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#323 · how to charge more for your agency

youtube ↗Pricing

I run a marketing agency for solar installers in Europe (ads, speed-to-lead systems, CRM/GHL). Clients stay for years and we get strong results, but our base retainer is only €1,000-1,500/month plus a fee per sale, and for the first 30 days we only charge the fee per sale. If this were your agency, what would you charge to confidently sell a $3-5k monthly retainer? Would you start with the clients we target, the offer itself, or how we sell it? What would you change?

If I ran a marketing agency for solar installers in Europe that handled ads, speed-to-lead systems, and included a CRM like GHL, I would first and foremost cut all of my lowest performing services. If I'm doing ads, speed-to-lead, and offering CRM services, that's three things. I would identify the one out of those three that generates a disproportionate share of my income — and the reality is that is almost always the case: one of your many services in a general, non-differentiated agency will give most of your results. I would cut the other two and only do that one thing. In your case, if you're handling ads and ads are where most of the money is coming from, I would just double down into ads. I would stop offering my CRM and all my general marketing services — I would just do ads all day. If it was my CRM that people really liked me for and tended to pay me money for, then I would just double down on my CRM. Then I would stop being a general solar marketing business and become, say, a PPC growth agency for solar businesses. If that was the main growth lever, immediately by doing that I'd probably be able to double my prices. Not only would I be able to double my prices, but I'd also be able to significantly improve my unit efficiency, because now I'm just doing the same thing over and over every single day. I'm not spreading and diversifying my time, energy, and staff member hours across a bunch of different services that don't stack gains as well. If you do ads all day and you turn ads into its constituent two or three parts — the creative, the copy, maybe the strategy, or the media buying — you get really good at that really fast. When you get really good at something really fast, you're able to guarantee and offer better results. And when you're able to guarantee and offer better results, you're able to charge more money for those results. That is the flywheel I would jump on in this case.

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Related answers

youtube ↗Pricing

I run AI automation retainer projects for CPA firms, mostly small firms of 1-10 people who won't shell out large amounts of money. Any advice on pricing strategies for the retainer services? Should I start lower than the ~$4-7K/month others in the space charge and gradually climb my pricing, the way you did?

Yeah, this is bang on — this is exactly what you want to do. You basically increase your prices until you get so much resistance that it doesn't make sense to increase them anymore. Here's a concept I think is really important: the optimal conversion rate is not 100%. If you put an offer in front of 100 people and all 100 say yes, odds are you could be making way more money by taking a few hits on the front end — because how much you actually make is conversion rate times price. If your fee is $1/month and 100% convert, you make $100 servicing 100 clients. If your fee is $25,000 and only 1 in 100 converts, you make $25,000 for 1/100th the work — 250x the money for 1/100th the work. This is an optimization problem: as price rises from low to high, conversion rate falls, but not proportionally at first — there's a hypothetical maximum where price times conversion rate is far higher than at a low price, even though conversion rate has dropped. So keep pushing your price up as long as your services stay solid; you'll make more money per unit of work. Alex Hormozi's rule of thumb is that the ideal conversion rate on a high-ticket service (and a $3K/month retainer with a ~5-month average return, i.e. $15K, counts as high-ticket) is around 30-40%. So if your current conversion rate is more like 50-60%, you'd actually make more money pushing pricing up until it drops to that 30-40% range — supply and demand: as price goes up, the number of people willing to say yes goes down.

retainerspricing strategyconversion ratecpa firms
youtube ↗Client Acquisition

What if your calendar is genuinely full and you can't take on another client right now? Would you still spend 1-2 hours per day applying on Upwork or doing outreach, or pause acquisition until you have capacity again?

Absolutely no — you should never stop client acquisition. Even if your calendar is absolutely 100 million percent full and you're like, I can't even take a conversation with another client, you need to understand that if you don't constantly breathe new life and oxygen into your business, there's no way for your business to grow. You will only ever continue existing at the same level. For instance, if you do client acquisition and outreach and you make it very time scalable and very efficient — maybe 20 or 30 minutes a day — what'll occur is over enough time, a week, a month, a quarter, you will get opportunities that are willing to pay you more money than your lowest current paid opportunity. So what you can do is swap out the lowest paid current opportunity for a new opportunity. That opportunity will make you more money per unit time, which will allow you to do things like invest in more growth to repeat that flywheel over and over and over again. Maybe over the next week, month or quarter you continue to do outreach at a higher rate. Now you get two opportunities that displace the other two lowest paying clients, and now you bring on those two instead. Now your total average earnings across the board — your internal hourly rate — is higher, and so you can continue to just scale. If you don't do client acquisition, what will occur is your roster will just start falling off because clients naturally turn. When the clients fall off, you will now have an abundance of time. You will now have to do a bunch of client acquisition or outreach, and then you will just slot in your first available paying opportunity. But rather than slot in your first available paying opportunity for a low rate, why not have a minimum rate where your opportunity cost is whatever the current client is paying you, and just do client acquisition all the time? It's one of the biggest traps in any sort of small business. People will always be like, I'm at capacity, I can't do more. The reality is if you want to grow, something has to give. And that might be, for the next week, month or quarter, an additional 20 to 30 minutes of your time. But that is the cost that you are paying in order to scale the rest of your business and continue growing.

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youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I've been building AI customer service systems, and most clients came from Upwork and referrals — I've got a case study for a big property management company where a system led to big savings, and I built others for medical practices too. My issue is generating demand myself outside of referrals: is this sellable via cold outreach, and can it be turned into a front-end offer? I've sent thousands of cold emails with only one booked meeting, plus LinkedIn DMs and content, and I don't know if that's the right play or if I should pivot.

Right now you're focused on the savings, and I think that's the main thing you've understood automations to provide, but savings is a small fraction of the total value of an automation. Say you build a system that saves 10 salespeople 1 hour a week each — that's 40 hours a month, and if they're paid $50/hour that looks like a $2,000/month automation. That looks sizable, but it's only a small part of the value you're capable of providing. The big thing isn't the savings, it's the revenue: if you free up an hour of a salesperson's time and they can use it to close deals worth, say, $500 in that hour (amortized across their whole workload), you're not just saving $2,000, you're making them an extra $20,000. That's the difference between a savings mindset and a revenue mindset — it's opportunity cost. When I sell a cold email system, I don't say 'this saves you $50/month on cheaper leads,' I say 'this frees up 10 hours a month of your salespeople's time, worth $500/hour, meaning it makes you $5,000.' Reorient your pitch around revenue, not savings — savings only matters if you're working with a multi-billion dollar enterprise. On your second issue: 3,000 emails to one booked meeting is a 0.03% booked-meeting rate. Two meetings would be 0.06%, three would be 0.1% — that's totally fine, not the best ever (ideally 0.5-1%, a meeting every ~200 emails), but it proves it's possible. You've run the equivalent of a 10-minute mile; now make your copy better and run a 9-minute mile.

cold emailai customer serviceopportunity costreply rate
youtube ↗Offers

Thank you very much. And sound pulling in 5k MR. Nice. I have two separate questions. Number one, I want to grow my MR, but I'm noticing a lot of business I'm offering to will gladly pay for the build, but when it comes to the monthly fee, they clam up. How can I reframe this to set myself up for more of a passive route to massive MR?

When a business likes the build but balks at a recurring fee, I reframe the conversation by offering a ladder of options. First, I sell a fixed‑price project (typically $1‑2k) that delivers a system I claim can add $10k of monthly value. If they accept, I then pitch a monthly retainer (e.g., $5k/month) based on the roadmap of additional improvements I uncovered while building the system—this can represent tens of thousands in lifetime value. If they decline the retainer, I fall back to a fixed‑price version of the same scope (around $3.5k) or a low‑cost maintenance retainer (about $250/month for Slack access). Should none of those work, I downsell them to my agency school—a low‑cost or free educational resource—where I can periodically re‑engage and upsell them later to any of the higher tiers. This creates a self‑reinforcing ecosystem: customers can start low and move up, or start high and later add services, mirroring the way high‑performing service businesses operate today.

mrretainerfixed priceagency school