Vampire Clients vs. Dream Clients

Because, like, the whole thing about freedom started to feel like a prison really fast. There's a lot of. There's a lack of predictable clients and the lack of predictable client work. And it led to a lot of financial anxiety, which I'm sure some of you guys can relate to. So once you feel anxious about your finances, if you don't know where the next kind of check's coming from, if you feel like it's all up and down or like a roller coaster, you start taking on projects and work that you don't actually want to take on. Some of you guys I know are doing that in this room right now. And there are jobs that are maybe uninteresting to you, or there's like a lot of work for the pay, or they're not for your ideal client. And you start doing it because you feel this financial pressure of, I got to pay the bills, I got to be able to put food on the table, all these things. And it makes you really miserable, though. So I call these kind of projects you take on like vampire projects because they suck away your passion time and even your financial resources. And I'm sure you guys have. Who here has ever had a vampire project before? Pretty much everybody. Sorry, I got the static coming from the mic here. But yeah, crappy project where it dragged on for months on end, didn't feel like there was any completion or end date, and where you possibly even lost money trying to satisfy an impossible client. Let's see. So here's an example of this one in Vernida. I remember Bernita. Cause this was 20, actually 2014. So I was still doing freelance copywriting too, by the way. But this woman, Bernita, she was in Alabama. She hired me because I moved back to Pensacola. Sorry. Because I was like, hey, now I can work from anywhere. I moved to Pensacola. I'll create an agency. I'll create jobs for people. Now I can do what I. I didn't have the opportunity after college. Now I can create this opportunity for other people. So there's this woman, Bernita, as an example. I had to build a WordPress membership site for her. I had a developer who I thought was good and where I thought it would be like, you know, it was a couple thousand dollars. I thought that we'd have it done in like a week and let life would be good. So you've got. And again, this would be hard to read, but you've got bermita on July 8. So after a few weeks, emails from her like, hi, Stefan, a Chrome, please. The Natives are starving, which I don't know exactly what that means, except for I think she's waiting about when is my website going to be good? And you've got later on like you know, just these anxiety ridden emails. So that was July 8th. Here's August 11th. You know, she's old. She was like 80. So she talked about how she was going to die before the site was finished. And that made me feel like so terrible even here. Like Alicia and I have gone over site and there are many issues that need to be addressed. We feel a conversation would be the best way to handle this since we were short on time with your developer. This time it was about the developer, but she talked about being short on time in Life. That was August 11th. Here's August 29th. Stefan, I know the last thing you wish to see is an email from me. It's truly the last thing I want to do, especially when it's to ask a question. Stefan is going to be September in a few days. That means another month has slipped past us. I'm getting these emails from this old ass Alabama woman for a website that I thought was gonna take me like a week to finish. And it was September 18th. When you have a moment, can you call me? I promise it won't take long. It just kept going. And I remember feeling like so fucking stuck in that project and I was hiring other people, hiring other developers, trying to find people who could fix this project. Suddenly I think she paid me like whatever. She paid me like three or $4,000. I'd spent five or six thousand dollars on this project. I felt like so trapped in this project, like Bernita was never going to end. Even though of course it was gonna end. And now I can look back at it and laugh with you guys. It's nothing compared to like Randall's story or other stories. But there's those clients where you're like, man, I am just so trapped. So that's just one example of where I felt so trapped. I started this agency called markettaffy. The goal is of providing and building out a team to provide SEO, all these different things to people. I was still running long form sales copy, but I thought the agency model was what I wanted to do. And so I didn't really. And for those of you who want to build an agency, I want to talk about that today too, because you may or you may not, but there was definitely stuff about the agency model that I ended up hating. I took on a group of doctors called Braincore therapy. Something like 130 doctors in virtually every state in the country and overseas as well. And it was my first profitable business ever. I was handling the marketing for these guys, doing SEO, building websites, all that kind of stuff, but it was still a nightmare. Why was it a nightmare? Because we have 130 clients. You're gonna get a lot of them that are vampires. And so even though I had all these clients, they're sucking away my time, my energy, my happiness. And I'd wake up feeling instant anxiety because I knew as soon as I checked my email, I looked at my phone, I'd have a message from some of them, and it meant I'd have to do stuff all day that I didn't want to do and that I was going to be miserable doing. So I was growing depressed, frustrated, and really burned out. So an old direct response client of mine named Yi Fong asked me to write some stuff about for a new venture of his. I jumped on it. The venture is called Lion's Creative Group. This is a picture of me. It's really dark, so you can barely see it, but he's a young Singaporean kid. Speaking of that, you're 23. He was like, 21 at the time, 22, probably 10, 15, 20 million in the bank. So I was like, oh, my gosh, this guy's killing it. So I did. So our deal was $1,000 per sales letter. Pretty simple. But I wanted more stability, and I was worried. This is, like, worth talking about too. I was like, okay, you guys are overseas. I don't really know if you're going to be around or not. So if I stop everything I'm doing, if I close down this agency and I just write copy for you guys, I need some kind of, like, guarantee that there's steady work. Because if there's not steady work, I can't close down this agency. Like, can we have steady work together? And at first I actually said, no. He's like, I don't want that burden. I was like, okay, fine, I understand. That is what it is. But then the first thing I wrote for them just, like, crushed it. Like, did really well. And so then they're like, actually, we've reconsidered. We're happy to give you steady work. Which just goes back to, like, one of the tenets of if you want to have a great clients, repeat clients, like, just knock it out of the park for them. That sounds simple, but it is one of the most easy ways to get more clients on repeat is just do a really good job. Like, really deliver. I think I don't want to steal my own thunder, so I won't. But, like, there's so many times where we sit around bitching about not getting enough clients, but it's like, if you are the best at what you do, if you are committed to excellence, then you're getting. You will never have issues with clients. And it sounds so simple, but we get the client. We love the sale, we love that the money's coming in. I'm gonna PayPal you. I'm wiring you the money. We love getting the money. And we're like, fuck yeah. And we're like, alright, I'm gonna start it in two weeks. And then you sit on the couch and watch Netflix or you do other stuff. And then two weeks happens. And then you're like, oh, what a burden. Now I have to do this. And that's such a crappy way to look at it. I've done that for most of my life. Only maybe in the last few years did I change my mentality on that. That instead of feeling like, what a burn. I'm like, this is awesome. How do I do the best job possible? How do I commit myself to excellence? How do I excel at this job?