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#321 · can a cold email agency scale to $70k/m?

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

If my calendar is full and I can't take on another client, what should I do?

If you stop outreach just because your calendar is full, you bottleneck growth and lower your effective hourly rate. Keep outreach running; it lets you find better‑paying opportunities. For example, with five $1,000/month clients, outreach can land a client willing to pay $1,500/month for the same work. Replace your lowest‑paying client with that higher‑paying one, raising total income to $5,500/month. Repeat the process: a $2,000/month client bumps income to $6,500/month. The key is to only take on new clients whose pay exceeds what you’d earn from your current clients — this creates a price floor and forces a growth mindset where your rates and abundance rise.

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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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youtube ↗Pricing

How should I price a monthly retainer for automation services, including what the client pays for, what I do as part of the retainer, whether I need admin access to their account, and how to determine the cost?

Retainers replace unpredictable hourly billing with a recurring, prepaid service model. For example, if you previously billed 20 hours at $50/hour ($1,000), a retainer might lock in those 20 hours at a discounted rate of $45/hour ($900) paid upfront. This gives you guaranteed income and lets you schedule work knowing exactly how many hours each client will need each month, eliminating the feast‑or‑famine swings of hourly work. The real power of a retainer lies in what you bundle with the core service. Instead of selling just the automation build, you add items that make the offer a no‑brainer for the client: a regular strategy call (e.g., a 45‑minute weekly meeting); unlimited maintenance: you fix any API glitches, server outages, or platform issues at no extra charge; an availability guarantee, such as promising to respond on Slack within 15 minutes between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. Monday‑through‑Friday; emergency Q&A or training sessions where the client can ask “How do I update this?” and get immediate help; and access to any resources or tools you’ve built for them. These extras increase the client’s perceived value and satisfaction, improve retention, and generate referrals, while they don’t scale linearly with your time — so you can serve more clients without a proportional increase in workload. From a utilization standpoint, clients often use fewer hours than they pay for (e.g., 18 of the 20 contracted hours). You still receive the full retainer payment, meaning your effective hourly rate remains at your baseline ($50/hour) while you enjoy predictable income. Over a six‑month period, a $1,000‑per‑month retainer yields $6,000 lifetime value; after subtracting acquisition costs (say $150 per client), your net profit jumps from $850 on a one‑time $1,000 deal to $5,850 — a margin increase from roughly 85 % to 97.5 %. Working with repeat clients also lets you understand their business deeper, deliver more nuanced solutions, and earn more referrals. Finally, because you’re building automation systems, the value you deliver isn’t tied to your personal time: a system like my cold‑email setup that generated 23 leads last month continues to produce results even when I’m not actively working on it, adding another layer of leverage to the retainer model.

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youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I'm an experienced software professional and I want to go big time in AI and automations. I'm trying to obtain high-value clients and ticket services north of $150K to $1M per year per client. What kind of areas or services do you think I can offer to tap into such value?

You're going to want to focus on partnerships in a situation like this. You're going to want to focus on big retainers where a percentage of your compensation is tied to the growth of the business. There are a few people in my life that make far more than this right now. One of my best friends is making around $1M-$1.5M every year with a single client. The way he did that is he came into the organization pretty small based off a referral. He proved his ability to do that one thing super well. He then built some systems for that one thing and said, "Hey guys, I actually just built a system that automated a fair chunk of the work I'm doing on a daily basis. I think I could make you guys way more money if you let me do this for other roles." They said "Yeah, absolutely." He started doing that. Eventually he moved into automating growth roles, and now he's taking a cut of whatever money he makes for the company, which is obviously a lot of money. So some sort of growth partnership, some sort of fractional COO-style gig, some sort of fractional CTO-style gig can be good if you want to juggle multiple, or you can just go balls deep like my buddy did with one — I think that's totally workable too. $150K-$1M per year per client logically speaking is just like $12K-$15K per month, so that's not that big of an ask. $1M per year per client is obviously bigger. That's probably the simplest and easiest way to do it. The sorts of businesses that are good to do this with are typically young people that do a highly scalable backend service — something like an information product, some sort of coaching, some sort of e-commerce thing that's highly scalable, where you can take a chunk of the revenue and the revenue tends to be quite large.

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