How Do You Build a Profitable Marketing Agency? | Lorraine Ball

I was fortunate enough to surround myself with young professionals who kept saying, you know, you should look at this. And so we did. And I spent a number of years on the bleeding edge. There are not a lot of agencies that even remember when Facebook launched their own markup language, FBML, and you could create landing pages for your business on Facebook. And we were building them and making money doing it until Facebook changed the rules.

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you can learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Show Low, Nevada. I— that's just an incredible name. Congratulations from being from Xolo, and thank you for listening. Joining me today, Lorraine Ball with More Than a Few Words. Did I get that correct? More Than a Few Words podcast. Lorraine, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much. It is so nice to be here. I appreciate the invite.

Absolutely. So we were talking in the green room that you are a recovering marketing agency owner. Tell us, let's start there. How did you get into marketing?

So you got to go way back for that. I got into marketing because everybody told me I was supposed to be in marketing. I was in grad school to be an accountant. I was in grad school to be a computer programmer. Yes, see, you're making faces which the audience can't see.

They can't, but you can. And that just seems like two very different worlds.

Well, you know, accounting and computer programming kind of have a lot of overlap, a lot of numbers.

Marketing.

Yeah. And, um, a number of my professors sat me down and said, look, you can do these things, you know, you've got the head for numbers, you will hate your life. And, and what you really need to do— and this is my—

I've had a pretty similar conversation with myself recently. Uh, go on.

But so, um, I ended up actually paying attention to them, and I'm like, you know, what should I do? And they were like, well, you'd be good in marketing. And I said, yeah, marketing, those people make that stuff up. And fortunately, I had a really good marketing prof who said, no, good marketing is all about the numbers. And if you do marketing and you don't pay attention to the numbers, you end up with award-winning advertising that doesn't sell product. Mm-hmm. And so that kind of became my guiding principle. I had a career in corporate marketing, and one day I looked around and went, yeah, I don't need to be here anymore. You people are too resistant to change. The world is changing. Things are different, and we need to move fast, and you can't get your head out of wherever it is to move. Mm-hmm. And so I left, and I started at the time a traditional agency But I was fortunate enough to surround myself with young professionals who kept saying, you know, you should look at this. And so we did. And I spent a number of years on the bleeding edge. Um, there are not a lot of agencies that even remember when Facebook launched their own markup language, FBML, and you could create landing pages for your business on Facebook. And we were building them and making money doing it until Facebook changed the rules. Imagine that. That was sort of the pattern for Facebook over the next decade. Um, we were doing live tweeting of our early podcast episodes 16 years ago. We were essentially—

you were on the cutting edge.

We, we really did. We, we, we tried things. I wasn't afraid because I I would try things that didn't cost a lot of money because social media didn't, and we would try it on us first, and if it worked, we would do it for our clients. And that was kind of how we grew the agency. Um, I think like a marketer. I, I look at the world through a customer's eyes and figure out what makes sense for them, and I've, I've used that kind of again as a guiding principle. And, um, in late 2020, I had somebody approach me about buying my agency. I'd done it for 19 years. I was a little tired. Um, 2020 was a tough year to be in the business, but we had made it, you know. We made it. We made a profit. But the offer was really good, and I was like, you know, I, I can do that. And maybe I'll go off and do something else. And so I sold the business in '21 and then spent a couple of years trying to figure out, you know, really where did I want to be. I was smart enough— and if I'm rambling, you feel free to interrupt me, um, but, but, um, I was smart enough to pull aside what I called the intellectual property, the podcast, because that was all me. The training programs, the books that I had written, all of that I moved into a separate company so that when I sold the agency, I kept the IP.

Yes.

And so, I had these things and figured, "Okay, I'll keep using them and then figure out how it all fits together." And had a number of kind of epiphany moments over the years. And one was that the podcast was fine. The content was great. I had no clue who my audience really was. I always thought it was business owners. But the truth is business owners didn't want to listen to my podcast. They wanted to hire me. Hmm. Who was listening to my podcast? Who was chatting with us when we were live tweeting? It was other agencies. It was other marketers. And coming to that realization reshaped my creative outlet because today I work with agencies helping train their people to do what I taught my folks to do.

I love that. I think that seems to be a natural trajectory when people are successful in some industry. I think of Vince Paglisi, was a commercial photographer, you know, very successful, and then moved into coaching, uh, others. So that seems like a natural, uh, trajectory. Do you, do you have any regrets about selling the agency, or is there anything that you miss about owning and running an agency?

Um, I miss having a team when, uh, there are little things to do and all of a sudden it's like me. I have one person that I can kind of reach out to if I really need to. One of the big things, and this was a really surprise but it shouldn't have been if I had thought through it, when I was doing the podcast as part of the agency I had 10 other people who would share and reshare every episode. My download numbers were great. When I sold the agency, they still love me, but they don't share every episode every week. And so all of a sudden, my reach declined, and so my downloads declined. And it's taken a long time to kind of rebuild that secondary audience. You know, my subscribers are my subscribers, but Beyond that, you know, the casual listeners, it's taken a long time and a lot more work, and particularly in a much more crowded environment, because these days everybody and their brother has started a podcast.

Yeah, my understanding is that that happened at the time you sold your agency. Like, that was when it exploded.

Yep. Well, and the other thing though, and here's the real truth, is everybody and their brother has started a podcast and 80% of the people who start a podcast never get past episode 5.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Yeah, this is just from where I sit. I, I think a lot of people started a podcast with, uh, in my case, no idea what my intentions were, uh, or they, they had some idea that they were going to reach a level where they could attract, you know, sponsorships and advertising, and that's you know, the pool of listeners out there is not growing. Like, I mean, I'm not saying that the numbers of podcast listeners isn't growing, but like the human population with access to podcasts is not changing, right? And so there's only so many, you know, Joe Rogan shows that can exist and attract sponsorship. And I think what The shift is using a podcast as part of your marketing ecosystem. It's not a revenue generator, right? And that's a completely different play and it is long-term. It can't be, you know, I did 5 episodes and, oh, I'm not getting any leads. This isn't working out.

Yeah, and you're absolutely right. And actually, I teach, um, classes on podcasting kind of in general, and then the more specifics on the how-tos. And I say the same thing: if you think you're going to get rich quick and knock sponsors out of the park, you need to think again. And the most successful secondary podcasts, not the Joe Rogans of the world, but the, the really successful business podcasts, are the ones that treat the podcast as part of their lead generation system. Hey, if you like the podcast, go here. You can download an expanded X, Y, or Z. You can sign up for consulting. You can, you can do all these other things and you have to have that pipeline in place that really talks to that. Or do it the other way. And this is the way we did it when, when I was podcasting for the agency. If I had a client and I was talking to them about why they needed to be thinking about blogging and adding that kind of content to their marketing mix, I could say, you know, I just had a great conversation with insert person's name here on my podcast. The show's only 15 minutes. Can I send you the link? And those audio files were a great sales tool. They were a great credibility builder. And so I was using them not at the beginning of my, my sales process. I was using it in the middle of my sales process, and it worked for really well for me. I was, I was doing a lot of training in those days, so the, the webinars and the seminars were my end. The podcasts were kind of in the middle to push people over the edge. And so I think you need to look at your sales process and figure out where does the podcast fit, or are you simply doing it because it's fun? And there's nothing wrong with that. There's, there's nothing wrong with, um, I have a message and I want people to hear this. I just want to express myself this way. Go do it, but understand that's what you're doing and don't expect it to generate revenue just because you put it out there. This ain't Field of Dreams.

Yeah, I mean, that's where I started. I started it because I wanted to have the conversation that I didn't have on any podcast shows as guests, and I couldn't find a podcast that was having those conversations. So I'm like, well, I'll just I'll just start that conversation. But, and it took me about a year to be like, okay, why, why am I doing this again? What, what exactly am I expecting to happen? And, and I'll be honest, I mean, we still haven't really dialed that in. I mean, we're, we're getting more traction, but like how to use it to, with a commercial intent, um, that, that, uh, that takes some refinement, like you said, like how, how I have done that. Like, I'll go on LinkedIn and I'll connect with somebody and I'll look at their profile. And rather than like send some, you know, generic introduction or pitch, I'll be like, hey, I see that you're in the movie production business. Check out this episode I I recorded because I think you'll really like it. But I haven't done that systemically and at scale, so I don't really know. And that, going back to your numbers thing, I couldn't agree more. I think, I think, and this is a new revelation, you're hearing it live for the first time. I think marketing departments, marketing agencies are kind of like a microcosm of the whole business problem. You have to have a creative element and you have to have an analytical element. You can't just run your business by the numbers, but you can't also just go out there and create shit willy-nilly because, you know, you have no idea what works and what doesn't work. So all of that to say, I agree, you've got to kind of figure out what your process is and figure out how to best use it. You test it. You don't— there's— you can make good guesses. One of my favorite books, have you read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland?

Been a long time, but yeah, yeah, great book.

And it really wasn't a book about marketing. I mean, it really kind of was, but it was really, to me, just a treatise on the failure of the Age of Reason. Like humans are unpredictable and you're fooling yourself if you think that you can predict them with any precision.

So yeah, I think two things that popped into my head as you were talking. The first one is that creating content is never going to be a bad thing. Having a series of podcast interviews, even if you don't know quite what you're going to do with them, having that library can work for you. Writing blog posts, even if you're not quite sure exactly how they fit, but having that content, that information, it improves your SEO. It gives you stuff to share on social media, and eventually you figure out how it all fits together. While you're in that figuring it out phase, you don't want to be dedicating a significant amount of time to creating the content. But carving out a little time each week to create some content is not, you know, not a bad thing. And creating those systems. My podcast episodes run, for my solo episodes, they're usually 3 to 4 minutes and my interviews are usually 10 to 12. So they're short. Mm-hmm. Most of my solo episodes, I do a first draft recording in my car. I have a random thought. I had one today. I went through the drive-through at Hardee's and had just this horrible customer service experience.

Where do you live that there are still Hardee's?

I live in Indianapolis.

Okay, I haven't seen a Hardee's in decades. Sorry, go ahead.

That's okay. I haven't eaten at a Hardee's in decades, and maybe now this is why. I know why. But I had this experience, but it just prompted me to think about kind of the marketing application, what they had done wrong, why I was annoyed, and how do marketers make that mistake. And so on the drive home while I was eating my car— hamburger in the car, I turned on the recording device on my phone. 5 minutes and I've got a great blog post and a script that I can use for a podcast episode. Mm-hmm. So finding ways to kind of fit that content creation into your day, especially in that early stage when you don't really know where it's going, is great. And the other thing is I I just saw an excerpt from one of my favorite movies, Men in Black.

Mm-hmm.

And one character says to the other, you know, he asks— Will Smith asks, you know, "Why don't we just tell people that aliens exist? People are smart." And the response is, "Individual people are smart. Collectively, they're stupid." Mm-hmm. And that kind of— plays to that unpredictability factor. You can look at one person and say, I know how they will react and try to extrapolate that, you know, with those personas and stuff to that larger. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Yeah, like I said, I think marketing, marketing and sales is the hardest thing in any business to do. Because you're dealing with humans, and humans are predictably unpredictable. That's another good book, by the way, Predictably Unpredictable. Okay, so, yeah, and largely irrational to your, to your further, former point, like they don't behave rationally. If you were going to start an agency now, well, let me, let me Beyond a non-compete, is there a reason why you didn't start another agency?

Well, okay, there was a non-compete. And also, the reality is I, um, I didn't want the day-to-day hassles of staffing and agencies and multiple clients. I The nice thing about consulting with agencies is every now and then they're like, Lorraine, we just lost somebody, can you do X? And I'm like, oh yeah, for 6 weeks, no problem. Oh, for a month, fine.

Okay, so you're a utility player.

Yeah, I mean, because honestly, over the years, again, we went from being a traditional agency to a digital agency. I learned how to use— to do web design. I taught people, new college grads that I hired, how to use WordPress. Can I build a website in WordPress? Oh, hell yeah. Do I want to do it? Not on a regular basis, right? Um, can I write blog posts? Any day of the week. Can I do social media? Absolutely. Don't do AdWords. Don't, don't really like that. It, you know, I, I have friends who can do that. So, but if, you know, if one, if a client says to me, hey, we're, we're playing a man down, can you pitch hit for an inning?

Yes. So, okay, how, just for reference point, how many employees did you have in the agency when you sold it?

When I started?

When you sold it?

When I sold it, there were 10 of us.

Okay. So a good-sized organization, and that comes with a lot of constraints. You know, you can build a business the right way, delegate, automate, all of those things. But if you're the person in charge, that's still a lot of bandwidth. And It's a lot of constraint of your time and your energy, for sure. Okay, so if you were counseling someone, and maybe you do in your consulting, people starting a marketing agency in 2026, how would you go about it? What would you do differently than how you started yours? Those may be two separate questions.

So let me go this way, and then I'll circle back around. One of the biggest lessons that I learned— it took me a while to get there— is matching capacity, is understanding capacity. So I came out of manufacturing environments. I understand capacity. If your production line can make this much, You want to sell right here because if you sell here, now you need another line. And now, sales here aren't enough. You got to be up here. Right. So, what I finally learned was anytime I started bumping up against my capacity, instead of hiring that next person, upping my capacity, I just raised my prices.

Hmm.

And so, I— I was able to say, okay, I need a person that can do this, a person that can do this, a person that can do this. Do I hire a second person in this category, or do I just raise my prices, not get as many— I mean, not get as many projects, but get more profitable projects? And that was a tough lesson to, to learn because the first instinct is always, I gotta have more people, I have all this work. Well, great, but do you have enough profitable work? Are you still doing those little piddly— at those little piddly projects?

You can say piddly ass, it's fine.

Can I say piddly ass on your show? Great.

Okay.

Yes. Yeah, you know, are you still doing those little piddly ass projects? Uh, so that was, that was a tough lesson.

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I guess another way of looking at it, my sales coach always said, you know, there are 5 kinds of clients. There are squirrels, deer, moose, elephants, and whales. Where you want to be is in the deer, moose, and elephant. Squirrels run around, they take a lot of your time, they don't know what they really want, but they try to convince you that they're a deer or a moose. They're not. They're not paying anywhere near as much as those bigger clients, but they demand the same kind of time and attention. And so you need to be surgical anytime you get near that, that capacity line. Who's taking too much time and not paying enough? Can you have a conversation with them about, dude, you got to cut back or you got to spend more, right? Or, you know what, we just don't do this kind of work anymore. Let me help you find somebody else. So I think Understanding where your capacity line is, where you want it to be. Once I figured that out, I made, um, a really limiting and freeing decision. I owned a small house that we were running the business out of. I could sell it and move into a bigger space, or I could remodel it at X size. And if I remodeled it and made that investment We were going to stay, but we were never going to be more than 10 to 12 people. I— because I couldn't stack the bodies any deeper and higher. And in those days, I very much— and I still love that in-person experience. So I made a decision to cap my capacity and just keep raising my prices. And we were worth it because I also held on to my people because I could pay them more and we could do higher-level work.

Yes. If you've listened to the show any length of time, you know pricing is one of the things that I talk about a lot. I'm assuming you said squirrel, you didn't explain the others. I'm assuming whales are the same problem in that they're large fee, but you don't make a lot of money on them, but you hold on to them because there's a large fee involved.

Yeah, there's that. They are so big and they are asking you to do things that are outside of your core. So now you have to start hiring extra people or outsourcing to keep them happy, and they crush you and, and suck all your resources. Before I left corporate, I, uh, worked for a company that ended up going bankrupt, and our agency, we were a whale for them. We were 80% of their business. And so overnight They lost 80% of their business. One of their offices— one of their offices was 100% dedicated to us. Every one of those people was out on the street the next day. And so that lesson stayed with me when I started my agency. The rule was no client could be more than 30% of my total business because I felt like 30%, it would hurt, but I could manage it. I could find other things to fill in the gap short-term and long-term. And in 19 years, I never— I, I, I, I think my biggest client, maybe 20, 25%, never, never went higher. I just didn't. And, um, You know, that was— if they started getting too big, I started looking for somebody else, you know, who, who could play at that level. And yes, it would stretch us in the short term, but it also gave us that flexibility that if somebody, if somebody was facing financial issues that had nothing to do with the job we were doing It wasn't going to take me down.

Yeah. I mean, I think what you're describing is a scalable business is you don't have all of your eggs in one basket, so they can't be disruptive. And it takes longer to build that kind of business. I mean, there's that allure of going after that one customer that's going to be, you know, take you, you're going to double your business or whatever. And the prestige probably of that, like, you know, there's some ego involved. But you also kind of speak to this underlying theme of what do you want from the business? What are you building the business to do? And you kind of drew that line of saying, I'm not going to go above 10. I'm not going to have a client that's more than a third of my revenue because you knew what kind of business you wanted to serve, what you needed, as opposed to where a lot of us, and I raise my hand and include myself in this, you get on the growth track and it's just growth for the sake of growth. And that's not sustainable. It just doesn't work.

Well, and it was so funny because one of my— I don't know if she was an intern or she was really an employee at the time. We were talking about adding another person to help us do this. And she says, yeah, let's run the numbers. How much more will you have to sell? How much more margin will we have to have? Will not top line but bottom line— will you really make more money?

100%. I, I was sitting— this has been probably 14 years ago— I was sitting in a room of about 40 entrepreneurs, all of them north of $1 million in revenue.

Mm-hmm.

Verne Harnish was speaking, author of Scaling Up and Rockefeller Habits, and he asked the group, how many of you could shrink your company in half, make more money and work less? And this is all different industries. Like, this is not a specific industry. And virtually every hand went up. And, you know, it took me a decade to figure out the lesson that I saw there. But the reality is, is that you absolutely can build a business where you're working more and making less money, which is wild. Like, why would you do that?

Because that top-level number, that top, that revenue number, there's so much ego and there's so much status in being a $1 million or a $5 million business.

Right.

And you're not really looking at how much am I taking home?

No, I've been in conversations with hundreds of entrepreneurs over my life and I've never heard one, not one, I might be 1,000 entrepreneurs, I don't know. I've never heard one talk about their bottom line. Never. Like, that's never the conversation. It's always, this is our top line, this is our employee count, this is, you know, this is our growth rate, you know, blah, blah, blah. No one ever comes to say, yeah, but you know what, I didn't make any money and I don't know how to make payroll next week. Right? Those conversations don't happen.

Well, depending on the kind of consulting you do, I, I had a couple of those conversations with clients, and I'm like, okay, let's step back.

And let's talk more of like a peer, like entrepreneurs getting together and, and, you know, chatting about what they're doing. No, not in the consultancy.

No, because, you know, when you're talking with peers, and, and I, I saw this a lot. I belong to a mastermind group of agency owners. We were from around the country and get together twice a year, and Since I could say piddly ass, I'm assuming I can say bullshit. Absolutely. So there was a lot of bullshit coming out of people's mouths about how much money they were making and how much they were doing. And, you know, I'd be sitting there going, yeah, I ain't buying this crap. I'm not buying it because I'm listening to the other things you're saying. I'm listening to you talk about your turnover rate. I'm listening to you talk about, um, your clients. My two biggest clients, you know, the ones that were 20 and 25% of my business, one was with me 11 years, one was with me 13. Mm-hmm. So that kind of longevity has a value that is hard to quantify. But my selling expense was so much less because I did not have to keep replacing my biggest clients.

That was— it's been just over a year ago. I got invited to a mastermind of agency owners, right? And I'm the accountant sitting in the back, just kind of observing. And they were doing a session where they were going over their numbers, their performance numbers, and one of which was retention. And they threw this number up and they were like, yeah, this trend, this looks good. They're sharing all of their data together. And they were happy that their retention was 50%. And I'm like, just as an observer, if you have to replace a customer every 6 months, something's broken. Like, that's not—

That's typical in agency world.

No, no, that's because I asked the question like, no, this is the way it is.

It is typical. But it doesn't have to be. And that was, that was one of those other decisions we made, was investing in long-term relationships, creating. And the really cool thing is one of those two clients that was with me like forever, when I sold the business, they didn't like the person I sold it to. You know what? And I told this, well, a whole different story about the people that bought the business, um, But they went away for a year or two and then they called me and said, "Hey, Lorraine, I know you're not in the business anymore, but do you know somebody?" Well, you know, as a matter of fact, I do. I have this company I'm working with and I think they will be perfect for you. And I called the company and I said, "Look, these guys, if you treat them right, if you take care of them, you will have them forever." And they've been with them for about 18 months now. And I was talking to the account manager and she's like, "Yeah, He loves everything we do. And I'm like, do you call him regularly? Yeah. Do you send him bite-sized reports? She says, yeah. Um, do you listen to him? Yeah. Guess what? They gonna be with you forever. And understanding that about that client and understanding what each one of my clients needed, and it was different. Some needed lots of flashy numbers. Some needed pretty graphics. Others needed me to be on the phone once a week just saying, "Hey." Right. Whatever it was. But our clients stayed with us. And so, my retention rate was much higher than that 50%. And my sales expense was that much lower. I did not need— Now, for my web business, it's different. You know, the content side, forever and ever. Web projects turn. But a good web client. So if I, if we did 4 websites a month and I could turn one of those into a content client, bonus.

Right. So I have a client and a personal friend that's been in the marketing agency space for at least 15 years. He made the comment to me a few months ago when we were having lunch. He said, The old agency model is dead. I'm not going to define it for you. I'm just going to give you that statement. What say you?

That is an interesting, um, because I, it's in, what I'm trying to figure out is what he considers the old model versus the new.

And from your perspective, I mean, well, from my perspective, um, a retainer—

we built our business on retainers. You pay us X amount of money every month, we do approximately the same things every month. However, if we think something is working or something is not working, we're going to make those changes and we're going to stay at— your investment will be the same but you're going to trust us to make the best use of your money. And that model served me for, I don't know, 15 of the 20 years I was in business. And, uh, the companies that I'm working with that— and the companies that I see that are successful are still doing it that way. Now I'm also seeing a lot of companies that sell retainers that aren't doing it the right way, that are doing very cookie cutter. Every client gets exactly the same package. That model is dead. You can't, you can't be doing that crap. You've got to be in a situation where you are adjusting what you're doing. But that retainer model, yeah, I think it still works. Okay. I just, I just think you have to take that retainer model and acknowledge that This is what the customer is going to pay every month. These are the results they're looking for. But you have to have that flexibility to go, you know what, we've been doing ads for 6 months and the ads ain't doing squat. We need to try this platform. We need to try more video, less video. We, we, we need to do other things. You can't be locked into this is all we do.

Yeah, I, I think about my experience with agencies. And, you know, I, I— his agency, this, this client that I'm referring to, we were a client of his for 3 years. Uber creative, really great at, at the, the content, the creative piece. Um, didn't feel like there was the strategy behind it, right? We hired another agency and we were with them less than a year because their approach was, yeah, we're strategy first, but then it became— I thought the strategy was tailored to us. Really, it was, well, this is what we've seen work somewhere else, so we're going to do it with you. And after about the third iteration of that, I'm like, this is not— there's some disconnect. Like, what you're doing does not work and it's not resonating with who we are. Right. So I totally understand the need for strategy. But like, I think from what you're saying, I think what persists, what's worked in the past and will continue to work is the, in the agency world specifically, is being that strategic layer and a creative layer to solve the problems on a custom basis, unless you're just going to say, I'm only going to work with accountants and then you're right.

But you know what, even if you say I'm only going to work with accountants, You've got to understand, even within that world, there are different accountants.

Yes, their customers are different, right?

Their customers. And so, okay, so when I, when I talk about strategy, and this is one of the things that I'm really passionate about, is part one of your strategy is you're approaching a— as you're approaching a client, the very first question you have to answer is Who is their customer? Well, not what— not what industry are they in?

And let me, let me, let me interrupt you there, because I think that's that right there. Naming that is the foundational problem because their customers, me, don't know the answer to that question. Right. I think there is a huge swath of businesses out there that are unclear on who their best client is, their ideal client is, and, and just the basic blocking and tackling of, okay, what problem is it that you solve? Because if you don't know that, the agency can't do anything. Right.

And, and so the, you know, if you, if you're sitting down with a customer, and they can't answer that, then you, you have to, you have to have the background, you have to have the experience to look at them and go, okay, so you come to me, I'm an accountant, we're accounting firms, everybody, any, everybody needs us, great. Let's narrow it down. Let's look at the center of your circle. Let's look at who do you like working with. Let's look at Let's look at your last year's worth of clients, okay? Everybody you've worked with. Now let's start putting them into groups. Who falls into the 'God, I wish I had 10 more clients like that'? Who falls into the 'Oh my God, I never want to work with that'? And how— if you can't help as an agency, if you have a client that doesn't know who their target is If you can't help them define a target, define a niche, and then that then lines up with their expertise, you ain't worthless. You as an agency, I'm sorry, you ain't worth a— you ain't worth a crap.

I would agree with that.

I would agree. So, so step number 1 is always who is the customer. Step number 2 is What is their pain point?

Okay.

And then what makes you uniquely qualified to address their pain point? But then also the other side of it is, who do you really compete with?

Yes.

And a lot of— and, and you would be amazed at the number of businesses that have more trouble answering that question than they do answering the who is your customer question.

Well, yes. And I would say that's symptomatic of not really understanding the first question of who their customer is. Because if you really knew who your customer was with clarity, you'd know exactly who your competition was, right? Because Accountants are a great example because we're absolutely horrible marketers.

Oh yeah, I know that.

We're marginal business owners. The problem with accountants is they come to the table and they want to be everything to everybody, right? We're the general practitioners. We're the country doctor, the county doctor, right? You know, back 100 years ago. And we do house calls. And it's like we don't have any level of specialization or expertise, and it largely comes from the fear of saying no. It's like, okay, I'm not working with these people. These are people that I'm not— and maybe that's the exercise that you start with as a business owner is defining who you don't serve. Like, if you're not real clear on who you serve, who is it that you absolutely don't want to work with?

I used to do this with my team, and I've done it with, with customers as well. I would have them make— we'd look at all of our current clients, and I— and the question I would ask is, if we could only work with 3 customers on this list, who would you pick? And each person got to put their 3 on the board, and we'd look for the overlap and the commonality, and then we could have conversations around, well, Everybody put this company on the board. How do we get more customers like that? What is it about that customer or that project? And then the other side of it is, if we could fire one client, who do we fire? Now, when everybody in the company points to the same customer, it's really easy, you know. But you also can have that conversation about What is it about them? Why do you all feel like we gotta get rid of them?

Well, and I can tell you who's on that list. It's engineers. You absolutely don't wanna work for engineers.

See, you know what?

There are no engineers listening to this program, so I'm completely safe saying that.

And I'm gonna tell you that I came out of, 'cause I came out of manufacturing, so I worked with a lot of engineers and I developed a skill at translating engineering into English. I would rather— and I hope there are no lawyers— I would work with a dozen engineers every single day than one lawyer. Well, because, because at least engineers, they will nitpick, they, they will be engineering, but they also, they understand their limitations. They will embrace the fact that they don't know marketing, whereas attorneys think they do.

Yes, yes. I don't, I don't work with attorneys either, but you know, they can sue you, so I didn't say anything.

Uh, yeah, you know what, I'm okay with it. I mean, I have said, I have said that to my friends who are attorneys. Um, I, I've, I mean, I think in the tall full time, the whole time I was in the business. I think we had 3 law firms. None of them stayed with us for very long because I would tell the attorney, "Look, I'm not telling you how to write a contract.

Please stop telling me how to write a blog post." Yeah, as a professional, that's probably the most frustrating thing you can do is have to argue. I mean, not to support or give reasoning, but like, they're paying you to give your professional advice and then they say, well, no, no, that's, that's not right. And now with the advent of LLMs, everybody's an expert and it's like, look, dude, go, go, go with God.

That's fine. Yeah. And I think that's, again, that was one of the luxuries of keeping the practice at a certain level. I could choose who I wanted to work with and who You know what? I don't think we're a fit. I think you need somebody who is going in a different direction, and it's not me.

The power of no. I love no.

I love no.

Lorraine, how do people find your show, and how do they learn more about you?

So, morethanafewwords.com, that's my website. You'll find the most recent episodes of the podcast. You'll find my training classes, white papers, things I'm doing. If you want to chat with me, if you want a 1-hour consulting session to say, "Hey, Lorraine, I just need somebody to look at this and tell me where to go," you can book an office hours appointment all from the website. And if you want to follow my adventures on a more regular basis, you can always look for me on LinkedIn. I'm sure there are other Lorraines there but Lorraine Ball is pretty active, so I usually come up in search pretty well.

Perfect. Listeners, we'll have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, share the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, uh, hit the little envelope button, shoot us a message, tell us what you'd like to hear, and I'll get rid of Lorraine. Until next time, ta-ta for now.