allocation. The usual agency stuff. Execution. Roadmap. The things agencies love to talk about.

But when we got on the call and I asked how she was doing - really doing - the conversation went somewhere else entirely.

She told me about the renovations at home. About feeling stretched. About not having taken a proper vacation. About knowing things need to change but not having the space to figure out what.

And I sat there with my agenda thinking: this isn’t what she needs right now.

Most agencies start in the wrong place

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Most agencies jump straight to execution. “Here’s your campaign plan. Here’s the budget split. Here’s what we’ll test this month.” Roadmap stuff. And it’s important. But it’s step three, not step one.

We use a framework internally called CARE. It stands for Clarity, Align, Roadmap, Elevate. And the order matters.

Clarity comes first. Do you actually understand the numbers? Not the dashboard numbers. The real ones. What does it cost to acquire a customer? What’s the break-even point? Where is money leaking?

Align comes second. Is the strategy built for how your business actually works? Are the channels, the creative, the offers all pointing in the same direction?

Roadmap is third. Now you execute. Now you build the campaigns and run the weekly rhythm.

Elevate is fourth. Reporting, insights, decisions. The layer that makes everything else compound.

Most agencies live in Roadmap. They skip Clarity entirely. They assume Align is someone else’s problem. And they wonder why the campaigns aren’t working even though the ROAS looks fine.

On that call with my client, I realized we’d been doing the same thing. Running great campaigns for a founder who didn’t have the clarity or the space to actually use the results.

The constraint question

There’s a principle behind the Clarity phase that applies to everything.

When an account isn’t performing, the instinct is to do more. More campaigns. More budget. More creative. More keywords.

But the real question is: what’s the constraint?

Is it traffic? Conversion? Economics? Scale? Each one requires a completely different response. And most of the time, the answer isn’t “more.” It’s “fix the one thing that’s blocking everything else.”

Same thing applies to a founder who’s drowning.

She doesn’t need more tools. She doesn’t need another dashboard. She doesn’t need me to run another channel.

She needs her time back. That’s the constraint.

What I’m actually working on now

Instead of jumping to the next campaign plan, I went back to step one. Clarity.

Three questions:

What costs you the most time?

What drains your energy?

If we could fix one thing, what would it be?

Those aren’t advertising questions. They’re the questions you ask when you actually give a shit about the person on the other side of the Zoom call.

One of our clients said something last year that stuck with me. She told a friend: “They actually give a shit.” Not “they have great ROAS.” Not “their reporting is detailed.” They give a shit.

That’s the bar. And it’s surprisingly rare.

Why this matters beyond one client

I think a lot of agencies and consultants miss this.

You get hired for a specific thing. Ads. SEO. Email. CRO. And you get good at that thing. You optimize it. You report on it. You show the numbers going up.

But sometimes the biggest value you can deliver has nothing to do with your channel.

Sometimes it’s noticing that the person making all the decisions is running on empty. That the brand is growing but the founder is shrinking. That the bottleneck isn’t the campaigns - it’s the chaos behind them.

If you position yourself as “I run your Google Ads,” you’ll never have that conversation. You’ll just keep optimizing a channel while the business slowly suffocates from the inside.

If you position yourself as someone who thinks about the whole picture - Clarity before Roadmap, always - you might actually solve the real problem.

What I’d tell you

If you work with clients - any kind of clients - learn to ask the question behind the question.

When they say “we need better ROAS,” they might mean “I’m scared we’re burning money.” That’s a Clarity problem, not a Roadmap one.

When they say “we want to try TikTok,” they might mean “we feel like we’re falling behind.” That’s Align.

When they say “everything’s fine,” they might mean “I don’t have the energy to explain what’s wrong.” That’s the constraint you need to find before anything else.

The best client relationships aren’t built on performance reports. They’re built on the moment someone realizes you actually see them. Not their brand. Not their metrics. Them.

My client doesn’t need a better agency. She needs a better Monday morning. And if I can help with that, the ads will take care of themselves.

Have you ever noticed a client or colleague drowning while the numbers looked fine?

What did you do?

- Raoul

We call it a quarterly off-site. Sounds official. In practice it’s two founders finally admitting what’s working, what isn’t, and what we need to stop pretending is fine.

Why most agencies don’t do this

I’ve talked to agency owners who haven’t had a real strategic conversation with their partner in months. They talk about client work. They talk about hiring. They talk about the tool that’s broken or the invoice that’s overdue.

But they don’t talk about the hard stuff.

Is this team member actually growing, or are we just hoping?

Are we hitting our targets, or are we rounding up to feel better?

Is the business going where we said it would, or did we drift?

Those conversations are uncomfortable. They require you to say out loud what you’ve been thinking quietly. And in a small agency, where the team is 3-5 people and every decision is personal, that’s hard.

How we structured it

We tried unstructured off-sites before. They turn into therapy sessions or wish lists. Nothing sticks. So this time we built a structure.

Morning: the hard decisions. When energy is high. Team calls that need to be made. Client portfolio, honestly. Q1 performance against actual targets, not vibes.

Lunch: no agenda. Let the morning settle. Eat something. Talk about life. You’d be surprised how much this matters.

Afternoon: building forward. Q2 goals. Infrastructure. What each of us commits to doing differently. Specific. Owned. Dated.

Two rules that changed everything:

1. If a topic goes in circles for more than 10 minutes, park it. You’re not ready to decide yet.

2. Keep phones away during the decision blocks. Not on the table. Away.

What we actually talked about

I can’t share the details. But I’ll share the categories, because I think they apply to any agency with 2+ founders.

Energy check-in. We started by asking each other: on a scale of 1-10, how motivated are you right now? And what’s been draining you? Sounds soft. It’s not. If your partner is at a 4 and you’re at an 8, the decisions you make that day will be different. You need to know where someone’s head is before you make calls together.

Honest target review. We set 3 goals for Q1. We hit 1 fully, 1 partially, 0 on the third. That hurts. But we also shipped a dozen things that weren’t on the list. Infrastructure that will pay off for years. The question isn’t “did we hit the number.” It’s “did we build something that makes the next quarter easier?”

The people conversation. This is the one we kept avoiding. We had someone on the team who wasn’t growing at the pace the business needs. We’d been coaching for months. Progress was visible but inconsistent. At some point you have to decide: is this a fit, or are we being kind at the expense of the business? We made the call. It wasn’t easy. It was right.

Who we actually are. We realized we’d been positioning ourselves as specialists when we’re actually something different. Our best client relationships aren’t “we run your Google Ads.” They’re “we think about your growth like a CMO would.” That’s a different business. A better one. But it requires us to stop hiding behind channel expertise and own the strategic layer.

The thing nobody tells you about partner meetings

The value isn’t in the decisions. It’s in the alignment.

After 5 hours, Mathijs and I weren’t just on the same page about what to do next. We were on the same page about why. That changes how you show up on Monday. How you handle the team call. How you talk to the next prospect.

Alignment isn’t a document. It’s a feeling. And you can only get it by sitting across from someone and being honest about the things that aren’t working.

If you’re running an agency with a partner

Block 5 hours. Once a quarter. Non-negotiable.

Structure the morning around hard decisions. Afternoon around what’s next. Put a lunch break in the middle so you can be human for 45 minutes.

Start with an energy check. End with specific commitments, not vague agreements. Write down who does what, by when.

And most importantly: say the thing you’ve been avoiding. The one about the team member. The one about the revenue target you missed. The one about the direction you’re not sure about anymore.

It won’t feel good in the moment. It’ll feel good on Monday.

Have you had that conversation with your co-founder or partner lately?

What’s the thing you keep parking?

I’m addicted to building things.

Not drugs. Not alcohol. Not even social media, really. Building. Shipping. The loop of describing something, watching it come to life, pushing it out into the world.

It used to take weeks. Now it takes minutes. And that speed has made the addiction worse.

How it started

When I started eCom Ads seven years ago, building was necessary. Website. Processes. Client onboarding. Reporting templates. You had to build, because nothing existed yet.

Then AI showed up. And building went from “necessary but slow” to “instant and unlimited.”

I built a product feed scanner in a day. A client dashboard concept over lunch. A content system that captures newsletters, YouTube transcripts, and research into a searchable second brain. I built tools that help me audit Google Ads accounts faster, write better proposals, generate campaign structures.

Each one felt important. Each one gave me that hit. That feeling of: I made something. It works. It’s useful.

The problem? I never stopped.

What building looks like when it’s an addiction

Let me describe a normal Tuesday for me before Egypt.

Morning routine. Coffee. Open the laptop. Check what’s happening with clients. See a Slack message that triggers an idea. Drop into building mode. Two hours pass. I’ve built something nobody asked for. It’s cool. It might be useful. But it wasn’t the priority.

Now multiply that by every day of the week.

The business doesn’t suffer - yet. The clients are taken care of. The team is solid. Revenue is fine. But the thing I’m not doing is the slower, harder work. Revisiting our positioning. Strengthening our legal foundation. Having the strategic conversations with my co-founder about where we’re headed. Revisiting our values in a world that’s changing fast.

That stuff doesn’t give you dopamine. It gives you clarity. And clarity is harder to feel in the moment.

The everywhere problem

It’s not just me. Look around.

Every founder I know is building right now. Every agency owner. Every marketer with access to Claude or ChatGPT or Cursor.

Twitter is a highlight reel of new agents, new skills, new automations. LinkedIn is full of “I built this in 30 minutes” posts. I know. I wrote one of those posts myself. It did well.

The FOMO is real. If you’re not building, you’re falling behind. If you didn’t ship something this week, what were you even doing?

That’s the narrative. And it’s dangerous.

Because building is easy now. Thinking is still hard. And thinking is the thing that actually moves the needle.

What happened in Egypt

I wrote about this in my last newsletter, but here’s the piece I didn’t share.

When the wifi failed at our resort in Sahl Hasheesh, I didn’t just lose connectivity. I lost my building environment. No Claude Code. No GitHub pushes. No tool iterations. No “let me just quickly...”

And for the first three days, I was restless. Not anxious exactly, but buzzing. Like an engine running in neutral. My brain kept generating ideas - a client portal concept, a legal structure overhaul, an AI tool for ad copy - and I had no outlet for them.

I couldn’t build. I could only think.

And thinking, it turns out, is a completely different mode.

The note dump that changed everything

Here’s what saved me from going crazy.

Before the trip, I’d set up a dead-simple capture system. An app on my phone that pushes notes to a queue. No internet connection required beyond a quick sync. Type a thought, hit send, forget about it.

So I started dumping. Every idea that popped up - captured in ten seconds and gone. Not built. Not explored. Not shipped. Just recorded.

Over the week, I dumped maybe 30-40 notes. Business ideas. Process improvements. Content angles. A tool concept. A contract structure thought. Random observations about how the resort handled customer experience.

When I got home, my morning routine processed all of them. Sorted by type. Flagged for action. Put in the right folders. Nothing was lost.

But here’s the important part: those notes were better than what I would have built.

Because I wasn’t in execution mode, I was in thinking mode. The ideas had space to breathe. Some of them connected to each other in ways I wouldn’t have seen if I’d immediately started building the first one.

The difference between building and thinking

Building is: I have an idea, I execute it, I ship it, I feel good.

Thinking is: I have an idea, I sit with it, I ask whether it matters, I connect it to other ideas, I decide if it’s worth building at all.

Building is fast, satisfying, and visible. You can show people what you built. You can post about it.

Thinking is slow, uncomfortable, and invisible. Nobody sees you staring at the pool thinking about your business model. Nobody gives you likes for deciding not to build something.

But every experienced founder I know will tell you the same thing: the thinking is where the real leverage lives.

The brands I work with that are actually scaling? They’re not the ones shipping the fastest. They’re the ones who thought longest about what to build before they started.

Same applies to running an agency. Or a team. Or a life.

What I’m changing

I’m not going to stop building. That would be like asking me to stop breathing. It’s how I’m wired. ADHD doesn’t come with an off switch.

But I am changing the ratio.

More thinking time. More note dumps. More sitting with ideas before executing them. More asking: does this actually matter, or does it just feel good?

I’m also being honest about what building sometimes is: procrastination that feels productive.

Building a new internal tool when I should be having a hard conversation with a team member? That’s not productivity. That’s avoidance with extra steps.

Building a client dashboard when I should be revisiting our pricing structure? Same thing. Comfortable discomfort.

What this means for you

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself - good. That means you’re paying attention.

The question isn’t whether you should build. Of course you should. The tools are incredible right now. The leverage is real.

The question is whether you’re building because the business needs it, or because you need the dopamine.

There’s a simple test. Ask yourself: if nobody ever saw this thing I’m about to build, would I still build it? If the answer is yes, build it. If the answer is “well, I was going to post about it on LinkedIn” - maybe sit with the idea a bit longer first.

The wifi went out in Egypt and I was forced to think instead of build. It was the most productive week I’ve had in months.

Not because of what I shipped.

Because of what I didn’t.

The practical bit

Since this is “The Real Account” and I promised real insights, here’s the actual system I use now.

For capturing without building:

• Note app on my phone that syncs to a queue (no live connection needed)

• Morning routine that processes the queue automatically

• Everything gets sorted, flagged, and filed without me touching it again

For protecting thinking time:

• Block one morning per week with no meetings and no laptop

• Use the note dump for ideas that come up. Don’t open the IDE.

• Review the note dump weekly. 80% of the ideas look different after a few days of space. Most get killed. The survivors are worth building.

For being honest with yourself:

• Before starting any build, write one sentence about why this matters for the business

• If you can’t, it’s a hobby project. Fine - but call it what it is

• Track how many hours you spend building vs. thinking vs. executing on client work. The ratio will surprise you.

I’ve been running eCom Ads for seven years. I’m thirteen years into being a dad. I have routines, systems, and a meditation practice.

And I still needed a broken wifi connection to remind me that the best work happens when you stop working.

- Raoul

But we were tired. Both of us. So we booked it.

I told myself I’d relax. But I also packed my laptop. I had an eSIM with unlimited data. I brought a mobile wifi device as backup. Two connectivity options, just in case.

Just in case of what? In case I had an idea and needed to act on it immediately.

The thing about building

Here’s what’s been happening in my life lately.

I’ve been building things with AI at a pace I’ve never experienced before. Tools for clients. Internal systems. A second brain that captures everything I think about - newsletters, YouTube transcripts, client notes, ideas. The pace is addictive. You describe something, debug it for a bit, and it works. Thirty minutes. An hour. Something that would have taken weeks two years ago.

I’m seven years into running eCom Ads. Thirteen years into being a dad. I know what meditation is. I know how important it is to unplug. I’ve had my breaks. I have routines and systems for this.

And I still packed two backup internet devices for a family vacation.

That should tell you something.

What happened

The resort wifi was okay. But the VPN I need for work distorted everything. Connections dropped. Pages half-loaded. Claude Code timed out.

I had ideas. So many ideas. A tool I wanted to build. Legal stuff I wanted to organize for the business. Notes I wanted to process. Things I wanted to push into my system.

And it just didn’t work.

I sat there, phone in hand, trying to force a connection. And at some point I thought: what am I doing here?

Not in a dramatic, movie-moment way. More like a quiet recognition. I’m at a resort in Egypt with my wife and two small kids. The sun is out. Nobody needs anything from me. And I’m hunched over a screen trying to make a VPN cooperate.

Vacation with young kids is not vacation

Here’s something nobody tells you until you live it.

Vacation with young kids is relocation. You move your entire household into an unfamiliar space. You rebuild routines from scratch. You figure out where the nearest bathroom is, what time lunch is served, how to get the stroller across sand, whether the pool is safe enough for a three-year-old.

It’s exhausting in a different way than work. But it’s still exhausting.

This trip was different. All-inclusive meant we didn’t cook. Didn’t plan meals. Didn’t organize activities. Didn’t think about groceries. The kids ate when they were hungry. We sat by the pool. We went to the beach. We did a day trip to Luxor that was incredible but completely different energy.

The rest of the time? Nothing. Actual nothing.

And it took me days to settle into that.

The ADHD part

I should be honest about this.

My brain doesn’t stop. It’s constantly online. Ideas at breakfast. Frameworks in the shower. Business problems while watching the kids splash in the pool.

That’s my ADHD. It’s my curse and my blessing. The same thing that lets me see patterns in ad accounts and connect dots across industries also makes it nearly impossible to fully switch off.

The building addiction is real. There’s dopamine in shipping something new. In solving a problem. In watching a tool come to life. And right now, with AI making that loop faster than ever, the hits come quicker.

Everyone I know in this space is the same. Twitter is terrible for it. LinkedIn is worse. Everyone’s building, shipping, sharing their latest agent or skill or automation. It feels like if you stop for a week, you’re already behind.

The solution I didn’t expect

Here’s the thing that actually saved me.

Before the trip, I’d set up a simple note capture system. An app on my phone that pushes notes to my brain’s inbox through GitHub. No ongoing connection needed. Just type a thought, hit send, done. It queues up and waits.

So when the wifi failed and I couldn’t do actual work, I started using that instead.

Idea for a client dashboard? Note dump. Legal structure thought? Note dump. Tool concept? Note dump.

My brain could keep running. The ideas didn’t get lost. But I wasn’t building. I wasn’t in execution mode. I was just... capturing. And then putting the phone down.

When I got back and opened my morning routine, the system read my inbox and processed everything. Sorted it. Flagged what needed action. Put things in the right folders. Every thought was there. Nothing lost.

I got back on track without losing a single idea. And I’d actually rested.

What I realized

By the end of the week, my wife and I looked at each other and both said the same thing.

This is what it feels like when you really don’t have to do anything.

Not “vacation but still checking Slack.” Not “relaxing but also planning next week.” Actually nothing. And it was so much better than we expected.

I came back recharged in a way I haven’t been in months. Maybe longer.

The thing is - I know all the advice. Disconnect. Set boundaries. Protect your time. I have systems for it. Routines. A weekly couple check-in with my wife. Morning meditation. The whole stack.

And I still needed to be forced.

The wifi going out was the best thing that happened to me in February.

What I’d tell you

You can’t give what you don’t have.

If you don’t have clarity yourself, you can’t give clarity to your clients. If you’re constantly building, you can’t actually analyze whether what you’re building matters. If you never stop the engine, you never check the oil.

And when you’re eventually put under real pressure - a client emergency, a team issue, a personal crisis - you’ll collapse. Because there was nothing in reserve.

I’m a seven-year founder. A thirteen-year dad. I’ve been doing this a while. And I still need the reminder.

Maybe you do too.

The wifi went out in Sahl Hasheesh. And for the first time in months, I actually rested.

Sometimes the best system is the one that breaks.

- Raoul

This week I want to zoom out a bit.

Because something happened that made me rethink what my job actually is.

I built a tool.

Not a spreadsheet. Not a dashboard. A real, working tool that anyone can use. Upload your product feed, get a health score out of 100, see exactly what’s broken and how to fix it.

I shipped it in a day.

And that single day taught me more about where this industry is heading than the last six months of running ads.

The problem I kept seeing

Here’s what happens in almost every e-commerce account I audit.

The campaigns look fine. The bidding is reasonable. The structure makes sense.

But the product feed is a mess.

Missing descriptions. Titles that say “Blue Shirt XL” instead of something a human would actually search for. No brand names. No GTINs. Categories that don’t match what Google expects.

And the brand has no idea. Because nobody looks at the feed. The agency manages campaigns. The dev team manages the website. The feed sits in between, and nobody owns it.

I’ve had this conversation so many times. “Your campaigns are fine. Your feed is the problem.” And then I’d spend 30 minutes explaining what a product feed even is.

So I thought: what if I just built something that shows them?

What I actually built

The tool is simple. You upload your Merchant Center feed (XML, CSV, TSV, whatever), and it scans every product against 20+ validation rules.

Title length. Description quality. Missing images. GTIN coverage. Category mapping. Price formatting. All the things Google cares about but most brands never check.

It gives you a score out of 100 and a breakdown by category - so you can see that your “clothing” products score 82 but your “accessories” score 41 because half of them are missing descriptions.

The interesting part? I wired up AI to rewrite the worst-scoring products. Feed it your 10 worst titles and descriptions, and it rewrites them following Google’s best practices.

I’m not charging for the scan. The basic report is free. Because the value isn’t in telling someone their feed scores 63. The value is in what happens next.

Why I’m telling you this

In my first newsletter, I said I’d share what I’m seeing. Real stuff. Not frameworks for the sake of frameworks.

So here’s what I’m seeing.

The line between “running ads” and “building tools” is disappearing.

Two years ago, if I wanted to build something like this feed scanner, I’d need a developer. A designer. Weeks of back and forth. Budget. Project management.

This week, I described what I wanted, iterated on it, and shipped it. In one sitting.

I’m not a developer. I can read code, kind of. I understand how APIs work, mostly. But I didn’t write this thing line by line. I worked with AI to build it - describing what I needed, testing it, fixing issues, pushing it live.

And that changes everything about what a small agency can do.

The shift I didn’t expect

When I started eCom Ads, the value proposition was clear. We run your Google Ads. We’re good at it. We charge a monthly fee.

That’s still true. But it’s not the whole picture anymore.

What I realized this week is that the most valuable thing I can do for a prospect isn’t run their ads. It’s show them what’s actually going on.

A free tool that reveals their feed quality does more for trust-building than any case study or sales deck ever could. Because it’s not me telling them they have a problem. It’s their own data telling them.

And once they see the score, they either fix it themselves (great, I’ve helped someone) or they realize they need help (and now they trust the person who showed them the problem, not the person who just claimed they could fix it).

This is the same logic behind the free audit I mentioned last week. Give away the diagnosis. Let the treatment sell itself.

What product feeds taught me about Google Ads

Here’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until I built the scanner and started running real feeds through it.

The average feed quality is terrible.

I’m not talking about small brands with 50 products. I’m talking about brands doing millions in revenue with thousands of SKUs. And their feeds look like they were set up once in 2019 and never touched again.

Missing descriptions on 40% of products. Generic titles that say nothing about the product. No brand field. No color, no size, no material. Just the bare minimum to get the feed approved.

And these are the same brands wondering why their Shopping campaigns underperform.

Google’s algorithm can only work with what you give it. If your product title is “Sneaker White 42” and your competitor’s title is “Nike Air Max 90 Men’s Running Shoe - White/Black - Size 42,” who do you think shows up first?

It’s not a bidding problem. It’s a data problem.

And most agencies aren’t looking at it. Because feed optimization isn’t sexy. It doesn’t show up in monthly reports. Nobody brags about fixing title structures on LinkedIn.

But in my experience, it’s one of the highest-leverage things you can do for Shopping performance. Boring and high-impact. My favorite combination.

The AI part (keeping it honest)

I said last week that AI is a sparring partner, not a replacement. I meant it. And building this tool reinforced it.

The AI-powered rewrites are genuinely good. Feed it a bad title and a list of issues, and it’ll write something that follows every best practice Google recommends. Proper structure. Front-loaded keywords. Right character length.

But here’s the thing.

It doesn’t know your brand voice. It doesn’t know that you call your products “kicks” not “sneakers.” It doesn’t know that your German market descriptions should sound different from your UK ones. It doesn’t know that one product line is being discontinued so you shouldn’t invest in optimizing those titles.

The AI writes a solid B+ title. Getting to A+ still requires a human who understands the business.

Same as last week. Same as it’ll probably be next week. The pattern keeps repeating: AI handles the 80% that used to take forever. The 20% that actually matters still needs you.

Why I keep coming back to tools

This is the reflection part. The thing I’ve been chewing on all week.

I’ve always loved building systems more than doing repetitive work. That’s probably the ADHD talking. The novelty of creation is more stimulating than the grind of execution.

But it’s more than that.

When you run someone’s ads, you’re doing work for one client. When you build a tool, you’re solving a problem for everyone who has it.

One scales linearly. The other doesn’t.

I’m not saying I’m going to stop managing ads. That’s still the core of what eCom Ads does. But I am saying that the tools we build around our services - the scanners, the audits, the diagnostic frameworks - those might end up being more valuable than the services themselves.

Not because they replace expertise. Because they make expertise accessible.

A brand in Dublin who’ll never hire us can still run their feed through our tool, see the issues, and fix them. And if they can’t fix them alone, they know who to call.

That’s the flywheel I want to build. Tools that create trust. Trust that creates conversations. Conversations that create clients. Clients that generate insights. Insights that create better tools.

What I learned this week (the honest version)

Some quick things, because I said I’d be transparent about what works and what doesn’t.

What worked:

• Building a useful tool fast by working with AI instead of trying to code everything manually

• Making the basic scan free with no email gate - just value, no friction

• Adding AI rewrites as a premium layer instead of charging for the whole thing

• Connecting directly to the Merchant Center API instead of relying on third-party tools

What I’m still figuring out:

• How to price the AI rewrite feature (free sample of 10, then what?)

• Whether to gate the PDF report behind email or keep it open

• How to make this work for brands that don’t know how to export their own feed

• Whether anyone actually cares about feed quality enough to use a tool like this

That last one is real. I might have built something nobody uses. That’s fine. The worst case is I learned a bunch about feed optimization patterns and AI-powered rewriting. The best case is it becomes a meaningful lead generation tool that helps brands and brings in clients.

I’ll know in a few weeks. I’ll tell you either way.

Where this connects

If you read the first edition, you know the promise. Real insights from real work. Not tips. Not theory.

This week, the real work was building something. Next week it might be a campaign restructure, or a client conversation that changed how I think about attribution, or an AI experiment that flopped.

I don’t know yet. That’s the point.

I’m not writing from a content calendar. I’m writing from whatever’s actually happening. And this week, what happened was that I built a tool in a day that would have taken a team weeks to build two years ago.

If that doesn’t make you think about what’s possible - whether you’re an agency, a freelancer, or a brand doing this in-house - I don’t know what will.

The tools are here. The question is what you build with them.

If you want to try the feed scanner yourself, it’s at tools.ecom-ads.com. Upload your feed. See what comes back. Let me know if the AI rewrites are helpful or terrible.

And if you’re building things with AI in your own work - whether it’s marketing tools, internal processes, or something completely different - I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Reply to this email. I read everything.

- Raoul

I want to show you what I’m actually doing. The real workflows. What works. What doesn’t.

This isn’t a ChatGPT tutorial. It’s what happens when you spend years in ad accounts and then suddenly have access to tools that can process data faster than you ever could.

The 30-minute audit I give away for free

I can’t take on every client who reaches out.

But I hate saying “no” without giving something useful. So I built a fast audit process.

Here’s what it looks like:

I pull together three data sources: transcript from our discovery call (I use Fathom to record everything), market research the AI summarizes for me, and a TrueClicks AI analysis of their account.

Thirty minutes later, I have a document with 3-5 concrete recommendations.

Sometimes they’re things the brand can fix themselves. Sometimes it confirms they need help. Either way, they walk away with something useful.

Last month, this led to four freelancer referrals. People I couldn’t work with, matched with people who could help them.

The funny thing? Those freelancers now refer prospects back to me when the account is too complex for them.

Giving away value isn’t charity. It’s building a network of people who trust you.

AI as a sparring partner (what it can and can’t do)

I’ve been using TrueClicks AI as something like a second brain for account analysis.

Here’s what it’s good at:

Pattern recognition at scale. It can scan an account and identify what I call “heroes and zombies” - the campaigns, ad groups, or products that are carrying everything vs. the ones that are dead weight but still spending.

Category-level opportunities. Things like: “Your feed-only campaigns are outperforming your feed-and-search campaigns in this product category.” Stuff that would take me hours to spot manually.

Structured data analysis. Give it a spreadsheet of search terms or product performance, and it can identify patterns I’d miss.

Here’s what it’s not good at:

Impact percentages are arbitrary. When it says “this change could improve ROAS by 15%,” that number is basically made up. The directional insight is useful. The specific number isn’t.

It doesn’t understand your business. AI doesn’t know that Q4 is your big season, or that one product line has higher margins, or that you just launched in a new market. You still need human context.

It’s not a replacement for experience. It’s a sparring partner. Someone to bounce ideas off. If you don’t already know what good looks like, the AI won’t tell you.

I told my team: “If you need some perspective and I’m not available, start with TrueClicks (no referral).” It’s not as good as an experienced human. But it’s better than staring at data alone.

The one ADHD trick that changed how I work

This isn’t really about ADHD. It’s about how media buying destroys focus.

Here’s the problem: you sit down to analyze an account. Thirty minutes later, you’re three rabbit holes deep into some random campaign experiment that seemed interesting.

The solution sounds obvious but almost nobody does it.

Separate ideation from execution.

In the morning, I do analysis. I look at data. I generate ideas. I make a list of everything that needs to happen.

I don’t do any of it yet.

In the afternoon, I batch execution. I work through the list. No new analysis. No “let me just check this one thing.” Just execution.

This works because ideation and execution use different parts of your brain.

When you’re analyzing data, you want your brain open. Exploring. Making connections.

When you’re building campaigns or making changes, you want your brain focused. Systematic. Following the plan.

Mixing them is how you end up working 10 hours but only accomplishing what should take 3.

I’m not perfect at this. Some days I still get sucked in. But the days where I keep them separate? I get three times as much done. Not exaggerating.

How I built a multi-language campaign in one morning

Here’s a recent example that still kind of blows my mind.

A client needed category-specific campaigns across 10+ languages. English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, the whole thing.

Old process: export search terms, analyze manually, build campaigns in each language separately, have native speakers review. We’re talking weeks of work.

New process:

1. Export search terms from Google Ads

2. Feed them to Claude with a prompt: “Group these by category and intent”

3. Generate keyword lists and ad copy for each category

4. Use what I call “copywriter personas” - tell the AI to write as a native German speaker, native French speaker, etc.

5. Export everything in TSV format (Google’s import format)

6. Import directly into Google Ads

One morning. Ten languages. Full campaign structure with keywords and ads.

Did I still have native speakers review? Yes. Were there some tweaks? Of course.

But the 80% solution was done in hours instead of weeks.

This is what AI changes. Not the strategy. Not the thinking. The execution speed.

Where this is all heading

I’ve been doing this long enough to see the direction.

The tactical work is getting automated. Bid adjustments. Keyword matching. Even some creative testing. Google’s algorithms handle most of it now.

What’s left for humans?

Pattern recognition across longer time horizons. Not “what happened yesterday” but “what’s the trend over the last 6 weeks?”

Connecting data to business context. The AI sees numbers. You understand that Q4 matters more than Q1, or that this product has weird seasonality, or that a competitor just entered the market.

Asking the right questions. The AI can answer almost any question you ask. The hard part is knowing which questions matter.

The job is becoming less about manual optimization and more about strategic thinking at scale.

Less tweaking. More pattern-spotting.

Less “let me adjust this bid” and more “what’s actually happening here and what should we do about it?”

I’m calling this the “strategic generalist” role. You don’t need to be an expert in every platform. You need to understand enough to spot patterns, ask good questions, and use AI tools to execute faster than anyone thought possible.

What this means for you

If you’re running ads for e-commerce brands:

1. Build your sparring partner stack. Find AI tools that can analyze your accounts at scale. Not to replace your thinking - to accelerate it.

2. Separate your days. Morning for analysis and ideation. Afternoon for execution. This one change will make you measurably more productive.

3. Stop hoarding insights. Give value freely. Build a network. The best clients come from referrals, not cold outreach.

4. Invest in pattern recognition. The tactical skills are getting commoditized. Strategic thinking at scale is where the value is moving.

The tools are changing fast. The fundamentals aren’t.

Understand the business. Ask good questions. Use whatever tools make you faster.

That’s the game.

- Raoul

Google Ads. Meta. Attribution headaches. The whole thing.

I’ve seen what works. I’ve seen what doesn’t. I’ve sat inside hundreds of ad accounts and watched the same patterns repeat.

And for a long time, I kept most of it to myself.

Client calls. Internal docs. Slack threads with my team.

That’s where the real insights lived. The stuff that actually moves the needle. Not the “10 tips to scale your ads” nonsense you see everywhere.

So why now?

Honestly? I got tired of watching brands make the same mistakes.

The founder who thinks they’re profitable because ROAS looks good. They’re not.

The brand that fires their agency after 3 months, hires another one, and gets the exact same results. Because the problem wasn’t the agency.

The marketing lead who’s been told to “just let Google do everything” - and has no idea if that’s actually working.

I’ve had these conversations hundreds of times. On calls. In audits. In those awkward moments when someone realizes they’ve been flying blind.

And I kept thinking: I should write this down.

Not for everyone. For the people who actually want to understand what’s happening in their ad accounts. Who want to make better decisions instead of just hoping the algorithm figures it out.

What I’ll write about

This isn’t a “tips and tricks” newsletter.

I’ll share what I’m seeing in real accounts. Patterns. Problems. Things that worked. Things that didn’t.

Sometimes it’s tactical - the email sequence that recovered revenue, the campaign structure that finally scaled.

Sometimes it’s strategic - how to think about launches, when to trust the data, when to ignore it.

Sometimes it’s just honest - the mistakes I’ve made, the things I got wrong, the stuff nobody talks about.

I’m not going to publish on a schedule just to fill your inbox. I’ll write when I have something worth saying.

Who this is for

You run an e-commerce brand. Or you manage the ads for one.

You’re doing €500K, €2M, €10M - somewhere in that range where the stakes are real but you’re not a massive corporation with unlimited budget.

You’ve looked at your numbers and thought: something doesn’t add up here.

You want to understand what’s actually happening. Not just trust that someone else has it figured out.

If that’s you - welcome.

If you’re looking for hacks, shortcuts, or “one weird trick” content - this probably isn’t it.

One thing before you go

I’ve spent years learning from people smarter than me. Podcasts, newsletters, calls with people who’ve been doing this longer.

The best stuff I’ve learned wasn’t complicated. It was usually someone saying: “Here’s what I saw. Here’s what actually happened.”

That’s what I want this to be.

Not theory. Not frameworks for the sake of frameworks.

Just: here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what’s working. Here’s what I’d do if I were you.

Let’s see where this goes.

- Raoul

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