u/SomeGenericNameDude

I have been running a small marketing agency for the past three and a half years, covering content strategy, paid social, email campaigns, as well as light brand work when clients needed it as a bonus package.

It was the kind of grind in the beginning where you finish one engagement and immediately start scrambling to get some more clients (and undervalue yourself all the way) before cash dries up. Feast or famine in the best of times, but usually just a month or two away from feeling unpaid bills weigh you down. I made decent money but it always felt temporary, like I was one bad quarter away from pretending the whole thing never happened. On an emotional level, this was my regular state.

Most of the work I do is project-based. A company hires us to launch a campaign on a social network or rework their funnel, marketing consulting work in other words. We'd deliver, they'd say thanks, and then silence. My campaign model was 1 to 3 month and most of the clients were one-off. I spent more time writing proposals and  discovery calls than doing actual marketing. This all accumulates to vast fatigue and long hours, and only getting a junior (a senior in disguise literally) did I get the bandwidth to make the delivery streamlined.

Few months after, because I could finally breathe and actually have quality talks with prospects, I finally got my first $4k/month retainer deal with an midsized indie game company, long term, NDA and for the foreseeable future. We’re now almost 2 years running together. That wast the *moment* in that pure sense when a client becomes a stable part of your income, and you know they’re not just testing out your services but actually prefer them to those offered by others. Nothing glamorous on paper when that first recurring invoice got paid without me having to chase it down or justify every hour, something shifted in my head. It wasnt even the money really, it was the fact that someone looked at our work and said yeah, I trust you enough to commit to this on a rolling basis instead of treating you like something I rotate every other month.

Thats when I started actually investing in the business instead of just surviving in it. From then to now, a lot of things have changed and now I have a sufficiently large network of recommends from previous clients and what I call cross retainers (lead people who quit but then contact you from their next job in the same industry, and get you on as a client twice - my favorite). A lot of it now runs on greased up wheels wherever I find I can save my team's bandwidth, especially LinkedIn which I completely disregarded for years because it wasn’t that relevant for my industry. An acquaintance got me a free plan for Expandi for a whole month, and I just let it run on its own wheels once I set up an adequate pitch deck for my services (I only look for SaaS clients there now) and it’s almost completely hands off and to be perfectly honest, plays a more supplementary role to the already established client network I have in some niches. The only manual outreach I do is to reconnect with past clients on Discord and see at which stage their projects are, see what they’re up to and if they need any help. It's small trickle of money for an even small amount of work, but it compounds the more you do it.

Besides, I think I reached the point where I can pick between clients, at least based on the perceived value I’m getting for using my bandwidth. It’s all specialized work and a custom campaign better be paying well.

That initial burst though, couldn’t have happened without that first retainer that first made me feel like my work was valuable. Funny thing is, that client-bro is still with me all this time later. It started as a straightforward retainer and turned into something much more intimate (not that intimate lol) than a business relationship. He still calls me when he's stuck on decisions that have nothing to do with marketing the product but something about his side projects, the stuff that you LIVE to work on, not only the stuff you work on to live. I consider him a friend at this point and I think that only happened because the retainer campaign gave us enough time to nourish that bond.

What was that moment for you fellas? When you first felt like you were running an actual business and not scraping by