Agencies, much like people, have bad weeks. A file doesn’t package properly. Everyone is calling in sick. A client is being difficult. Your team is being difficult. The list goes on, and it doesn’t seem like there’s an end in sight. Nothing is working or getting checked off. It’s hard to admit when your well-oiled machine’s wheels are not aligned or, worse, they’ve fallen off their tracks.

You start feeling like a complete failure, and dark, looming thoughts flood your brain, telling you your agency isn’t good enough and you should probably just close up shop.

OK, maybe you don’t get this bad, but you get the point. Each and every one of us has had those moments.

As a human, we take days off. We go on a vacation, get a massage, sit with nature, or even watch a movie to realign our thinking or our whole day.

An agency, however, can’t just take a vacation. Too much is on the line and too many people depend on the work it produces.

So, how can a whole agency reset and realign?

Take a walk as a team. Clean the office together and freshen up your space. Spend time doing non-work-related activities together. Play a board game, take a yoga class. Or, if you’re like us, sit on the porch and enjoy a cocktail after weeding the sidewalk cracks. Close up shop early and head out to happy hour at the neighborhood watering hole. Hit pause on work. Work and your clients will thank you for it.

If you’re struggling to communicate with a client, skip the emails. Pick up the phone, or better yet, have a face-to-face meeting. You’d be surprised how often miscommunication or misunderstandings are cleared up when you’re actually talking to each other instead of communicating electronically. Think about your clients the way you think of your family, friends, or partner. You misunderstand a text message and go along with your day thinking they meant X when they really meant Z. An in-person, face-to-face conversation makes a big difference with any relationship. Clients are no different.

Admit when you sucked. Did you prep 5 minutes before a big pitch? Did you wing that presentation? Forget the client’s name or oversleep because you were up binge-watching Netflix until 4 a.m.? That happens. Because human emotion and behavior don’t care about your deadline or big pitch. Admit that you could have done better, learn from the experience, dust yourself off, and do better next time. The key here is to learn and adjust from it.

Remember, agencies are made of humans. And human error is part of the cycle of being, well, human. And not being perfect is OK. And admitting things are not OK is also OK. What’s not right is letting things continue to fall apart. Sit down as a team and debrief on how you can support one another to get the whole agency back on track.

As for that paper jam, well, good luck with that.