I have a confession to make: I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had to. Eight years ago, during my last job hunting spree, I was stuck in a rather common Catch-22: the companies I wanted to work for wouldn’t employ me; the ones I didn’t want to work for were lining up to hire me.
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Instead of settling for a dead-end job, I built my own agency, Idunn and its tech-oriented spin-off, Copywritech.
My two brands grew organically, without paid ads, and they grew beyond my wildest dreams.
But to get there, I’ve had to learn everything about building a service business on my own. It was hard and frustrating. I often felt like throwing in the towel.
So I present to you a few of my mistakes as learning material. If you’re thinking about starting a service business or if you want to grow the one you already have, use these four pillars to avoid needless setbacks and frustration.
1. Only sell what you’re damn good at
Figuring things out as you go may land you a few clients in the beginning but they’ll soon end up running faster than you can chase them.
Case in point: because I saw an increased demand for this service, my agency started selling Google Ads management as a service. We were good at it. We had four clients who had good results.
But their feedback was not our usual “wow, this is better than I expected.”
So I ditched the service because I realized it would take too much time investment to offer excellent (not good) results. We re-routed those clients to our core services and got the wow feedback we wanted.
2. Customer experience can set you apart faster than the service itself
To provide a memorable customer experience you need two things: a personality and a backbone.
YOU already have a personality — don’t be afraid to transfer it to your business. Whether you’re warm and nurturing or sarcastic and blunt, there are definitely people out there who are going to love your style.
Avoid blending in just to fit a generic standard. Blending in makes you bland. No one likes plain vanilla-with-nothing-on-top.
When you allow your personality to seep into your business, a miraculous backbone will rise to support your efforts. This backbone will prevent you from saying yes to every prospect.
Say yes to every prospect because you want to grow FAST and you’ll take time and energy away from best-fit clients — the ones who can turn into your biggest fans. Choose sustainability, not speed.
I learned this the hard way: I positioned my business as a boutique agency, with a clear personality and a stellar customer experience. Three years into my business, I got seduced by the “grow or perish mantra” so we ended up onboarding more clients than we could manage.
Naturally, I hired more people. The new hires were a bad fit — as were a good part of our newest clients.
When I realized how close I was to turning my agency into a content mill that spews millions of mediocre words per month, I was mortified. I fired clients and content writers, took a massive hit to our bottom line, and needed three months to rebound. Learn from my mistake and do better!
3. Don’t be everything. Service excellence comes from what you choose NOT to offer.
My agency offers SEO content writing services, but not link outreach or link building, despite the numerous asks we’ve had for this service (I’ve learned my lesson from the Google Ads experience).
I dabbled in them for my own business and realized they were a quagmire of spam and scam. Though I was tempted to add it to our service deck (it looks like easy money, who doesn’t like that?), I’ve resisted the temptation.
Don’t try to master everything. Claim your territory and rock it!
Who would YOU work with? Someone who’s mediocre at everything or a superstar at one thing?
4. Be a partner, not a hireling
The customer isn’t always right. The customer doesn’t know everything — that’s why they hired your company in the first place, not for the donkey work.
Don’t be afraid to tell them they’re wrong. Give them a better alternative (remember: you’re the superstar!) BUT without being patronizing or arrogant.
Their success is your success — make that clear from the beginning. This is the foundation of every mutually beneficial, long-term partnership.
Personal example: one of my agency’s most successful services is a teardown of our clients’ websites (we call it The Positive Nitpicker). They want to know what could be improved and they need our expertise for that.
We’re also extremely blunt (again, in a helpful way!) with all our clients, whether they buy that service or not. We create realistic expectations and point out things that can be improved, even if they are beyond our direct scope of work.
Guess what? They love that! Some of my agency’s clients have been with us for seven years and counting. My favorite interactions with them are when they pop in my inbox just to ask for my opinion on something — they know I’m never holding back, so they trust me to be honest.
TL;DR: To build and grow a service business, you have to learn how to say “no”: to unfitted prospects, bad hires, even to your own natural proclivity to grow with unnatural speed.
That’s it from me today. I hope these four things will help you build or grow a more sustainable service business.
See you next week!
Always in your corner,
Adriana
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