Eric Siu and Neil Patel share seven ways to scale a consulting business: offer free months to lock in annual contracts, use project-management tools to track profitability, master copywriting on LinkedIn and email, find recently funded startups on Crunchbase and send them free audits, niche down to avoid competing with larger firms, automate reporting with SEMrush or Data Studio, and switch to performance-based pricing tied to measurable outcomes.
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Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about 7 unconventional tactics to scale any agency or consulting business right now. So number 1, Neil and I talk about this a lot. I think during times like this where people are kind of, might be dialing back their purse strings a little bit, you know, you offer some type of thing where it's a no-brainer to work with you. So a no-brainer example would be, Let's say I go to Neil and say, hey Neil, I'd like to work with you. I'd like to provide agency services for you and I know you need help and you can't really afford it right now. Why don't we work for you for a month or 2 for free and then we have an annual deal agreement after that? So basically how it works is you don't pay for the first 2 months, but what you can do is you can split up the cost with the next 10 months afterwards and you can make it— that's good for you actually because you get repaid on it. They get to save on cash flow for a little bit. And you get a longer-term deal. So that's the first one.
Yeah. The next one is use project management solutions because if you're trying to scale your consulting business and you don't use project management solutions to communicate with your clients, communicate internally, and track time and hours on who's doing what, it's a pain and a nightmare to continually scale and grow. By doing that, what you'll do is you'll quickly figure out which clients are profitable, which ones aren't, which ones you're not spending enough time on, which ones you need to spend more time on, as well as how people could be more efficient too, so that way you can get more done for your customers for the amount of time that they're spending. Because even if they're paying you a flat fee, in theory it ends up coming down to an hourly rate because you know that you have costs and you have to make sure it's profitable.
All right, number 3, I think it's really important to learn copywriting. And what I mean by that is not just writing essays or whatever, but learning how to be persuasive, learning how to structure your sentences, learning how to write less, doing less with more. A lot of that ties into how you do work with anybody really, whether it's your friends or whether it's in business. But there's a course called increase.academy and this was shared by our mutual friend Syed and he actually shared it with his team. And what happened was they got a lot better at copywriting. They know how to write email copy now. They know how to write All this other copy, right? So LinkedIn copy, email copy, LinkedIn especially, I see the people that are writing good copy, they get like, you know, 400 to 500 comments or so, and that's just awareness for you. So I think, you know, taking advantage of organic reach with LinkedIn and just in general when you email people, being very succinct, that's going to get you more at-bats for getting more deals.
As a consulting business, and this gets into number 4, is you need consistent deals, new clients. Customers, more revenue, because if you're not getting that, one, you're not going to scale, but two, your consulting business is going to dwindle away. So what I want you to do is go look at all the recently funded companies. You can get a list on places like Crunchbase, and I want you to outline everything that they're doing wrong that you can help them with and break down how they can fix it all in a PDF, send it to the founders and the investors, and let them have all the information for free. What you'll find is a portion of them, 20, 30%, should be hiring you to fix those issues. It's a great way to scale your client generation or your revenue generation side of your consulting business.
All right. Number 5 is niching down. So here's the thing. Like we have an agency accelerator coaching program where we help agencies grow. And the number one thing that I see that's a problem is that people in the very beginning, they try to compare themselves to the big agencies. Oh my God, the big agencies have all these big clients. They work with all these people. They work across all these industries, they're full service, and they try to be everything to everyone. But keep in mind, they have a lot more resources in terms of capital and human capital as well. You don't have that. So you have to think about what you're really good at, what industries you're good at, also what services you're exceptional at. Because if you try to do all this stuff in the beginning, it's going to overwhelm you. And before you know it, you're out of business. So you got to think about how you can be focused in the very beginning. And the problem with agency-type businesses is it's really easy to become unfocused. Because there's a shiny new object every single day.
The next thing I want you to do is streamline your reporting process. There's a lot of tools out there from the SEMrushes to Ahrefs to, what's the other one? Agency Analytics, is that what it's called?
Yeah.
Raven Tools. There's a lot of software for whatever niche you're in that'll help you streamline your reporting. You can even use things like Google Data Studio, but if you don't have your reporting right, because any type of consulting business you're in, you're going to deal with clients on a regular basis. Send them notes on what's being done and the results, whether it's marketing or something else. But streamlining the report creation will save so many hours from your team.
All right. Number 7, last but not least, think about how you can structure. I talked about in the very beginning pricing where maybe they don't pay you, but if you can, if the timing is right, what you can do is think about how you can price based on value or how you can price based on performance. So here's an example. If I get on a sales call with somebody, instead of saying, hey, we just charge $2,500 a month or $5,000 a month or whatever, I actually have a conversation saying, hey, Neil, if we're able to get these results for you, let's say we make you $10 million, are you willing to pay $1 million? And he'll be like, of course. And we'll be like, okay, how much is it?
$10 million in profit or $10 million in revenue? Yeah, $10 million in profit. All right, $10 million in revenue. I don't know, but yeah.
Well, let's assume Neil is not, you know, Neil's not the entrepreneur. Let's say it's actually like a big company and, you know, it's like an executive, like a director level. They're probably gonna be okay with either or.
But yeah, that's true.
Anyway, so the thing is like, if you can get them to say that, like, okay, if we're to work together and, you know, after a year or so, you know, what we're having coffee, what would success actually look like? What do you want?
Right?
So you actually get to the crux of what they want. And then what you can do is you can charge a small, medium, large type of thing. Meaning instead of just charging the $5,000, maybe your lowest tier is $5,000, but then you have a $5,000, $15,000, and a $60,000 a month. Like $60,000 is the FU pricing, right? Um, and sometimes you put like, you know, additional levels of support, but what happens is sometimes people have such a big ego that they just go for the biggest one. It's like, no, no, no, no, we're going to go for the biggest one. And I've seen that happen a couple of times. So that is number 7. I hope that's helpful. And by the way, guys, you can go to singlegrain.com/call if you want to book a call with my team to grow your agency. You can do that. If it's a fit, we'll reach out. And also Growth Accelerator, it's virtual now. It's going to be live again sometime soon, probably not soon, but go to singlegrain— marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E. And we'll see you tomorrow.
