Dan Gent

For agency founders only. Every week I write an email. I don't sell any courses, I don't do coaching, the email is all the value in itself. 🎖️ 15 years+ experience 🍏 Tactics to win the right work 🌳 Grounded growth strategies It's worth a 👀, you can always unsub

Big projects aren't harder to do, it's just harder to get clients to trust you with them. How are you building trust over time?

Crazy how you’ll adopt a big company HR policy like probation periods without thinking but you’ll reject other useful things big companies do like “business development” Design agencies I love you.

You take up a tiny part of your client's brain even when in a face to face meetings. Have empathy with their world if you want to influence them.

Most client’s don’t have clarity around their problems (and they feel insecure about that). They don’t have things in a shape to come to you with. The person that provides clarity and safety gets the work.

Positioning isn’t optional. If you don't create a position for yourself in people's minds, then they will assume one anyway. They’ll ask you to do the things they assume you do and so their positioning for you is what you'll end up doing. Fingers crossed you like what they choose.

Partnerships are free access to another business's pipeline of leads.

A lot of magic bullet talk about growth tactics. Do they work? It’s the wrong question, you have to find out if they work for you. If the tactic exists it's because it works somewhere. If it worked everywhere then no one would do anything else.

When you are boss, every opinion is a decision, every preference is an order and every nod is a sign off. When you wield power, even if it’s a tiny amount, apply an equal amount of empathy to anyone your decision affects.

Want a steady stream of leads next year? Start collecting proof now. Everyone says metrics matter. Few actually track them. You can be different. 🔍 Define what you’ll measure 📊 Track it 🧠 Learn, adjust, repeat Make your results impossible to ignore.

What should you be doing now to guarantee a steady stream of leads next year? Part 1 of 3: Case studies & testimonials Every project should do two jobs: 💰 Make a profit 📈 Win you more work That second one doesn’t happen by accident. You need proof. Stories. Social proof. Start collecting it now.

I found a lot of growth by acting like the agency we wanted to be in 3 years. As a founder it snaps you out of all the small stuff. Maybe I should stop worrying about how much RAM people's laptops need and think about how I'm getting a meeting with a client that spending 10x our current ones do.

Do you find yourself waiting until the client is *really* happy before mentioning a rate raise? Do you second-guess what they’ll accept and then reduce what you ask for? Those thoughts are costing you money.

So much talk about starting with systems. It's because it's tempting to think that a system can guarantee success. Avoiding the hard experimentation phase. Systems make you go faster. But in the beginning you haven’t even worked out which direction you are supposed to be facing in.

Even if AI could do everything your agency could do, you'd still get hired. Because what clients are really buying is accountability.

If you aren't paying attention to the quality of the work you produce then you're building on sand

Your excited potential client doesn’t know your imposter syndrome. When you meet your doubt will take their expectations down to your level. Or you can meet them where they are. The good news... their vision of you is probably more accurate. Can you see yourself as they do?

This week's Dear Agency Founder is in your inbox! 👀📥

There's no shortcut to trust. Which means less people have it. The perfect barrier to entry.

It's easier to find someone who already believes than to change someone's mind. If your clients “won’t listen” then have you found the right clients?

6 figure projects aren’t much harder to do than 4 figure ones. What’s hard is building the trust required to win them.

Do this today to increase your revenue. Put a clause in your standard terms that says your rate goes up by a certain percentage each year. Point out this clause to your clients. They’ll understand it. They increase their prices over time too.

It doesn't matter what time someone gets out of bed, whether or not they journal, or what time they exercise. Focus on what they did to grow their business. Taking the same vitamins as them won't make you any money.

Don’t sit at your desk crafting your positioning or configuring a CRM. Go and meet people.

You are biased about your value. We're all passionate about our services and believe them to be key to success. So why isn’t the client investing? Don’t assume they don’t understand it. They just believe in something else. Is it the wrong client for you? Or do you need to change that belief?

The agency you admire isn't fundamentally different from you. They don't have a secret recipe. They faced everything you are facing and are dealing with problems beneath the surface. They got better at hiding it.

“Too busy, not enough people” “Too quiet, the bench is too big” On very rare occasions while running your agency you'll find midpoint of these. Enjoy it while it lasts 😅

If you always reply with an off-the-shelf proposal, then you can come across as someone who isn't going to go on the full journey of discovery with a client. Receiving a proposal like that is a full stop on a conversation that only just got started. And you wonder why you get ghosted?

The mistake to avoid… is scaling too early. Experiment until you have the right clients, offering, and business model, then you can scale. Otherwise, you're just making something broken into a bigger problem.

In your inbox is this week's Dear Agency Founder. 👀 📥 Enjoy!

Before you hire, you need to know how to fire. But you won't, so you'll get it wrong. Tomorrow's newsletter gives you the advice you need to eventually get it right. Link in the profile, see you there!

The difference between growth and scale?

The new Dear Agency Founder is in your inbox 👀📥 Enjoy!

This week's Dear Agency Founder is in your iBox 👀 📥