Grab attention, monetize, and persuade with Storytelling Every Thursday you'll get one story and writing tactics in 5 minutes. This is the FREE newsletter that 50,000 follower accounts read.
Slap this bad boy on my tombstone
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Last week I learned a business lesson so profound I told me GF to slap it on my tombstone. Let me spill the beans for ya… When you start a service-based business, it’s easy to get pulled into the orbit of what I call “the spray and pray black hole”. Meaning? That in the beginning, you are willing to serve anyone with a pulse to get the wheels churning on your biz. Big mistake. Take our cold email agency, for example. In the beginning, my partner and I worked with all sorts of markets: HVAC, commercial cleaning, California property tax reimbursements, manufacturing, just for starters… Eventually, we found ourselves getting an epic wedgie of universal proportions from this black hole. Because the cliché advice is true: When you serve everyone, you serve no one. Slap that bad boy on my tombstone. Anyway… After signing 10 clients, our resources, time, and attention were getting stretched thin. Most folks at this point would just enter a hiring spree, lose margins, have managers managing managers… …and wonder why they’re making so little money while having such a big workload. We did the opposite. At first, this felt risky, but we took a look at our clients with the ol’ 80/20 principle. Which 20% of our clients were getting 80% of the results? Turns out literally 3 of those 10 clients were generating around 70% of our revenue. Absurd if you ask me! You see, our business model operates on a pay-per-result basis. The client covers the monthly tech fee, we break even, and we get profit on leads generated or sales calls booked. Some clients would earn us $1,000 a month. But other clients were earning us $1,000 a day alone. And all of those clients were in one market: Staffing and recruiting. So? We walked away from those clients we were spending so much time on to yield few results, and went warp drive on the staffing and recruiting clients. But we didn't stop exploring. 80% of our resources go toward clients we know we can get results for. The other 20% goes toward exploring new markets and testing new offers. This allows to keep feeding what's working but leaving a little risk for exploration. And doubling down on staffing and recruiting led us to one of our greatest breakthroughs, and perhaps the chance to corner a market with our services. You see, cold email lead gen is competitive as fudge. But since we can guarantee 8–12 leads a day for our staffing and recruiting clients, we can now offer zero tech fees and operate on a strictly pay-per-lead basis. The income from one client’s lead gen payments covers the cost of their tech stack in about 4 hours. No other cold email agency can offer this. I feel an extra tingle in my veins when I wake up because we now know our perfect ICP, have an offer no one else can compete with, and know that we don’t have to hire a team to do fulfillment. Take a look at your clients and products, and see what you can cut to let the best plants grow. Catch ya soon, Parker P.S. If you're hungry for all of my lead generation tricks, tactics, tools, and hacks, the click here to join the waitlist for the Cold Gold webinar. I reckon there's nothing else like it on the web |
The Story
Grab attention, monetize, and persuade with Storytelling Every Thursday you'll get one story and writing tactics in 5 minutes. This is the FREE newsletter that 50,000 follower accounts read.
There’s a special place in internet hell for marketers who make huge guarantees, take thousands of dollars from a client… …then disappear the second it’s time to honor the guarantee. And one of my newest clients learned this lesson the expensive way. You see, the most disgusting thing I see on the internet is the lack of moral ethics from sleazy marketers. They promise insane results with guarantees… Only to not deliver their clients results, rob their clients with expensive retainers, and...
Last week, a client sent me a message that made my body rise into the air, my arms snap outta place, and my torso contort like I was mid-exorcism. Then I smiled. Because they’d booked 31 calls in 2 weeks. The message: sorry if you have to squint you're eyes for this My client literally had to pause because they were overwhelmed, had to optimize their fulfillment, and hire just to handle the new volume. So then why does everyone and their mother say: "CoLd EmAiL dOeSn'T wOrK" I just proved...
First Google slapped Russell Brunson. Then Elon slapped me. And a couple weeks ago, Manus decided it wanted a turn. Weirdly enough, getting slapped around has taught me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in business. Here's the dealio: A lesson that’s forever seared into my consciousness comes straight outta a Russell Brunson book. “The Google Slap” In Traffic Secrets, Brunson talks about the dangers of solely relying on one channel for traffic. Because, as I’m sure you’re aware,...