Discover the secrets to building a high-demand agency with irresistible offers, strategic client selection, and $10k+/mo retainers.
Jacob started his marketing agency while he was at university, and he spent three years building it, never getting close to $10k/month retainers. It didn't matter how good the agency got at delivering results; he just didn't have an offer worth paying $10k+ for. The better you are at making offers, the more demand you create, and the worse you can be at everything else. He realised that to charge $10k+/month, they only needed to align four things:
By this point, Jacob and Jordan joined forces and had already spoken to 40+ CEOs in the Education sector and figured out who their customers were and who they weren’t. Education isn’t a niche; it’s a $7 billion industry in the UK with hundreds of niches. Just like B2B SaaS and E-com aren’t niches. They could have been greedy and tried to go after the whole industry, but they liked certain things.They wanted to become the best or only option in one market so they could charge more without being price-compared, which meant focusing their efforts on Further Education. They knew:
But they didn’t know that they needed to work with businesses with product-market fit - their first client struggled with this. Essentially, they needed to work with CEOs of companies that were going to be successful with or without them, and Jacob's team was just there to accelerate the growth and take a slice of the pie (similar to how Private Equity works). They needed to look for partners who were already making $1m-$5m a year (get rich by working with rich people), were ready to expand their team, and had some good case studies. Their second client, Digital Learning Institute, grew from £100k/month to £200k/month in 3 months. Small tweak, big difference!
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When running the agency, Jacob focused on delivering services because he thought that was what people were looking for.
He was seen as just another agency to hire, a commodity competing on price and not value, because clients could compare him to thousands of others offering the exact same thing. But by speaking to 40+ CEOs, no one said they wanted more leads or calls. The goal of every for-profit business is revenue growth and increased profits in the most efficient way, giving maximum returns for the shareholders. So, they decided to sell more profits. That means they didn’t have to think about how much time it takes or how much it costs to deliver; they focused on how much money the problem is worth to their clients if they could solve it.And ultimately, since they were charging based on value created, they could instantly charge 2-4x what they once were IF they could back it up. Seems obvious - so how do you practically do this (even without a case study)? Create a unique mechanism.
Contrary to what everyone says, customers do care how you get them the results they paid for. Using big claims might get their attention, but CEOs of 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses don’t buy on emotion or 1-call closes; they buy based on math, logic, and evidence with proper due diligence. Jacob and Jordan thought of it like this: if they had to grow their own business, what would they do? They wanted to control each step of the process because you can create millions if you move the needle in a few directions across the board. This is why the concept of selling one service in isolation is BS. So even though between Jacob and Jordan, they knew:
And while they could have created a 6-figure agency around any one of these skills, they were looking for 8+ figures. They took just a handful of their highest impact, revenue-driving skills and put them together in a logical sequence - these became the pillars of their business (which will be important in step 4). They chose:
The market is saturated, so they had to position themselves in a new way that gave their prospects clarity as to why everything they’ve tried before hasn’t worked and why this will. CEOs aren’t stupid; that’s why they built custom plans for their clients to go from their current state to their desired state using a logical process - this is their secret sauce and how anyone can close 6-figure deals if they can read and are motivated. This isn’t about having a perfectly packaged skillset when you are starting out. You will need to iterate fast and see what works and what doesn’t. You’ll uncover insights in your niche that will improve the efficiency of your process, get better results, and collect stronger case studies.
Jacob's agency's typical retainer was $3,000 a month, which meant hitting $100k/month (his goal at the time); he needed 34 clients. Firstly, signing 34 clients is hard enough, but delivering for them? Jacob ended up burning so many good clients because there wasn’t enough time to deliver the results he knew he could have. It’s a lose-lose situation. So the answer was to have fewer clients but to take better care of those clients. That way, they get better results, so they don’t leave and they didn’t need to aggressively market and could focus even more on their current clients. That’s why they needed something that gave them:
They were operating at 95%+ margins from the start. This creates free cash flow to invest back into the team without having to worry about some crazy money-back guarantee. Before, they needed to take on dozens of new clients when they wanted to scale. But now, scaling comes by working with fewer clients and getting better results. This means the more demand they generate, the more selective they can be and the more they can charge. Whenever a potential client gave them even minor red flags, or they didn’t like the offer, they’d just move to the next. They knew that bringing on one client monthly for a year would create a multi 7-figure business. And ultimately, because clients get more of their direct attention, they get better results. So it’s pretty simple: People who charge more make more and get better results than people who don’t.
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