In this solo presentation, Kyri Nahlis explains a single, powerful tactic for dramatically increasing client retention in agencies, coaching programs, and online communities. She frames the tactic around the concept of "operational drag" – the friction or complexity a business faces that they pay a service to eliminate. While most community owners simply teach members how to solve a problem, Kyri argues that true retention comes from making members dependent on the service by providing a done‑for‑you (DFY) component that removes a critical, high‑drag task. She illustrates the idea with concrete examples across niches – pre‑built ClickFunnels funnels, DFY thumbnail and title creation for YouTubers, VA‑managed comment replies for lead‑gen communities, product‑listing optimization for e‑commerce, weekly bespoke meal/fitness plans, and DFY podcast publishing. By embedding one high‑impact DFY service into the core offering, members face painful friction if they leave, leading to 3‑5× longer lifetimes and higher LTV. Kyri also notes that while this adds short‑term operational drag for the provider, it can be systematized with SOPs, templates, and trained staff, turning the drag into scalable value. She predicts the approach will become widespread, turning community ownership into a competitive "bloodbath" unless providers adopt the dependency model.
Chapters
If you have an agency or a community or any kind of business, you know client acquisition is a pain in the ass. However, once you do crack it and you do get those clients, why would you ever want to lose them? So I spent a lot of time trying to understand how to retain these clients. I'm going to explain to you in this video one tactic, and this really is specifically for like communities and coaching programs. And this is taken from the agency space specifically, and I'm putting it into communities as a way to like retain people disgustingly well. It's like, it's so good people become dependent on you. No one really does this in the industry. I know about 3 or 4 coaching programs that do this, and their retention is ridiculous. Like, they'd never lose people. And the idea here is to understand the base principle of business and why people actually buy to begin with. What— so they buy anything in business whatsoever. This isn't about consumer things like Netflix and stuff. This is just straight for if you're selling stuff with a business outcome. So every single business has operational drag. This means that something that slows down the business, okay? And normally, normally operational drag is intricate, twisted, confusing. The reason that they're like paying for your community, course, or agency to begin with is because they need to solve their drag. And once a business solves its drag, the business is now free to fly again without drag. And this is why, you know, cars try to get as aerodynamic as possible to reduce their drag. The problem is, once a client has solved their issue, A lot of the time in these community programs, businesses can now like escape from your program. And this works with B2B and B2C, by the way, like communities, programs, doesn't really matter which person you're serving. It works for any niche, to be honest with you, as long as you understand the principle. And that's why principles are so great. So why do people stop using a service? They stop using a service because there is no more drag and they're free from their pain. But, but it is within this where the underlying principle of of operational drag exists, and you can exploit this dynamic to retain clients basically forever. I genuinely mean that. Some really cool concepts I'm gonna speak about in this video. And this is exactly what companies like Amazon, Apple, they do to you. And this is why you continue to pay for their services forever. Like some people, they'll buy Amazon once and they'll just never stop paying for it. Same for Apple products. They buy an Apple product once and they're an Apple fan for life. You've probably experienced this for 100 other products in your life, and the same can be applied to online communities or coaching programs. Think about this: every time you use an Apple device, or you buy something from Amazon, or you talk to your favourite business whatsoever, this— the reason that their service is so good is because they've gone to an extreme length, and I mean an extreme length, to eliminate any drag on your time. Any drug on your business. They've taken all the pain away and all the complexity away. So all you have to do is go through the front door and experience their product. To retain a customer, you need to position yourself as an indispensable solution to their problem, okay? But more than this, you don't just need to solve their problem. You need to solve it in a way, which is very interesting, you need to solve it in a way that makes them dependent on you. So they can't solve it on their own. Not because they don't know how, but they can't solve it on their own because it's too operationally consuming and it just adds too much drag to their business. This works if you're an agency owner. Agencies do this beautifully, and that is why they can have a long, long LTV. Coaching businesses and communities though, they don't do this very well. That's why the average coach can retain a client for 3 months and at the best 5 months. They just lose their clients. The client learns how to solve the drag on their own so then you become dispensable as a coach and they just leave you. But this is the part where you can exploit, and this is the dirty secret behind the industry. Not dirty secret, this is like a secret that most people won't even tell you for free, and most people will charge you $10,000 to tell you this. If you want to retain clients in your community or coaching program, you need to adopt the same philosophy. You need to add functions to your community that make leaving painful. That's what people misunderstand in this industry. You don't create something that people enjoy using necessarily on its own. Of course they have to enjoy using it, but that is not how you retain people. You need to create something painful to stop using. People don't retain because they enjoy your product, they stay because it's too painful to stop using it. Okay, think about Apple, think about Amazon. I, I like my iPhone, but it's like, why am I going to go to— I'm not going to go to an Android because Apple's better. Because it's better. I'm gonna stay with Apple because switching to an Android is too painful, you understand? I'm not gonna suddenly start trying to ship my own orders from China. I'll let Amazon do that. It's too painful for, for me to do that. Now I'm going to give you some concrete examples about how you can apply this to a community, but I'm trying to like emphasize the principle to you. So it means solving the problem beyond the surface level. You don't just— like, most community owners make the mistake of telling someone how to do something. No, what I'm saying to you is you actually, in, in a community, you do it for them. Doesn't have to be everything, but you choose the single most potent and like, like a needle. You, you've got to understand the problem that your members are facing that pokes like a needle that really hurts. So imagine they just hate making their own website. This, this isn't a good one, but imagine they hate making their own websites. Don't just make a guide about how to build a website. Build a template, set the template up, and then put it on ClickFunnels as a template they can, but they can just take from you for free in the community. So you don't just show them how to do it, do it for them and give it to them. If they need marketing funnels like ClickFunnels, for example, don't just show them how to do a ClickFunnels account. Pre-build the funnels on ClickFunnels and let them just take it with one click. This is what a lot of big companies do in the, in the community space. But that's not actually a dark secret, that's just a tactic. The dark secret is finding the exploitable and complex moments in a business and offering these complex moments as a part of your core service. For example, imagine you had a YouTube community that helped people grow their channel. To exploit this dynamic and retain them in the community for like 3 or 5 times longer, I would offer a done-for-you thumbnail and title creation service. Yes, I'll teach them how how to do this themselves, but I'll do it for them within the price, baked into the price. This means leaving the community not only incurs the problem of losing you as a coach and losing the community, they now lose the thumbnail and title creation bonuses, and this incurs massive drag on their business. I'm telling you, this will increase your retention by 5 times overnight, because whenever you add drag to someone's business, it's painful, they don't want it. Business is hard enough already. If you can take something away from them, they'll stay with you forever. Like, this is a massive, massive thing to understand. If you owned a community where, let's say, you taught people to generate social media leads, I would offer a done-for-you service where I have like a virtual assistant to go into their accounts, like on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram, and reply to all of the comments on their posts. I've got about 8,000 people on Twitter. When I do a post, 10 to 20 people will do a reply to me at any one time. I don't want to go in there and reply to all those comments, but I know replying to those comments increases my following and gets me more leads. I, if I owned a community where I help people generate leads, you know, online, I would have a VA who works for everyone and it's built into the package to do that for them. They will probably never leave because they can't train, they've got, then if they left, they'd have to then train their own VA, source their own VA, sourcing someone is hard, manage their own VA, make sure the VA is doing quality checks to make sure the posts are actually good, whatever the VA is doing. See what I'm saying? The more complex problems you can solve for people in business, the longer they stay with you because you have spent the time solving it. Again, like, if you're on the community where let's say you taught someone how to do something in regards to e-commerce, I don't know, you done TikTok Shop, I would do product listing optimizations for them. Like, my team would go in, optimize the product titles, optimize the descriptions, optimize the keywords. This helps, you know, increase visibility of the product and increases conversions on the platforms. That is really complex to do, but you could train a VA to do that, and it would probably increase your conversions by 5 times. Again, easy example: say you had a fitness community. I would do weekly bespoke meal plans for them, or fitness plans every week, you know. Don't do it like 6 months in advance because then you lose your leverage. Do it week by week. So I'm trying to say, you have to make people dependent on you. Imagine— I'm going to give one more example, um— imagine you had a podcast growth community where you show people how to build their podcasts. I would then— let's think, what's the annoying part of doing a podcast? Publishing a podcast. I would have VAs publish a podcast done for you as being part of the community. Little bonuses that make it ridiculous to not stay, or make it so easy to stay in your community because you just do so much for them. Like, yes, they get the community, yes, they get the course, yes, they get the coaching calls, but they also get a done-for-you service. You don't get like 10 done-for-you services. You get one done-for-you service that solves such a specific problem, they never leave. This is such a good strategy and some of the best communities on the internet use this right now. So these are all just examples of like how to exploit this whole community dynamic and like really retain customers with a done-for-you service within your community. And I think everyone's going to start doing this in the next year or two because it is such a strong service. And then the owning a community is going to become a bloodbath because once everyone's doing this, It's gonna be crazy. But the underlining principle here is to add a done-for-you element to your community or program. And if you do this, you will increase attention because people just don't want to do this stuff themselves. And if you're asking to me, like me, Kyri, like, that means I incur more drag on my business. And the answer is yes. Like, yes, that's how you build a good product. But you also get 3 to 5 times more retained members in your community, which you probably spent thousands to get in the beginning with. If you're doing ads, for example. You also get more revenue 'cause you retain them. You get a better product and you build word of mouth. And eventually you will systemize this system and it will no longer incur as much drag on your system anyways because you're gonna get so good at doing this. You have SOPs and templates and trained staff who can just do this with their eyes closed. So it'll seem like drag to begin with, but that's where the value comes in. It is hard and people do wanna pay for this. And they're paying you, so they'll continue to pay you. And like, you'll be surprised how long people continue paying you to get to make them no longer have to do the shit that is hard and the shit that is boring, the shit that just, it moves the needle, but it takes way more effort than it's worth potentially. This is truly the dark secret because it really creates a dependency on you. And once a client is truly dependent on you, you can probably have their wallet forever. And that is the mark of a great product.
