Did my client listen to me?
When I think of all the client work I’ve done, I’ve really always been hired for one reason and one reason only.
Time.
You see, there are never enough hours in the day for a business owner. SaaS, coaching, ecom, you name it - they’re all working flat out and are desperate to offload something, ANYTHING, to a competent pair of hands.
If they could offload just this one task, they could start tackling the next one on their never-ending to-do list.
Sometimes, you can sell time back to a business owner in the form of consulting or advising. This is the coaching model in a nutshell. You teach someone how to do something so they don’t waste weeks or months trying and failing. They buy to shorten the learning curve.
This is what I did when a client came to me because their landing page copy wasn’t converting. Their SaaS startup was getting plenty of free-plan sign-ups, but they were struggling to convert those users to paid.
They thought it was a copy problem.
I saw it differently.
You see, there was zero reason to upgrade to a paid plan - and no amount of copy was going to change that. I advised the business owner to drop the free plan entirely, or at the very least, turn it into a free trial.
Now, you probably know by now that I’m not a big fan of doing anything for free. But it’s not just my opinion:
https://newsletter.marclou.com/p/ditch-your-free-plan
At the time of writing the above blog, Marc attributes most of his growth to removing free plans.
Did my client listen to me?
The answer is no. They were seduced by the vanity metrics of more users signing up, so I did what I could to improve the copy. But that’s the thing about copy - you can’t outwrite a fundamental flaw.
Unfortunately, it looks like that particular client is no longer in business. And I’ll be honest, it hurts a little. I keep tabs on him just in case he reappears. But the likelihood is that he’s another creator who had a dream, realised how hard it was going to be, and decided that the juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze.
I’m not saying listening to me would have saved his business. But it sure as hell didn’t help it.
He could have saved himself so much damn time if he’d focused all his efforts on paid users. Perhaps he only had enough savings to go all-in on his SaaS for a set amount of time before he had to abandon it and get another corpo job. Maybe if he’d built an automated email system, it would have done a lot of the heavy lifting in the background and allowed him to afford to make more mistakes.
That’s the thing about client work - you can’t save them all. It’s their business at the end of the day. They have the final say.
All I know is there are so many creators out there running around with no email list, no segmentation, no automations. Hell, some of them don’t even have sales pages for the products or services they’re selling.
Some of them will see the light. Others won’t.
We do what we can.
If you want some help setting up email automations that work for you 24/7, send me an email with the phrase “PRIVATE CLIENT”, and I’ll be in touch to ask you some questions about your business.
James Perkins
P.S. Refer me a client I end up working with, and I’ll pay you 50% of what I charge them for the first month.
