I want to tell you about a moment that changed everything for me.
Summer of last year, my mum was in hospital. Pancreatic Cancer. Short battle, the kind that doesn’t give you time to prepare. I was at her bedside, and in 30 minutes my wife & I had a scan appointment at the maternity ward for our twins who were due around a couple of months or so later. Same hospital, just a walk across a corridor.
I kissed my mum and let go of her hand and she said she couldn’t wait to see some scan pictures, walked down a corridor with loads of empty hospital mattress beds in it which felt slightly apocalyptic, and into the maternity ward, sat in the waiting room with my wife, where we then saw our twin daughters on the screen. Then I walked back to my mum’s ward, sat down, and opened my laptop to answer some Slack messages.
One corridor. Three completely different lives. One afternoon.
That’s the moment I knew I couldn’t keep operating the way I had been.
Here’s the thing about ambition: nobody tells you it has a shape. And the shape I’d been running for a decade was more hours, more clients, more growth, more proof… and I wasn’t going to survive what was coming.
I’d already built and sold the agency in a unique way. Scaled it to £3m ARR, worked with 250+ retailers, sold majority stake through an EOT. By every external measure, I’d done the thing most business leaders say “oh yeah, that’s the goal”.
But I was still operating like someone who had something to prove. And when you’re splitting your time between a cancer ward and a maternity unit, you realise very quickly that proving things to strangers is a terrible use of a life.
So I’m rebuilding. All of it. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
NOVOS is evolving. We’re becoming an eCommerce growth agency for the AI era. Search is being completely reshaped across AI overviews, generative discovery, the way people find and buy products is changing faster than most brands can keep up with. We want to be the agency that leads that change, not reacts to it. I’m genuinely excited about this, and definitely the most excited at work I’ve been for years.
My weeks have a different shape. Fridays are for my girls… non-negotiable. The rest of the week, I focus on the work that only I can do whether that’s sales, client relationships, big strategic decisions. Not the menial stuff & problems I used to fill my days with because being busy felt like being productive.
I’m saying no more. To projects that don’t excite me. To meetings that could be messages. To the voice in my head that says rest is the same as falling behind.
And I’m writing. That’s what Efforia is. Right now it’s a weekly newsletter; an honest diary of what this chapter actually looks like, making more of a cohesive story for you out of my messy notes. The wins, the doubts, the things I’m figuring out in real time. One day it might be a book, but for now, it’s me sitting down once a week and telling the truth about what it takes to perform at your best when life doesn’t slow down for you.
The takeaway:
You don’t have to burn it all down to build differently. I still run an agency & I still have big ambitions. I still want to win, but the definition of winning changed the day I walked between those two wards.
Winning now means building something I’m proud of and being present for the people I’m building it for. Those two things aren’t in tension, they only feel like it when you’re doing one of them badly.
If you’re reading this and you’re in the thick of it… scaling something, raising kids, carrying more than anyone around you knows, I want you to know that building differently isn’t building less. It’s building with more clarity about what actually matters.
That’s what I’m trying to do. I’ll let you know how it goes.
See you next week.
— Antonio