Crazy how you’ll adopt a big company HR policy like probation periods without thinking but you’ll reject other useful things big companies do like “business development”

Design agencies I love you.

England lost because they refused to adapt to the game state. They could have scored slower and reduced the risk of getting out. But this current team love to score fast and got out needlessly.

They refuse to play differently. So the analogy is Ange. It's just who they are, mate.

You take up a tiny part of your client's brain even when in a face to face meetings.

Have empathy with their world if you want to influence them.

Most client’s don’t have clarity around their problems (and they feel insecure about that).

They don’t have things in a shape to come to you with.

The person that provides clarity and safety gets the work.

You will run in this form until you stop being valuable, or until you stop being fulfilled, and then your business will stop. This aspirational final form, which you got to by being really good, is actually going to be the end of you.

But the closer you get to it, you realize the drawback. Same clients, same problems, same value, same budget. No room to improve, and no room to change. ⤵️

ICPs, Statements of Process, automation, and support from virtual assistants (soon to be teams of AI agents) became the dream. Clients on retainer, low churn, high rates, time fully utilized, fully optimized. Nothing that needs to improve, nothing that needs to change. ⤵️

Tim Ferris… a man who famously works more than 4 hours a week… wrote "The 4-Hour Workweek," and we all saw a different way to run our businesses. ⤵️

Positioning isn’t optional.

If you don't create a position for yourself in people's minds, then they will assume one anyway.

They’ll ask you to do the things they assume you do and so their positioning for you is what you'll end up doing.

Fingers crossed you like what they choose.

Partnerships are free access to another business's pipeline of leads.

Every success story is built here. The mistake when looking for direction from more established agencies is to ignore reputation and relationships and look only at the tactics.

⤵️

To be fair a lot of the people that have had success are selling access to their tactics and promising the world 🧐 🧐 🧐

The hope is it might work for you. What isn’t mentioned is that these things worked because they were layered on top of the size and quality of their network

Reputation and relationships are the most robust assets your business has.

The market can’t affect them and they passively generate opportunities. People buy from people they trust. The more they trust them the more the invest.

⤵️

A lot of magic bullet talk about growth tactics.

Do they work?

It’s the wrong question, you have to find out if they work for you.

If the tactic exists it's because it works somewhere.

If it worked everywhere then no one would do anything else.

When you are boss, every opinion is a decision, every preference is an order and every nod is a sign off.

When you wield power, even if it’s a tiny amount, apply an equal amount of empathy to anyone your decision affects.

Want a steady stream of leads next year?
Start collecting proof now.

Everyone says metrics matter. Few actually track them.

You can be different.
🔍 Define what you’ll measure
📊 Track it
🧠 Learn, adjust, repeat

Make your results impossible to ignore.

What should you be doing now to guarantee a steady stream of leads next year?

Part 1 of 3: Case studies & testimonials

Every project should do two jobs:
💰 Make a profit
📈 Win you more work

That second one doesn’t happen by accident.
You need proof. Stories. Social proof.

Start collecting it now.

I found a lot of growth by acting like the agency we wanted to be in 3 years.

As a founder it snaps you out of all the small stuff.

Maybe I should stop worrying about how much RAM people's laptops need and think about how I'm getting a meeting with a client that spending 10x our current ones do.

Do you find yourself waiting until the client is *really* happy before mentioning a rate raise?

Do you second-guess what they’ll accept and then reduce what you ask for?

Those thoughts are costing you money.

So much talk about starting with systems.

It's because it's tempting to think that a system can guarantee success.

Avoiding the hard experimentation phase.

Systems make you go faster.

But in the beginning you haven’t even worked out which direction you are supposed to be facing in.

Even if AI could do everything your agency could do, you'd still get hired.

Because what clients are really buying is accountability.

If you aren't paying attention to the quality of the work you produce then you're building on sand

Your excited potential client doesn’t know your imposter syndrome.

When you meet your doubt will take their expectations down to your level.

Or you can meet them where they are.

The good news... their vision of you is probably more accurate.

Can you see yourself as they do?

This week's Dear Agency Founder is in your inbox! 👀📥

There's no shortcut to trust.

Which means less people have it.

The perfect barrier to entry.

It's easier to find someone who already believes than to change someone's mind.

If your clients “won’t listen” then have you found the right clients?

6 figure projects aren’t much harder to do than 4 figure ones.

What’s hard is building the trust required to win them.

Do this today to increase your revenue.

Put a clause in your standard terms that says your rate goes up by a certain percentage each year.

Point out this clause to your clients.

They’ll understand it.

They increase their prices over time too.

It doesn't matter what time someone gets out of bed, whether or not they journal, or what time they exercise.

Focus on what they did to grow their business.

Taking the same vitamins as them won't make you any money.