They ask you for access, which you provide. They ask for creatives, which you send. Then they tell you the campaign is delayed because they’re still waiting on your team. Fair enough. Maybe you were slow. But then you find out they’ve had access for two weeks and nobody actually launched anything. Now you're wondering whether you hired the wrong agency. And the awkward part? The agency might genuinely be good at what they do. They just handled the situation badly. I think that's one of the fastest ways to lose a client: not necessarily doing bad work, but making the client feel like they have to manage you. There's a difference between a client being involved and a client having to chase the people they hired.

Send it to someone who doesn't know your business. Then ask them: “What do you think you're getting?” Don't explain it. Don't give them context. Just let them read it. If their answer is: “Uh… some kind of marketing service?” the offer probably needs work. I used to think a strong offer needed more detail. More deliverables. More features. More proof. More explanation. Now I'm starting to think the opposite is often true. The prospect should be able to understand: what changes for them + what they're actually getting + why it's worth paying for without needing you on a Zoom call to translate the offer. That's a much harder problem than making an offer look impressive.

You hand someone a problem because you don't want to deal with it anymore. Then suddenly you're answering 14 questions about it. Sending them assets. Approving things. Explaining things again because someone on the team wasn't in the original call. Chasing an update. Approving another thing. And eventually you start wondering: “Wait… didn't I hire you so I wouldn't have to do all this?” 😂 I think there's a huge difference between an agency that does the work and one that actually takes the problem away from you. If I were the client, that's the experience I'd pay more for.

It wasn't broken. It worked exactly how I designed it. And that's precisely why it took me so long to remove it. I kept thinking: “It's already built, might as well keep it.” But every extra option makes the product slightly harder to understand. So now I'm trying a different rule: If a feature doesn't make the main job noticeably easier, it has to earn its place. Might end up deleting a few more things before I'm done. Turns out building software is partly just learning what not to ship.

“Can you show me how this is performing?” Sounds simple. Then you start digging through: CRM → automation tool → spreadsheets → analytics → invoices → Slack and 45 minutes later you're trying to turn six different pieces of data into something a client can actually understand. I've been thinking about this one a lot lately. Not because the data doesn't exist. It's because the client shouldn't have to see the machinery behind it. They should just see: what happened → what it achieved → what it means. That's one of the things I'm playing around with right now.