Why I turned down a 12k/mo client

When I was fully focused on my agency, I would routinely have clients pay between 5-13k per month in retainers and rev shares.

They aren’t the highest retainers you’ve ever seen, but they certainly pay the bills.

The idea was to be a boutique style growth agency and get insane results for clients.

But there was a huge problem:

• When focusing on 5-10 offers at once (while also selling funnel setup deals for 20-30k a pop), I was never be able to achieve the same scale as just focusing on one. Maybe that is a skill issue by me, but it was dreadful. Here were the results:

  • Launched coaching offer to 40k cash in 14 days from a 2,000 person audience

  • Scaled an email agency from 10k/mo to 50k/mo

  • Scaled a content agency from 15k/mo to 100k/mo+

  • Launched a short form agency to 20k/mo

  • Scaled a paid ads agency from 100-130k/mo

  • Launched a Saas to a few dozen waitlist users in <60 days

  • Email marketing agency booking 40 calls/mo and singing 6-7 clients in the first 30 days

  • I also consulted for 100+ agencies and I have seen the same thing across all of those

  • This was all across an 8 month period in 2023

Compare that to being focused on growing one of those (let alone my own agency) and I know I could have achieved much better results.

Another problem was that because the idea was ‘growth’ the offer wouldn’t always attract the best clients that I would really want to work with.

As you can imagine, if someone’s biggest pain point is growth (so painful they would pay 5-30k on it) that doesn’t suggest they are in a leveraged position to grow very quickly.

In fact, it suggests that they have a severe bottleneck in their business or an offer problem (probably both) so I would end up solving these very complex problems to grow these companies.

So imagine if Harvard just let anyone into their school.

What do you think would happen to their average grades?

How would it affect the average income of a graduate?

This is the exact same thing as working with bad clients.

The difference between someone worth working with, and someone who is not worth working with is insane when it comes to their results.

An A level student just needs a few tweaks to get an A+, and a C level student will usually become a B+ at best.

Unfortunately 99% of businesses are not worth working with, and if your revenue depends on people who suck, then you are most likely screwed.

It’s hard because of course you want the client and you’d love to get that extra few thousand dollars per month or something, and it might even be necessary when you’re first starting out, but you want to stop doing this as soon as you can afford it.

One bad client will make your entire team hate their lives, they will make you hate your life, they will prevent you from scaling your business, and they won’t even enjoy the process.

It is quite possible that there is no greater net negative activity than working with a shitty client.

But of course like anything else in life, even when the waiter tells you that a plate is hot, you still have to actually touch the plate in order to determine that yes in fact the plate is indeed hot.

So I learnt my lesson, and now I am 100% focused on helping my clients scale from a more leveraged position.

And now my clients do a combined $205million per year across 135 of them, and I can focus on helping them with specific problems.

Much better.

Anyway, if you’d like to learn about how I could help you scale your business, you should go and watch this video (link)

Talk soon,

Leo