recession comin'

Hey -

It’s a beautiful snowy day here in Montreal.

I thought given the chaos in the market I’d write some notes on running an agency/B2B business during a recession.

These are things I wish I knew starting out.

1. GET YOUR CLIENT’S CREDIT CARDS ON FILE

When I talked to the CEO of the old agency I worked at ($50m exit), almost all his advice was about how to get clients to pay invoices.

There’s a reason.

Some of your clients will likely go bankrupt.

I once had a client whose founders took all the cash out of their $40M GMV business and deliberately bled it dry, leaving me with a $14k unpaid invoice.

If I was fresh in the agency game I would have panicked.

Luckily with a couple of years of battle hardening, my hands went to Stripe and charged their card before I could even think about it.

2. DIVERSIFY YOUR CUSTOMER BASE

If all your clients are luxury brands, you’re very exposed to that industry’s specific issues.

If you spread out the portfolio of people who pay you a bit, you are much safer.

It’s also good to have some clients who don’t necessarily grow, but are reliable payers and don’t want to churn.

3. ADD MORE VALUE TO YOUR OFFER

In this age of AI it’s pretty easy to spin up little customer-facing tools that add quite a lot of value to the relationship.

For example in my program there’s:

• SaaS tools to write posts - replaces MagicPost / etc

• Group Coaching - replaces/supplants high-ticket agency coach

• Community - provides additional help

• Trainings - gives you concrete skills

And I’ve deliberately priced it so you only really need to get value from ¼ of those things to not want to churn.

Btw - if you want to try those SaaS tools and learn more, link’s here: https://go.modernagencysales.com/group

There’s 42 members in the ongoing group now!! Join us!! It’s fun and you will grow your business.