Services Business

Closing the Deal – A Pricing Trick That Helps

This Pricing Trick Isn't For Everyone Not every pricing trick will be perfect for every agency. I get that. So if your average project costs less than $10,000 or more than $100,000, this may not help you when closing the ...

Life is Poker not Chess

Life is Poker not Chess The entire day today I've had this sentence running thru my head. “Life is poker, not chess.” It's because I'm reading Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets again. I read it when it first came out, ...

The Value of Domain Expertise

My first startup (and what we got wrong) I was recruited to my first startup (a small San Francisco-based company) from Berkeley Lab. Happy building some very early web applications without any thought of venture capital, I was a kid ...

The Art of Lead Generation: What Top Business Owners Do Differently

The art of lead generation I talk to business owners every single day. Sometimes they own product companies. Other times they run agencies. But they fall into two categories. The first want to keep growing their business but they're not ...

Leveraging Multiple Price Points

The challenge with talking about pricing (and especially multiple price points) is that the conversation comes in the middle of a much larger discussion on product design. By the time you've built a new feature and want to know how ...

4 Clues That Your Prospective Client May Not Be A Great Fit

Not every prospective client will be a great fit The other day I was talking to an agency owner who had a tough year last year. Not shocking given how tough things were for everyone last year. But what was ...

Your Scarce Resource

We can all earn more money… When my daughter was just five years old, she asked for some toy that I wasn't interested in buying her. The conversation was completely predictable. “No way kiddo, that costs a lot of money.”“Why ...

Some Nonintuitive Lessons That Are Hard To Learn

I spent today in an all-day meeting With some very smart people, we worked on planning for the second half of the year, and did a lot of work to identify themes, areas of effort, strategies for prioritization, and more. ...

Managing Clients Who Send Weekend Emails

We all get weekend emails We've all been there before, right? You’re out, enjoying time with friends or family and then you check your phone. You know you shouldn't have. But you did. And what do you find? Clients have ...

The Emails You Need to Sell Coaching

Are you starting to sell coaching services? In the last few weeks I've spoken to a couple of folks that are looking to sell coaching services. Additionally, I've discovered folks in the WordPress ecosystem that are adding coaching to what ...