What’s the secret to growing your profits year after year as a freelancer, consultant, or agency/service-based business? Is it a) more clients? Is it b) selling high-profit services? Is it c) more advertising? What if I told you that it was d) none of the above. More clients, selling high-profit services, and advertising can play a […]

What is the most underrated part of selling your professional services to clients? Lead quality? Tenacity? Deal-closing skills? Nope. It’s having a defined system for tracking and following-up on deal flow.  That’s the backbone of successfully selling your services; not sales tactics. Having a clearly defined and well-thought-out sales process is the key to closing more […]

The agency business is a relationship business. Same goes for any other form of professional service you might offer. Delivering good work may feel like your primary obligation, but it’s the relationships that keep your clients paying their bills. Work hard on your craft, and you might win a few awards or recognition from your […]

Rome wasn’t built in a day. It took centuries to create all those roads. Your business works the same way. Like all good things, it takes time to achieve success. Yet it’s easy to see the results of others and assume their success was overnight. This is a problem as old as the Roman empire. […]

Marketing a business shouldn’t be a Hail Mary pass. Paid advertising shouldn’t be your last hope. Throwing good money at a bad customer experience rarely works, unless you find joy in lighting money on fire. When struggling to grow your business, spending more money doesn’t solve your problems. It creates new ones. You’re better off going […]

It feels weird to call yourself an expert. Egotistical, even. It’s much better to leave that designation to a third party. For years I was of that opinion; frightened by the word expert. Afraid of what it meant. Afraid of the responsibility. Afraid of the reactions. Afraid of the unknown. Then in 2010 I landed […]

For years, I stressed over how much I should charge for my services, as if there was a right answer. There is no perfect answer. There is no one magic formula to use. There is no right answer, and there are no wrong answers. But some answers are better than others. Should you charge what clients are willing to pay […]

Last month my friend Dan Shure published an article about the pain in writing SEO Proposals. It was an honest look at the proposal process that we go through as freelancers, consultants and agencies. While you will find the whole article revealing, I was most interested in a particular section where he talks about giving […]