Depesh Mandalia argues that agencies chasing more leads often miss the real problem: they can't deliver on what they have. He breaks growth into three stages: Start (need one lead), Fix (too many leads, bad delivery, high churn), and Growth (both working). Build systems first, validate your ideal clients, turn results into case studies, then scale.
Chapters
Hey, everyone, it's Deepesh Mandalia, and I'm here to tell you why leads are not your biggest problem. So many businesses are focused on what they're hearing in the market, which is, you know, to grow your business, you need to get more leads, you need to find new clients, close that business, and that's the way to grow your business. The problem is there are three different life stages that a business will go through. And this determines whether leads are your biggest problem or. Or if it's something else. Number one, the start phase. If you're just getting started, let's say that, you know, you're working in house and you want to start your own freelance business, you want to start your own agency, you want to get your own client base and grow your own business. That start phase can come from many different methods. It could be word of mouth, it could even be white labeling for another business. But it isn't a case of getting as many leads as I can to get started. Sometimes it's just that one lead that I need in order to go from position zero to, to position one, which is, I've got a client and now I'm going to get them results. The second phase is the fix. If you have too many leads and not enough members of your team to serve them, now things start to break. Your clients are not happy, they end up leaving and we end up in this situation where we get more leads and then we burn those leads and we get more leads and we burn those leads. And what eventually happens is your team are not happy because every single month a new client is coming through that revolving door. Your reputation's getting damaged, you're not creating consistent revenue and cash flow for your business and eventually it will burn you out. And I've seen this happen time and time again. The third stage is growth. You've got your acquisition here and you've got your delivery and both are absolutely working. If you are just getting started, well, guess what, you're usually the only person in the business. So how do you give enough time for acquisition and delivery whilst trying to keep clients happy? And here's the problem here. If all you're doing is focusing heavily on your acquisition system and you're trying to service clients, this is the first thing that gives. So clients results stop. The clients are unhappy, the clients end up leaving. And then you go into this cycle again of I need more leads because my clients keep leaving. And you then have a massive barrier which you just can't get past to get to this growth stage. The growth stage is I am attracting clients, I'm delivering now. I need to get more clients, I need to get more clients. And that becomes an easier, painless and profitable business to grow than either of these two. If you are generating leads and you have clients coming in, if you haven't yet figured out your delivery process, this is where you should spend most of your effort. You'll be surprised at how many businesses are being burned by bad services. So for example, if a client comes in and says, you know, I'm making $30,000 a month, I want to scale it 3x to 90k and I want to do it in 3 months time, it's very easy to sell that service by literally saying, yes. This side of the equation is ten times easier than it is to, number one, deliver them results and number two, retain them. Part of that delivery system is the systems that you've built up. But this is where so many people fail, fail. If you can't get out of this situation, then that's the first thing you need to break out of. What I would suggest is when you're in this phase, just take that step back. Do you have a repeatable system? Our agency grew because we created a conveyor belt of delivering results. That conveyor belt became really good when the type of clients we were attracting were very similar to the ones who got results already. And that made it easier for us to market. So if we created a great result for a client here, we turn that into a case study, publish that, bring them into the acquisition cycle, and then here we validate whether that client is right for us. But when you validate and plan and create a clear path of how you're going to deliver their results, and you deliver them and you retain them, not only are you able to grow more case studies and improve your acquisition, then you actually end up growing your agency through retention and being able to charge more as well. So go ahead, click the link below, download the free ebook on how we have moved from this kind of constant fix and break cycle into growth mode and apply that to your agency or freelance business today and see what difference is going to make for you.
