Podcast 14 min read

How to Choose the Right Clients w/ Jodie Cook

with Jodie Cook

Chris Do and Jodie Cook examine how client size, profitability, and ambition determine the right business model.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · August 9, 2025

The prestigious client who owned the birthday

The client looked like a breakthrough until it took over a birthday. Jodie Cook, who started an agency at 22 and ran it for 10 years before selling it, remembers canceling holiday plans when a major automotive client wanted work done. The account represented 20 percent of her company's revenue, and protecting the jobs attached to it took precedence over celebrating.

There was no complicated decision to make. That was the problem.

The same contract that gave the agency revenue and prestige also constrained its founder's freedom. Cook had built what she considered a lifestyle business, with processes that allowed a team to handle delivery. Yet this client could pull her straight back into the work whenever it demanded attention.

Her conversation with Chris Do exposes the gap between winning impressive clients and building a business worth owning. Both have served large organizations. Both know the appeal of recognizable names on a website, substantial project budgets, and work that signals arrival in a more competitive market.

They also know that arrival does not settle the question of whether the business works.

A bigger account changes more than the invoice. It can change who controls the schedule, whose contract governs the relationship, how many people must approve a decision, and how much custom work the agency must absorb. Revenue rises while flexibility disappears.

The right client fits the business, not just the portfolio.

Cook eventually organized that distinction around three animals: rabbits, deer, and elephants. The metaphor gave her agency a way to compare clients by the effort required to acquire and serve them, rather than by the excitement their names generated.

Her answer was to concentrate on the middle category. But she corrects herself when that preference starts sounding like a universal prescription. Other businesses can thrive at either end, provided their systems and ambitions match the clients they pursue.

That correction matters. A framework for choosing clients becomes less useful the moment it becomes another ladder everyone is expected to climb.

Do supplies the counterweight. His commercial work involved large brands and advertising agencies, where substantial budgets were normal rather than exceptional. He was not simply a small-client operator who accidentally landed a demanding account. His company was built for complex production, and even there, the economics eventually prompted a different direction.

The issue is not whether large clients are good or small clients are bad. It is whether the business has chosen its obligations deliberately. Cook's canceled birthday makes that distinction concrete: a contract can be commercially important and personally expensive at the same time.

The prestige was visible on the client list. The cost appeared on the calendar.

Three animals, three operating models

Cook's categories describe different ways of operating, not fixed revenue brackets. A small account at one agency can exceed the largest account at another. The useful comparison is between the contract's value and the machinery required to win it, deliver it, and keep it.

In her agency, the categories initially looked like this:

Rabbits are small, accessible, volume-driven clients. Cook's typically paid $500 to $1,500 monthly and arrived through networking.
Deer offer solid value without excessive complexity. Her examples ranged from roughly $1,500 to $6,000 or $7,000 monthly, arriving through her personal brand or Google Ads.
Elephants bring prestige and resource-intensive delivery. These accounts came through pitches and required more people, more customization, and more complicated decisions.

Rabbits made the agency possible. They were relatively easy to close, and one relationship could lead to several more. The difficulty emerged when their numbers grew faster than the business's capacity to serve them efficiently.

Each client wanted something slightly different. Each contract contributed relatively little on its own. A full schedule could therefore conceal a weak model: plenty of activity, limited room to breathe, and too little value in any individual account to justify extensive attention.

Do describes the operational requirement as an assembly line. Low-ticket work needs enough consistency and volume to sustain the people delivering it. Giving every small account a highly customized treatment does not automatically demonstrate excellence; it can make the service financially unsustainable.

Elephants create almost the reverse problem. Their budgets appear to support more attention, but they also expect delivery on their own terms. Cook remembers needing to learn unfamiliar requirements and create new processes for accounts her agency was not set up to handle.

One revealing distinction was contractual. Smaller clients generally accepted her agency's terms. Large clients expected the agency to accept theirs.

The contract became a practical indicator of where authority sat.

Deer offered Cook a more workable balance. Her team defined the kind of organization it wanted, the job title of the person buying, and the services it would deliver. Instead of stretching toward every prestigious opportunity or discounting to secure smaller accounts, the agency developed a repeatable center of gravity.

Do's own numbers show why the metaphor must remain relative. In his commercial production business, projects around $100,000 to $200,000 could function as rabbits. Work between $200,000 and $400,000 occupied the middle; larger assignments brought more procurement, scrutiny, and complexity.

The amounts differed dramatically. The underlying trade-offs did not.

This places client selection alongside the broader organizational choices suggested by How To Grow A Small Creative Agency. Growth is not merely adding contracts to the same operation. A different category of buyer can require a different company.

The half-million-dollar illusion

Large budgets create an unusually persuasive form of confusion. They make the scale of the transaction easy to see and the economics of the business harder to inspect.

Do recalls regularly delivering projects between roughly $250,000 and $500,000. Those were substantial assignments, but the headline figure did not describe what his company retained. Before evaluating the outcome, he had to account for the work required to secure the job and the expensive specialists needed to produce it.

He also counted the pitches that failed.

That detail changes the picture. The successful project did not exist in isolation from the sales effort surrounding it. Presentations, proposals, and unsuccessful bids belonged to the economics of pursuing that category of client, even when their costs were less visible than the production budget.

On a $500,000 job, Do says the remaining net profit could be $100,000. He therefore evaluated it as a $100,000 opportunity, not a half-million-dollar achievement.

Evaluate the profit left behind, not the revenue passing through.

The distinction prompted a different question: what other kind of work could produce the same return? For Do, content and products eventually offered an alternative. His company could own its intellectual property rather than repeatedly competing for permission to produce someone else's work.

He describes that shift in terms of fulfillment, working less, and reducing team stress. It was not simply a move away from clients. It was a comparison between different ways of generating the economic result the company actually wanted.

The same discipline underlies the concerns raised by 99% Of Creatives Lose Money With These Pricing Mistakes: an impressive fee is not sufficient evidence of a healthy business.

Cook adds an important limit to that argument. Another business model can always look easier from the outside. Her first office boss repeatedly imagined making money through something other than the work in front of him, an early example of what she calls shiny object syndrome.

Changing models is not automatically strategic. Sometimes it is simply dissatisfaction wearing a new costume.

An agency that understands large accounts, prices them effectively, and has the right delivery operation can do well serving elephants. A business serving rabbits can also work when its systems fit the volume. Cook's preference for deer reflects her agency's needs, not proof that the middle category always wins.

Her distinction between a performance business and a lifestyle business makes the choice more precise. One founder wants to test scale, build a larger organization, and work with increasingly ambitious clients. Another wants clear deliverables, dependable processes, and work that stays within chosen boundaries.

Neither ambition is inherently smaller. They are aimed at different outcomes.

The expensive mistake is pursuing the symbols of one while expecting the daily life of the other. Cook wanted an operation her team could run through established processes. The automotive account wanted access that overrode those processes. The conflict was structural, not a failure of enthusiasm.

A pitch is not always an opportunity

Even within the largest client category, the odds are not equal. Do divides his experience with major accounts into three situations, distinguished less by the size of the company than by its actual intention to hire.

Some clients already wanted his company. They had seen the work, remembered it, and waited for the right assignment. Winning the pitch was largely a matter of confirming the confidence that brought them there.

Others invited a proposal without seriously intending to award the work. Their process required multiple bids, and his company supplied the extra option. Between those extremes sat genuine competitions in which the decision remained open.

Preferred agencies enter with an established advantage. The buyer already has a reason to want them.
Courtesy bidders satisfy a procurement requirement. Extensive preparation does not necessarily create a real chance of winning.
Open competitors face an undecided buyer. The pitch must meet that buyer's particular standards.

This distinction helped Do recognize that not every invitation deserved the same investment. A proposal request can look like demand while functioning only as paperwork in someone else's selection process.

His response became disarmingly direct: “Are we the third bid?”

A coach encouraged him to ask. Some buyers admitted that he was. The practical gain was clarity before the agency spent more time preparing work for a decision that had effectively already been made.

The lesson is qualification, not merely confidence. The agency needed to know what role it actually occupied in the process. Without that information, enthusiasm could turn a low-probability invitation into an expensive internal production.

This is where client selection meets the interpersonal demands reflected in The Skill You Need To Win Clients That No One Talks About. The formal request and the buyer's underlying position are not always identical.

Large accounts also become more attractive when the acquisition effort does not repeat with every assignment. Do recalls a handful of relationships in which his company served as agency of record, handling ongoing creative and strategic work rather than continually competing from the beginning.

After an initial onboarding process and a master service agreement, subsequent projects became easier to commission. One relationship that began with a $100,000 project expanded to more than $1 million in revenue as the client kept returning.

Those figures still describe revenue, not profit. Their importance here is the shape of the relationship: repeated work following an initial commitment, rather than repeated selling before every piece of work.

The contrast explains why client size alone is an incomplete selection criterion. Two equally prominent organizations can impose very different sales burdens. One repeatedly invites the agency into uncertain competition; another already trusts it and has a working arrangement in place.

The valuable distinction is not simply big versus small. It is uncertain pursuit versus an established commercial relationship, with all the operational differences that follow.

The route upward starts with evidence

Choosing a category does not require staying there forever. Cook describes her own development as a progression from doing the work, to teaching others, to teaching people who could teach others. A founder has to create the career ladder that an employer would otherwise provide.

But moving toward larger accounts requires more than deciding that the business deserves them. Cook's recommendation starts with the quality of the work already available.

Smaller clients can become evidence for larger opportunities.

Her approach is to produce results worth documenting, write case studies, and make those stories visible on the website and in downloadable materials. The existing client base is not merely a source of current revenue. It is where the agency can demonstrate its judgment and ability.

Do work that produces results worth showing. The case study needs substance before it needs presentation.
Document the client's success. Make the evidence accessible through the website and downloadable case studies.
Choose a receptive showcase client. Strong work requires a buyer willing to be guided.
Maintain relationships as contacts change jobs. A trusted agency can follow a buyer into a larger organization.

Cook suggests that deliberately over-servicing some smaller clients can help create this proof. That advice sits in tension with Do's warning about making low-budget work uneconomic, and the distinction deserves attention.

An intentional showcase project has a strategic purpose. Treating every small assignment as an unlimited creative opportunity leaves no boundary around the investment. The point is not to normalize unpaid effort, but to recognize when a particular engagement can demonstrate capabilities that the current portfolio does not yet show.

Do offers a concrete example. He says Hudson Pacific Properties hired his company after seeing its branding work for Trojan Storage, a self-storage business. The attraction was not a matching real estate portfolio. It was the perceived transformation his team had created for a more modest brand.

The prospective client saw an ability that could transfer.

That is a more useful interpretation of portfolio development than simply collecting increasingly famous logos. The strongest example can be the one that shows how far the work moved a business, especially when the starting point was unremarkable.

The question of fit also connects to Proven Strategies to Attract Your Ideal Clients. Proof becomes more persuasive when it makes sense to the kind of buyer the agency wants next.

Cook identifies another route upward: the careers of existing contacts. An account manager or marketing director who moves to a larger organization can bring a trusted agency into consideration there. Good service travels through people, not just through published case studies.

Do recalls an early break that followed this pattern. Someone who remembered his portfolio moved from a small agency to a larger role, invited his company to bid, and helped begin a relationship that lasted for years.

“No excuses. Just get better,” Do says. The bluntness is earned by the examples: better work created something buyers could remember, show others, and carry into a new job.

Keeping the account takes two kinds of work

Winning the right client does not complete the selection process. The relationship can drift after the agreement is signed, especially when good results or a friendly rapport begin to stand in for active attention.

Do and Cook describe almost opposite versions of this failure.

Do identifies himself as previously a strong introvert. He did not enjoy the dinners and informal contact that accompanied major accounts. Executive producers would invite him to join clients, and he would decline while paying the bill.

The clients mattered to him. His behavior did not consistently communicate that.

He now sees the absence of proactive contact as a leadership issue. If the founder does not check in, other people can read that behavior as a signal about what the company values. In his account, the organization reproduced his distance until some clients stopped calling.

Cook, who describes herself as highly extroverted, faced the reverse danger. Relationships became so close that the commercial work sometimes took second place. Knowing a client's family and receiving a wedding invitation did not answer a later question about results.

Client retention requires both commercial results and human attention.

Neither compensates indefinitely for the absence of the other. A warm relationship can lose credibility when the work underperforms. Strong delivery can become fragile when nobody notices that the buyer's expectations or priorities have changed.

Do's proposed correction is a deliberate conversation about the relationship, not an assumption that continuing work means everything is fine. The questions concern service quality, whether the work meets or exceeds expectations, and what the client anticipates needing next.

Review the quality of delivery. Establish whether the work still meets the client's standards.
Ask about upcoming needs. Find out where the agency can be useful before a new brief arrives.
Address silence directly. A change in communication deserves a conversation, not a reassuring guess.
Keep results visible. Personal closeness should support the work rather than replace scrutiny of it.

Cook argues for entering the uncomfortable conversation early. If a substantial client is pulling away, fear of losing the revenue can make the agency excessively cautious. Yet avoiding the issue leaves it without the information needed to repair anything.

The buyer's role also matters. Cook recalls dealing directly with owners when her agency served smaller businesses, then increasingly working through marketing managers as the accounts grew. The relationship changed because the person evaluating the work had different responsibilities.

In her experience, a business owner could share the founder's perspective, while a marketing manager often needed confidence that the agency was a safe professional choice. The same service therefore entered different decision-making environments.

That observation is not a guarantee that founder relationships last forever. It is a reminder to understand the individual carrying the decision, including the pressures attached to that role.

“You have to renew relationships in personal and professional life,” Do says. An established account is not a permanent verdict in the agency's favor.

Build around the commitment, not the fantasy

The final decision is less glamorous than pursuing a famous logo. It involves specifying what the agency will repeatedly do, for whom, under what conditions, and with what effect on the people responsible for delivery.

Cook's middle-market focus worked because it became concrete. Her agency identified its version of deer, understood the buyer's job title, and established a set of services it could provide consistently. The category became an operating choice rather than an appealing description.

That specificity also exposes mismatches inside apparently suitable accounts. Cook remembers small clients behaving like elephants, demanding attention and flexibility that their contracts did not support. The animal metaphor is useful only if it reflects actual behavior as well as nominal size.

A small invoice does not guarantee a simple client. A large organization does not automatically guarantee a worthwhile margin.

Cook's advice also offers a way to adapt when an existing service no longer fits the desired market. Identify the most valuable element of the work, separate it from the surrounding complexity, and package that element as a smaller offer.

Rather than selling every capability developed for a large account, the agency can sell the part that buyers most want. Her example is a service made narrow enough to deliver consistently, such as a defined number of LinkedIn posts each month.

The promise becomes bounded. So does the delivery obligation.

This provides a different interpretation of moving downmarket. A smaller offer does not necessarily mean reproducing an expensive custom engagement at a discount. It can mean changing what is sold so that the scope matches the price and the process.

The decision begins with the founder's actual ambition. Cook distinguishes the satisfaction of building and training a growing organization from the satisfaction of having a business support a chosen life. Do's move toward products illustrates another possibility: retaining creative ownership while changing how income is generated.

These are not interchangeable destinations. Each requires giving up opportunities that belong to another model.

A business built around standardized delivery cannot treat every request for customization as evidence of progress. A company pursuing complex accounts cannot pretend that procurement, specialist staffing, and relationship management are peripheral distractions. They are part of the work it has chosen.

Cook started at 22 without a finished theory of agency ownership. Her framework emerged from learning which commitments worked and which ones she did not want to repeat. Do reached related conclusions through a different company, different clients, and much larger production budgets.

Their shared warning is not to avoid ambition. It is to stop using the size of a buyer as a substitute for defining success.

Before the next pitch, the agency needs a position on the terms it can accept, the service it can repeat, and the profit that justifies the effort. Otherwise, the next prestigious opportunity will make those decisions on its behalf.

The client gets to buy the work. The contract should not quietly buy the founder's life.

TRANSCRIPT

In this episode, Jody Cook breaks down a simple framework, rabbits, deer, and elephants, to help you figure out which type of client actually fits your business. We talk about ambition, scale, lifestyle, and why chasing the biggest deal isn't always the smartest move. If you've ever wondered who you should really be working with, this one's for you. Let's talk about the three types of clients and which is right for your business because I have a theory or I have a framework that I used when I ran my agency that I ran for 10 years before I sold it and this is how we categorize clients so that we decided who to work with and the three categories are rabbits, deer and elephants. The idea is that first you've got rabbits and rabbits are quite small clients. So they are very easy to close, very easy to get. They're low ticket. They're kind of easy to serve. They multiply. So once you have one rabbit, you'll probably have loads of rabbits. For me, all my first rabbit clients were the small ones. They all came through networking and For me and my agency, these are the kind of $500 to $1,500 a month type clients, but it doesn't have to be that dollar amount. It could be anything depending on what kind of agency you run or what kind of business you run. Then you've got Deere. And so deer are mid-sized clients. This is kind of a hunting analogy, but because we've got elephants, I'm not going to do that because obviously that doesn't happen. So then you've got deer and they're the mid-sized clients. So they are pretty solid value. They're reliable. There's, they don't take a bunch of people to catch. You can kind of catch a deer with one person. They take more effort to land than rabbits, but they're still good return, not too much complexity. And then In my agency, when we started getting deer based clients, they were kind of 1500 to maybe six or 7,000 a month. That was kind of the level of deer client. And then also all of those clients came through either my personal brand or Google ads. They just, that's where they came from. And then you've got elephants and this is the third type. And elephants are really big clients. And we actually categorize these in terms of Indian elephants and African elephants, because they were slightly different sizes of elephants. And these are really high value, prestigious clients that you put on your website. You tell everyone that you're working with these companies. They're slow moving, they're resource intensive. So it might take five people to land this client. They have often very complex cycles, very complex delivery. You'll be doing a lot of complicated work. You'll have, it won't be really be one size fits all. you have to create new processes to look after this elephant. For us, we had a client, we did a bunch of work for a car company and it was 20% of our entire company's revenue. And at any given time, if they wanted something, I was on a holiday once and it was my birthday and that client clicked their fingers and said they wanted something. And I just canceled my plans. I just did the work. I was, I just have to, I can't not because it's too big and it's too many jobs rely on it. I just have to do this. And for us, those clients all came through pitches. And so what we found is that we were so tempted by elephants and we wanted to do all these pictures and we wanted to get these really big prestigious clients because we wanted to work with them and we wanted to have this, maybe it's ego, maybe it's pretty cool to say, oh yeah, we work with Subaru or whatever. Um, but at the start it was very much rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, and then you realize that you get overrun with rabbits and you've got too many of them and you feel like you're You're just gonna be busy forever if you keep serving these types of clients where they all want something slightly different, but there's not too much meat on them. They're not that valuable in themselves. So our strategy eventually was that we came to thinking that Deer were just the way we were gonna find our version of Deer. We were gonna define them. We were gonna know exactly what type of clients they were, the person at the organization that we were selling to what's their job title. And then we were gonna have a set of things that we would deliver for these clients to mean that it that it was, that was our jam. That was our bread and butter. We weren't flexing our work to try and get elephants and we weren't undervaluing ourselves to get rabbits. So we kind of settled on this, like this middle and that's the, but that's the framework. There are those three. And I think that every single agency could almost define their version of rabbits, deer and elephants, and then pick the deer and focus on those. Okay. It's not. pick the deer. It's every single company could define their version of rabbits and deer and elephants, and then decide which one they're going to serve. Cause I, I really believe that only serving one type is the best way of doing it. Okay. Fascinating. So when I ran my, ran my agency, we only dealt with elephants or whales because they were pitches. Hmm. Whales. Yeah. They're all The big whale, right? We're just, you can, you can feed a whole village for months on one kill and they were not easy to catch and they didn't come by that often. And it's very bespoke service and a lot of hoops to jump through a long procurement process, everything that you said about the whales. So I'm wondering within the whales, cause you said there's two types of elephants, Indian and African. If you've thought much about those very high end clients, because we're dealing with mostly Fortune 1000 brands, Madison Avenue ad agencies as our clients, servicing those brands. If you have any specific insight on that, curious. On the whale level, right at the top. Or the elephant in your case, yeah. For us going after elephants, it required learning a lot of stuff from scratch and it involved almost winging it. And we weren't successful in catching that many elephants. So when we got some, it was like, oh my God, what do we do with this? And we probably didn't really know because we weren't actually that set up to do that. Because if you think I was running an agency, I was also, I saw it very much as a lifestyle business. Processes in place so that the team could look after them. Elephants aren't gonna, they're not, you can't put them in box. You can't. get them to just follow those processes because they want everything bespoke, you said, and they want everything done their way. And so sometimes the difference actually between a deer and an elephant or a rabbit and an elephant is whose T's and C's do you sign? Do you sign your T's and C's or do you sign theirs? Because the elephants, you sign theirs, but the rabbits and the deer, it's like, well, these are ours and this is them and you agree to our terms. But I don't think we were set up at all to serve elephants. So it meant that when we had them, it was like, they took, they massively took over. It's like, you're You imagine putting a physical elephant in with a bunch of rabbits. It's like they stomp around. They want to be heard. They want to be seen. And all the rabbits eventually are just like, what? Like they don't understand. And then they escape. Whereas if you're like, if you're set up to serve the rabbits, then you create the systems in place and you look after a lot of rabbits and you scale it up because you've got the, you've got the way of doing it. Yeah. I think when you, when you service rabbit kind of clients, It's all about volume, I think, because you can't sustain yourself. You literally have to kind of do an assembly line thing in order to put enough food on the table for everybody. You don't get to do that kind of super high and bespoke work because you would sink the company. You would go into the red. You're financing their inability to pay with your own desire to do a better job. As you were talking, I was really kind of just searching my mind. Of all the clients, the hundreds of clients that we've pitched and won, What, what did they fall into? I don't, I haven't thought about the whole animal hunting analogy as you have. So I'm just going to wean it here and, and just using the rule of threes. So there were the whales who would come to the boat. They would just come to the boat because they knew you were there and they liked whatever you put in it, the shrimp, the krill, whatever you put in the water, they liked. And they saw something you did and they made it on their list to work with you at some point. Like it was an accomplishment to work with you and you got the inside track. There was preferred treatment. And I like that. Of course, we wanted all of our clients to treat us like that. And there's a phrase that they use, not always true, but a phrase they use, it's your job to lose. Unless you do something that scares us, we're not really considering anybody else. And to a point, one of our clients who we had done multiple projects with, And that's also a sign that they're the kind of whale that prefers you. They're like, Chris, we didn't even like some of the ideas that you presented, but we're going to pay you. And you want to do this other idea we have? I'm like, yeah. Or here's the best one. And this has happened multiple times. We have a surplus budget at the end of the year. And we need you to send us an invoice for which we'll figure out what to do with you later. Because if we don't use this budget, we're going to lose it. So then you know you're in so deep with this organization and And the powers that be invite you to dinner and do personal things together, go play golf or play something. Like, wow, I'm just so in, this is really nice. You feel like you've worked all your life to have the whales swim up to your boat and you're like, I'm good. Then there are the whales who tease you, but they actually have zero intent working with you. But because they have to triple bid as mandated by their contract with their clients, you're just a third bid. Those suck. And we used to fall for them all the time. And the way we got around that is we would ask them, are we the third bid? We would just say point blank, are we the third bid? And sometimes they would say, yes. I say, this is fantastic. Tell us what number you need us to submit the bid under. We're not going to go through all this work for nothing. So they want to tell you to put in a high number so they can pick the people that they want to work with. Because if you're too competitive, they actually might have to give you the work and they're going to resent the process. So that saved us a lot of work and they like how honest and direct we are and how comfortable we are with knowing how the game works. The ones in the middle are the most interesting, the most difficult. They're kind of undecided. It is a fair race as anybody can tell and may the best bed ever fall. pitch presentation win. And this is highly subjective. So I don't mean literally the best design creative, but to whatever standards that they're looking at, that person wins. And so that's where we, we spent most of our time figuring out how to be better at hunting big game. The third bid one, they're more dolphins. They're just playing. It's not real. It's just la la la. Let's just get this third bid because we have to. I love that you asked that. Yeah. I think we were probably the third bid a few times, but I don't think I would have thought to ask back then? I didn't think to either until my coach told me, just ask them. If you know this is what happens, just ask. Again, somebody just gives you permission to do what you've always wanted to do. And we did it. We just asked. And it was shocking because every once in a while they would say, yeah, you are. And then you decide what to do. So did you ever look after rabbits or deer? Those kinds of clients where they weren't huge, multi. Did you ever have somewhere where they just, we just want a logo. We just want a logo, one file. The really, really small pieces of work. Yeah. I think in the first seven to eight months of running my business in 1995, yes. But because we were making commercials, there are not a lot of small commercials. There might be pro bono, which we've done for, I remember when we did one for the Partnership for Drug Free America on meth use, and that was no budget. And there were a couple other things that we did that responsible drinking, that kind of stuff. And we would do those for free. But when it comes to commercial advertising, you're usually dealing with an agency and agencies are not small. There's midsize agencies and then there's really big agencies and they have to have a media team. There's a lot that's involved. So all the projects The low budget projects would probably be around 100 grand. A high budget project would be a million plus. And so we're dealing with a different caliber. Now, one valuable lesson I learned from my business mentor was when we were dealing with clients that were paying us between 100 to 200K, those are easy to get. Those would be considered our rabbits. They were easy to get. We would show up. We barely had to do anything on the call. And they were just so happy to give us the work. They might've been like an animated logo or some what they call supers titles that appear on the screen superimposed on whatever live action footage. But as we got into bigger budget projects with live action, with visual effects, with motion graphics, it got really complicated and the level of competition got real steep. So we would consider those probably our, our deer, our bread and butter between two to 400K. Above 400K was, as you say, there's a lot of tire kicking procurement process, cost consultants, people of that nature who would really look into all this stuff. Those typically were like product launches, 360 campaigns that had a lot of touch points. And so it was solid. It was a massive thing. They needed to know you could do all this stuff. We're talking about rabbits, deer and elephants. We're talking about whales. We're talking about dolphins. We want people messing around and how to decide which, how to decide which one you should work with and what the best strategy is. Yeah. So how do you decide? I mean, if somebody's early in their business, I'm pretty sure it's going to be rabbits. by whatever definition, it's going to be plentiful, but you need a lot of them to sustain yourself and they're not that difficult to get. And a lot of people just cruise on that. And if we were talking about people in the creative space, it could be that they're on one of these marketplaces for creative services. And there's lots of those client kind of clients out there that are going to spend hundreds or maybe a couple thousand on what you do. They don't really love what you do, but it's easy. It's convenient for you. It's convenient for them. You don't have to learn how to do marketing and sales. Do you think it's natural for us to want to progress to the larger game? Yeah, I think so. When I was running my agency, I saw it as first, it was me doing the work. Then it was me teaching other people to do the work. Then it was me teaching more people to do the work. Then it was me teaching other people to teach other people to do the work. And the idea that if you join a company and have a job, you've got this career ladder that you're probably going to progress up. But if it's your business, you have to create your own career ladder. So I always saw it as me progressing to the types of different work I did and the types of different clients we served. But I do think that now maybe stuff's different with how much AI stuff is around that you could apply to rabbits. So I think now if I had the same agency in the first three years, when we were just rabbits, rabbits, rabbits everywhere, I think if I applied now the tools that exist, I think we could have got a ton bigger, probably 10 X with the AI tools that are out there. And then it would have been quite fun. But I also think it depends on the type of business you want to run, because if you want to run a performance business where you're seeing how big it can get, how much impact you can make the coolest clients that you can possibly work with, then yes, progress up the chain and move from rabbits to deer to elephants to whales. But if you want a lifestyle business where you want things to fit in with your processes, you want to be able to do a certain work, deliver someone's 30 LinkedIn posts a month and then leave it at that. Like it depends how much ambition you've got for your company or whether your ambition is more lifestyle and your company supports that. So I think there's so much to ask the founder about before they decide which animal to go after. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. Yeah. I think because you're entrepreneurial, that you see scaling as something that's fun and then you're building something together, a community, a culture, a tribe of like-minded individuals that you can train and level up. A lot of people that create a space don't think like that. They just want to do all the work themselves. There's lots of limiting beliefs about loss of control, loss of quality, imposter syndrome, where if I'm not doing the work, then who is it and what am I selling? All kinds of things. And They're going to be in that rabbit space for a really long time. Now the rabbits eventually get fatter. Maybe they get one of those rare bread for human consumption as food source with a really big. Maybe that's what they get for a while. Yeah. They're like biggest dogs. I'm like, dang, that's a big rabbit. Man, I feel like we had some jumbo rabbits. I feel like we had some rabbit sized clients who act like elephants. And then at first you get taken along with it and then you're like, hang on, no, you're a rabbit client. I think it sounds horrible. Never the thing because you of course buy your clients and everything else. But I feel like at some point someone has to be a decent size contract for them to be able to stomp around like an elephant. Well, there's something I want to share in terms of whales. Because we can get enamored with the client, the prestige. It's a big brand name. And it's something that when you do for the first time, it feels really good. But as you do it more and more, you start to realize none of this really changes anything. And you get, it's very alluring to work on big budget projects, like mid six figures, right? It sounds like a lot of money. I guess it is. But what you have to pay attention to is profitability. And the reason why we stopped doing client work is we're doing projects between, I would say about $250,000 to $500,000 on a regular basis. And what we realized is after we spent all the money to get this client in the door, the pitches, the presentations, missed pitches, we have to account for those as well. And then after we paid all these super high-end people because whales want the very best. So you have to hire very expensive artists to work with. The profit that's left over on a half a million dollar job could be a hundred grand like net. And you can confuse your $500,000 client as a $500,000 client. But I always looked at it as that was a hundred thousand dollar client. Cause that's what we made. Then we started to evaluate other things that we can do to make a hundred grand. it led us towards content and product-based business. And so that's when we're like, okay, so I own my own IP. I don't have to chase anybody. I just get to do me and people will pay me the equivalent of the same as the big whale, but I'm happier. I'm more fulfilled. I'm working less. So the teams is not stressed out. And so when we do that, I felt like the natural evolution of our company was to move away from working with whales and just doing a product-based business. So I wanted to warn everybody that, and there's an expression, I heard it from Ron Baker. He said, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. And we were looking at the revenue, the big number and getting mesmerized by that. So I just want to put that out there because eventually I think you came to the similar conclusion where I think we can run a really good agency by just getting fat deer. So you're the feeder feeding up all these animals. Yeah. Nice. But then say something that popped into my head, my first ever office-y job, it was a one in university holidays. And my boss there was always convinced that there was an easier way of making money. than the one he was currently pursuing always, no matter what was happening, whether it was a really good day or there's really bad day, no matter what was happening, it's, oh, I could do that. Oh, I could do that. It was, it was probably my first introduction to shiny object syndrome. And I wonder if that's the thing with rabbits and deer and elephants. There will be some. agencies or some freelancers where elephants is just their jam. They're just so good at it and they are making profit and they do know what they're doing and they've got their process. But similarly with rabbits as well, I think you can make anything work. It's just about owning the, owning the animal and owning the one that you've chosen. Yeah. Everybody before, before you send us all hate mail, we're just talking about metaphors. Oh yeah. I've never killed a rabbit, deer or whale or an elephant. Yeah. No animals. It's just a metaphor. No animals were harmed in the making of this episode. Not at all. Just a metaphor. That's it. Yeah. What were you gonna say? I think it's really easy to be serving deer thinking, oh, I'd love to be working with elephants. And yeah, like you said, getting enamored by those huge big clients and like, oh, we should be pitching more and we should be doing this. You could probably hang out where you are and just make the best of it and build something really cool. Because there is, there's work to go around and there are smaller clients who want looking after. And there are so many terrible agencies out there probably doing a really, really bad job. It's like, it's yours to lose. I want to put this out there. No matter what we say, I think if you're in the deer category. You're going to want to experience the elephant because you're going to say it's going to change everything for me. Jody and Chris do not know what they're talking about. I'm going to go for it. And there's nothing we can say that will stop you and you need to experience it. And then after you do this for a while, after you go after the elephants and the whales, you're going to come to the same conclusion. I believe it's no coincidence that both you and I landed at the same spot. We're two totally different people from different places in the world with different experiences, but we landed in the same exact spot. I think where the whale thing works is when the whales are a monster, like there's so much profit in it that you can really, really have a million dollar project as profit, not as revenue. That's when it starts to become worth it. And that's why I think advertising agencies exist because they only service whales, but they make enough off of the whale that they can sustain lots of people for a good long period of time. They have an added benefit too, that they become agency of record. And that means that they're not just pitching for the new business. They pitch for it one time, they get the client and then they service that client. Now in our, in our lifetime, I've had a couple of clients, not many, a handful of clients where we were agency of record. Everything that had creative wise, strategy wise, they would just call us up and we would send them a bill for whatever it is that we did. And so it was a bit of an onboarding process, but once we had a MSA, a master service agreement set up, it up, it was just easy to knock it out. It became like one client that started out as a hundred thousand dollar project became over a million dollars in revenue for us really, really fast because they were a whale that was going to be on semi retainer basis where they're coming back with for more and more work. That made sense. I like what you said, Jodie and Chris don't know what they're talking about. I feel like that could almost be the tagline for many of these conversations, but that's the point, isn't it? Everyone's kind of making it up as they go along. Especially I was for sure. I was 22 when I started my agency. It was my first business. I was, I was playing businesses and then you're just learning and going, huh, I'm not going to do that again. Or, oh, this, this is cool. I'll go more in that direction. And then you just think of everything out as you go along. I don't think there's ever I don't think anyone really knows because then things change and then they don't know all over again. Now, let me ask you this question. If you're in the rabbit space and you want to transition into going after deer size clients, What are a couple of things you need to do? Let's make this super practical for people. Get it. Rabbits are good, but I want to know what it's like to go after a deer or to go after the elephants. What do I need to do? What kind of skills do I need to acquire? You need to do exceptional work. You need to focus on quality. You need to try and get all the results that you possibly can. Potentially over-service the rabbits to the point where you've got some results that you're really proud of and write up the case studies and use social proof to get deer. more and more stories of people you've worked with that you've done a really good job with, put them all over your website and create PDF documents that can be downloaded. Be almost become famous on the success of your clients and become famous for the quality of your work so that you start to attract in the better clients. That's what I would do if I was starting from scratch, going from rabbits to deer. What would you do? Thank you totally much for that. One of the clients we wound up working with, they're called Hudson Pacific Properties, and they do class A buildings in Los Angeles, but in other places of the world. They're a $13 billion company. Last time I talked to them. And the reason why they hired us, even though we didn't have specific industry real estate experience, was because we took a fairly modest company brand called Trojan Storage, which is a self-storage facility, and we made it look 10 times more valuable. And I only found out months after working with them, they said, "You know why we hired you?" I'm like, "No, I don't know why it didn't occur to me to ask you." And they said, "It was because if you can make that look good, you're going to make what we do look great because we're spending millions of dollars developing these buildings. And we want that magic. And you're absolutely right. So if you can take a smaller client where you see the potential and they are open enough to be led by you and what it is that you're doing. So you have to be aligned there in values. We talked about this in our last episode. Then you can actually make more out of this meal and you want to use this as the showcase client. And that's going to help you trade up a smaller client for a much bigger client. I think you also benefit from them trading up. You benefit from the account managers or the marketing directors at your Rabbit clients trading up in in their roles and then joining new companies and then wanting to take you with them. We've got so many clients that are doing that because it's they get in, they get their role, they find their feet. And then as soon as they can change agencies, they're back with you because they just want to work with you because you're already good. So you almost benefit from them progressing as well as you progressing. That happens a lot. This means that you must be really good. It goes back to you being good and then you providing a great customer experience and then your reputation will travel when they travel. And so at times you're sad to hear, oh my gosh, you're not going to be with agency X anymore. And if they happen to be going to some bigger agency or bigger company, That means the opportunities hopefully will follow you. That literally happened to us. That's how we got our big break when we were just starting out. Somebody who had worked at a very small agency, more of a local agency, they were hired on to lead a bigger team for a newer agency. And they remembered, I didn't even work with them. They just remembered our portfolio so much so that they invited us to bid on this project and we bid on it and then we grew with them. And it was an awesome ride for many, many years. The moral of so many of these stories is just to be good. It could just get better. No excuses. Just get better. I think maybe one way that we can wrap up this episode is we talked about the different types, the three types. and what they look like and to figure out which one makes the most sense for you and how you can move up and maybe going to the very top isn't exactly what you hoped it to be. I'm curious if you have any tips for us on not how to go backwards. So you're working with a certain type of client, things are going great. And then for some reason they don't want to work with you anymore. I know that's happened in my life and my career. I'm curious if you've experienced this and if you have any advice on that. Advice on going down. I would find the most valuable part of the work that you're doing and package it into a smaller offer. You know, this is different industry, but you know how Instagram started out as the photo filter. It was called bourbon and it started off. They had all these functionalities, but people just really liked this filter thing that they had, where it was, you could take upload your pictures and put something else on it and it would look different. And then, so they doubled down on that. They were like, this photo filter thing is the thing that we're gonna just create. And then it became a photo sharing app where you put your own filters on and now it's like an Instagram and it's sold for a billion dollars. So I would look into all the work that you're doing for your elephant clients and your whale clients and see if you can be like, that is the most valuable thing. That is the thing that people really want. Separate it from the fluff and then put a package around that and then sell that to more deer level clients. You answer that question in a different way than I thought you, and I love it. Like how do you package your high end service work to be, to service a different market? You package it up. What I was asking you was how do you keep these relationships so that they don't fire you? Because yes, the person gets promoted, they move to a different company, you get bigger opportunities and things are going great. And then something weird happens and then you're no longer talking to them. You're no longer working with them. What can you do to prevent that from happening? I think you need to not be afraid to get into the black box and figure out what's really going on. As you said, are we the third option? Are you just speaking to us because you need to get a third quote? It's asking those kinds of questions, calling them up and saying, why aren't you talking to us anymore? What's going on? Are we, why are we falling out? What's the, and having those conversations, which I think actually might feel quite uncomfortable because if it is a client where maybe it's 20% of your revenue, maybe more, you might just want to tread carefully, not upset anything for fear of losing them, but you're probably gonna lose them anyway, if you don't do anything. So you might as well go on the offense and start talking to them and asking them the difficult questions. And then you can find some kind of solution and then you can figure out what role you play in their future, if any. I think in every relationship, both sides take each other for granted. They take it for granted that you're, they're an important client to you and then you would not want to work with anybody else. You take it for granted that everything you do is great and they're going to have lots and lots of projects to feed you and you don't have to level up. I think what happens is you have to renew relationships in personal and professional life. You have to kind of rekindle, you have to renew your vows, if you will. So in a relationship like this, I think, and we never did this. And so eventually clients would just leave and we were just like, what happened? Because we weren't proactive. We weren't saying, so we've been working with you for two years. It's a good time for us to check in with you to see how else we may be of better service to you. Are you happy with what we're doing and the level of service we're providing? Is the work meeting and exceeding your standards? Are there things that are coming down the pike that we can then maybe look out for and see if we can be of assistance to you and to continue to maintain those relationships? Now, back then I was a different person, so I didn't love talking to people. I didn't like hanging out with them. And I think that signal to them, like it wasn't important. They were very important to me, but I didn't act like it. I don't call in and check on people like the way a good salesperson or a good account manager would. There's a friend of mine. He'd always say, well, Chris, Chris, the fish always rots from the head. You're the head. Things aren't working because people look at what you do naturally, and then they're going to mimic or do what you do. And they're going to try to adhere to your values or your sense of what you'd normally do. So nobody did it. And so eventually the client stopped calling us and we're like, I wonder what happened. That's so interesting. I think I went the other way. This is so, we should dig into this more because this is so the, what percentage introvert would you call yourself if you had to roughly say? Now I would describe myself on the spectrum before as a hardcore introvert, as far left on the introvert spectrum as you can imagine. But as I'm finding out part of that is through socialization, feeling I don't belong, some internal conflicts about who am I? I'm a stranger in a strange land kind of thing. But as I become more of myself, people are like, there's no way you're an introvert. I still am, but I think I'm more ambivert than I was, or I thought myself to be previously. I think I'm almost a hundred percent extrovert. There's some quiet time needed, but not much. If you told me that I could never ever be alone, I'd be like, I think I'd be okay with that. I would rather never be alone than never not be alone. I think is, is fun. Cause I haven't, I don't know if I said that right, but I've been having people around me a lot, but I think that that meant that we have the opposite problem with clients. It wasn't that we wouldn't talk to them. It's that we would develop such big relationships with them and such deep relationships with them. But the actual work side sometimes would take a second tier to the relationship. So then you end up, you know, their kids names, you would get invited to their wedding. You're so close with your clients. But as soon as someone goes, hang on, what are the results that they're getting? then that's not been your focus because your focus has been more the relationship. So I find that we had to really be like, hang on, let's make sure we focus on what's important here rather than just getting on with them. Okay. So this, this is the example I will share with everybody. When you have a client, they're in town, six figure client, it's an obligation to take them out for dinner. And the producers, my executive producers would go and take them out. They would always ask me, Chris, we're going to this great place. You should come with us. I'm like, no, I'm not coming. I'm paying for the bill and inexpensive there. Everybody's having a good time on my dime, but I don't want to go. Cause I'm like, oh, this is so weird. And to this day, I kind of think about that. Like, I wonder how different my business would be. Had I gone to some of those things to give some face time. Because my business coach would always tell me when the owner shows up for anything, even if they don't do anything, it means a lot. And I remember when he said that, because I walked into this editorial place called rock, paper, scissor in Hollywood. And I was picking up something or delivering something. I can't remember what I was doing there. Still pretty young person. And a lady hippie ish walks out barefoot and says, honey, can I take care of you? Are you okay? Somebody looked after you want to have something to eat. I'm like, oh my God. Later on, I found out she's the co-founder and owner of a rock, paper, scissor. I was like, that's so cool. That is really dope that I'm for all she knows, a messenger boy, just dropping off the tape, an insignificant person in the cog in the machine, if you will. And she paid that kind of attention to me because I think that's her nature. So I can only imagine if you were a client, you walked in the door and she's like, great to see you, Bobby. How are the kids, Mary? What's going on with you, et cetera, that they would feel this warmth. And that was her role. She was a great hostess co-founder. And then Angus could just do the editing and that worked for them. It's founder energy, isn't it? There's just some energy that founders have that is different. It's just different. And maybe if you get really amazing account managers and maybe if they do have some ownership of the company and I know, I know they exist. I know they're out there, but I still think there's just something about founder energy that is just different. You just think in a different way. You want We used to, I feel I used to have so much empathy for my clients and what they wanted to do, especially when they were other business owners, but I was just so it was it was my business at the same time. And you just care so much that they can feel that. And I feel that's the really hard thing to replicate really hard. And if you find an account manager who can do that, then keep keep hold of them forever. Yes. I'm a founder. I don't have founder energy the way that you described because I'm not just shooting out energy in my pores and oh my God, so good to see you. But there is this bias that we have that when we find out somebody who's of importance within the company pays attention to you. Because I think no matter how long we live, how well we've been raised, we could probably always use a little bit more of someone caring about us and what we're going through. And so when we find somebody that, for example, when the chef walks out from behind the kitchen, and says, you know, I'm chef Leon or whatever. And I just wondered if you're, if you're happy with the meal, is there anything I can do for you? And they're just in their apron or whatever. Yeah. Damn. I didn't know how that important that you would check in on me, you know, and it could just be an assistant chef. It doesn't even matter. But the fact that we think it's so many important And if you contrast that with say the waiter who walks over and says, Hey, I just want to make sure the meal is fine. Is there anything else we can do for you? Yeah, that was good. That was good service. You got your tip. It's not the same as knowing it's the owner. And all that is, is just a story. I don't know if they are any different, any more charismatic, but to your point though, I think when two founders speak to each other, two business owners speak to each other, there's a level of shorthand that you develop that they know what you know and they respect how hard it is to run a company where if you're a mid-level manager, sorry, no shade to mid-level managers, maybe you're not seeing that perspective. You understand that you can move mountains because you're not given permission to do that. So you play within a very defined box. And so therefore you're not as creative as with the kinds of solutions you're able to provide. And that's a natural limitation to the authority you've been given. I feel like if we went back to the deer and elephants and rabbits as well, it often depends who your contact is at the type of company you're working for as to how sustainable those relationships are over time as well. Because I think We at my agency, it started off that our main point of contact would always be the owner. And then that was when we were working with rabbits. And then as we moved up to deer, and then as we moved up to elephants, it would be the marketing manager. But if you can get on a level with the owner and they want to never let you go, then you will always keep the client. Whereas marketing managers. They kind of come and go and they also have a different agenda because entrepreneurs probably, they partly want to work with you because you've got the founder energy as well. They partly want to work with you because you're getting good results with their company. But marketing managers so often, they just wanted to not make the wrong decision. They wanted to make the safe decision that they wouldn't get in trouble for. And everything that you did was to make them look good in their job. So then you've got different undertones and level of levels of understanding around that at the same time. But either way, I think the founder going to dinner is always a really good thing, whether you're doing it with the marketing manager or the founder of their company. I think so. Yeah. Okay. Here's what I've learned on this episode is there are a couple of different types of clients that you're going to work with. And Jody shared with us her analogy in terms of like game hunting, I suppose, providing food for you and clients can be categorized into three things. One, the rabbit, which is abundant, small. But you have to consume a lot for you to sustain yourself. They're fun. They're easy to work with. And generally speaking, when you work with the rabbits of the world, you're dealing with the decision maker. They're too small for you not to work with the decision maker. And so there's a connection there that you're going to get that you're not going to get somewhere else. And you may at some point elevate yourself to the next tier, which is the medium-sized client. And she describes this as a deer. They are reliable. They're a little bit harder to get, but they're not impossible to get. And they're a good return on your investment. And this tends to be probably the most profitable and happy you'll ever be because it's the right mix of the number of clients and profitability with some name brand in there. And you feel like you're making progress. And some of you might aspire to work with the elephants, which is the third tier. And the elephant is like the really big Profitable, generally speaking, big name brand. They're large, they're slow moving. They're hard to get. Usually it requires pitching. You're now pretty far removed from the decision maker because the nature of the organization. There are multiple gatekeepers in charge and you could do great work for them and you can put that feather in your cap and have that beautiful logo quilt of name brand clients that people recognize. but you may come to the realization that this might not be what it's all cracked up to be. That you might have to do a lot of really highly customized bespoke work, be on call at all times, and it might not be as profitable as you think. So in reality, it's like the expression I'm mixing metaphors here, a sheep or wolf in sheep's clothing. It might be a deer in elephant clothing, where at the end of the day, the amount of revenue is higher, but the percentage of profit is much lower. And so if you're in business to be profitable, you might want to consider that. And it doesn't matter what I say or what Jodi says, you have to find what works for you. So here's an easy thing to follow. Rabbit, deer, elephant, figure out which works for you. And you may need to try them all at some point. And we've shared ways for you to level up. And if you're up, ways that you can maintain and keep that relationship depending on your introvert or extrovert selves. Hope you enjoyed it.

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“You have to renew relationships in personal and professional life.”

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