Why I Quit the Agency World to Talk About Dirt
For about a decade I worked in and around digital agencies. I helped brands build their online presence, ran workshops, consulted on strategy, sat in a lot of meetings about things that felt important in the room but less important when you walked outside.
I was good at it. I genuinely liked parts of it. But there was this growing sense — quiet at first, then impossible to ignore — that I was optimising for the wrong thing.
The moment I couldn’t unknow
I remember sitting in a client briefing for a large food brand and thinking: we’re spending serious money making people want more of something that’s depleting the earth. Not maliciously. Nobody in that room was a villain. But the whole system was pointing in one direction and it wasn’t toward anything that mattered to me.
Around the same time I started falling down a rabbit hole about soil. Regenerative agriculture. The web of life beneath our feet. The fact that healthy topsoil takes hundreds of years to form and we’ve been treating it like a disposable input. I became one of those people who couldn’t stop talking about it at dinner parties.
“What if the most radical thing I could do wasn’t to disrupt an industry — but to tell better stories about the one thing that feeds us all?”
So I started a podcast
Secrets of the Soil started as a curiosity project. I wanted to talk to the people who were actually doing the work — farmers, scientists, chefs, activists — and share what they knew with anyone willing to listen. No gatekeepers. No agency brief. Just real conversations about real things.
89 episodes later, I still feel the same pull toward it. There’s something about sitting with a farmer who’s spent 30 years rebuilding degraded land and listening to them describe the moment the soil started coming back. That’s not a story that gets told enough.
What I learned about myself in the process
The agency world taught me a lot — systems thinking, how to read a room, how to make complex things simple. None of that was wasted. But I needed to point those skills at something that felt alive.
Soil turned out to be that thing. Not because it’s glamorous. Precisely because it isn’t — and it’s the most important substance on the planet.
If you’re sitting somewhere in your career wondering whether the thing you’re good at could be pointed somewhere more meaningful, my honest answer is: it probably can. The skills transfer. What changes is who you’re building for and why.
Sometimes the most important pivot you make is toward something most people overlook.
Want to dig deeper? Check out the Secrets of the Soil podcast — 89 conversations with people who gave up comfortable certainty for something worth doing.
