Do you still have your old clients, and how is your relationship with them after experiencing massive growth?
I don't have all my old clients; I've let go of many because the profitability per unit time spent on them is lower than focusing on other things. The relationship is different now that I have 150,000 subscribers versus when I had zero subscribers and got those early clients. With the clients I still have, the relationship is pretty good—I've even negotiated a bigger partnership with one of them. Early in my community, there were questions about whether I'd still have time for them as I shifted into information products and coaching. I decided to make time because it's important to practice what I teach. Many coaches and consultants build a successful business model, then teach it as an idea, realizing they make more money selling the model than delivering the service, so they stop doing the actual work. When they stop, they lose touch with the market. In our fast‑changing industry, an outdated approach won't work in six months, making it unethical and ineffective to sell outdated methods. That's why I do live building—showing how I acquire leads and sell stuff—so I stay current. Revealing the 'sauce' (my methods) actually increases my income; every time I've shared it, I've made more money.
Coaching, especially digital coaching, offers extremely high ROI because service delivery is virtually instantaneous—coaches typically create an information product that clients can sell autonomously after purchase. I view myself as a coach/educator: I help clients achieve a specific outcome, build a business model, or reach a revenue goal, and they pay me for that expertise. The term 'coach' is broad, but I think of it as information‑product‑based coaching on the internet. Once the product is built, the client can sell it repeatedly without further work from me. Examples include Maker School, my communities, and other educational products I’ve sold: they require a large upfront time investment, but after that core asset is built, I don’t need to update or rebuild it for each client (though I do update Maker School periodically). As an operations person working with such clients, my focus is solely on pulling the growth lever—acquiring more clients—because the variable and fixed costs per new client are nearly zero; the only bottleneck is how many clients I can acquire. Thus I scale by increasing client volume, and fulfillment time per client remains extremely low after the core asset is ready, with daily check‑ins optimized.
I used to be super into strategy and building the most productized solution before taking it to market and trying to figure everything out on day one. Unfortunately, I made next to no money. When I did win a client, it was very difficult because my total addressable market was pretty low. I over‑qualified clients, seeking only those with very high leverage who would let me scale using my little productized template and pay me $10k–$30k. I found it hard to scale because I was making opinionated decisions based on what was in my own head—what I thought was the best business model and the right way to pitch it. Nowadays you can't make decisions just in your head; you have to make decisions in the market. If I could go back in time, I would have taken on broader freelance work from day one instead of spending years building packages and pitching them a certain way. Doing the math, I could hit $40k MRR with five clients and then upsell a portion of them. I wish I could just go back in time and raw dog it—caveman max it—because I would have gotten a lot farther. Everything I've learned from the market has been thousands of times more valuable than what I thought I knew and what I learned from strategy. So, that's my answer to that question.
Your content is your sales, so hiring someone to handle the most important task doesn't make sense; instead, consider delegating operations, fulfillment, or administrative work. In general, delegate any work that isn't essential to your bottom line to buy back your time—a concept Dan Martell emphasizes. Use that reclaimed time to focus on activities that have a direct one‑to‑one correlation between time spent and revenue, like high‑value sales or product development. You might worry about remaining just the sales guy while others become more valuable to larger companies, and while you're strong at marketing and getting attention, your sales still need improvement. The valuable skill is maintaining client relationships and providing daily progress updates; doing so preserves the relationship and sharpens your most valuable abilities. You're overthinking the situation—you're stuck in your head. Stop spending time on this problem; put your head down, resume the daily outreach and marketing activities that got you meetings, and repeat them all day. These concerns are largely self‑created; you are your own biggest obstacle. Getting out of your own way will unlock far greater progress. I’ve experienced this myself over the last seven or eight years: progressively removing my own limitations has been key to my success. Okay, it's Clark's as I am. Thank you.
That's a reasonable assumption if you don’t have a strong relationship with a client, but in my case my longtime clients have very strong relationships with me and see me as a growth partner, not just someone who drags and drops modules on a screen. My value goes far beyond the actual implementation—I'm a strategic partner. So even if the team learns how to build the systems, they still rely on me for guidance, strategy, and the broader growth partnership, which makes it unlikely they’d fire me just because they can do the technical work. Regarding running out of high-ROI systems: while it’s true that over a very long horizon you might exhaust the high‑ROI automation ideas for a given business, in practice you’re probably not at that point yet with a two‑year client; you’re putting the cart before the horse. There’s usually always something to optimize or improve, and if you ever do hit that limit, you can cross that bridge when you get to it. No business model is perfect, and the market changes quickly, so new problems will emerge that require new systems, meaning there will likely always be some sort of new problem to solve because the market is evolving fast.
team empowermentfear of replacementgrowth partnerhigh-ROI systems