How Do You Build a Profitable Marketing Agency? | Lorraine Ball

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this episode of The Profitable Creative, Christian Brim sits down with marketing veteran Lorraine Ball to talk about the evolution of digital marketing, the realities of running an agency, and why most podcasts fail before episode five.

Lorraine shares her journey from accounting and computer programming into marketing, building and selling a successful agency, and reinventing herself as a consultant and educator for other agencies. Along the way, she and Christian dive into pricing strategy, client retention, scaling challenges, and how podcasts actually fit into a modern marketing ecosystem.

Whether you run an agency, create content, or are trying to grow a business sustainably, this conversation is packed with practical insights.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• Why good marketing is rooted in numbers, not guesswork 
•  Lorraine’s transition from corporate marketing to agency ownership 
•  Early social media marketing lessons from the FBML era 
•  Why podcasts should support your sales process—not replace it 
•  The hidden downside of scaling too fast 
•  How raising prices can be smarter than hiring more staff 
•  The “squirrels, deer, moose, elephants & whales” framework for clients 
•  Why client retention matters more than top-line revenue 
•  The danger of letting one client dominate your business 
•  How to identify your ideal customer 
•  Why many businesses fail to define their real competition 
•  The importance of saying “no” to bad-fit clients 

Join our community of creative entrepreneurs and get a free copy of our No-BS Guide To Making Your Creative Business Actually Profitable delivered straight to your inbox. We’ll share smart, simple tips to help you keep more of what you earn—no boring accountant talk, we promise.  
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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:00.957)
Go ahead.

Lorraine Ball (00:04.11)
I was gonna say, you may want to adjust your camera, because right now it's cutting off the top of your head, at least on my screen. There you go, you're back in frame now.

Christian Brim (00:09.733)
Well, that's probably accurate, but I only use the video for promotional purposes. It's an audio only format, so I have a face for video, for radio.

Lorraine Ball (00:23.47)
You know what, I did that for a long time and then I found that video helps. So I've actually gone back and started using some of the video I thought I would never use. So, doesn't hurt.

Christian Brim (00:37.851)
Yes. No, it does not. All right, Randy, I'm going to finish chewing and then we'll start. Randy is my very talented editor. You can listen to me eat.

Lorraine Ball (00:44.448)
your editor. Who makes you sound good? Better. Better.

Christian Brim (00:51.083)
Mmm, as well as he can.

Welcome to another episode of the profitable creative, the only place on the interwebs where you can learn how to turn your passion into profit. am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Show Low, Nevada. I that's just an incredible name. Uh, congratulations from being from Show Low and thank you for listening. Joining me today, Lorraine Ball, uh, with more than a few words. Is that I get that correct? More than a few words podcast.

Lorraine Ball (01:23.064)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (01:24.785)
Lorraine, welcome to the show.

Lorraine Ball (01:26.552)
Thanks so much. is so nice to be here. I appreciate the invite.

Christian Brim (01:30.489)
Absolutely. So, we were talking in the green room that, you are a recovering marketing agency, owner, tell it, let's start there. how did you get into marketing?

Lorraine Ball (01:43.118)
So you gotta go way back for that. got into marketing because everybody told me I was supposed to be in marketing. I was in grad school to be an accountant. I was in grad school to be a computer programmer. You see you're making faces which the audience can't see,

Christian Brim (02:01.399)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, no, they can't, but you can. And that just seems like two very different worlds.

Lorraine Ball (02:08.716)
Well, know, accounting and computer programming kind of have a lot of overlap, a lot of number stuff. Yeah. And a number of my professors sat me down and said, look, you can do these things. You you've got the head for numbers. You will hate your life. And what you really need to do, and this is my accounting.

Christian Brim (02:11.633)
Yes, yes, no, but marketing, no.

Christian Brim (02:28.357)
I've had a very similar conversation with myself recently. Go on.

Lorraine Ball (02:31.726)
So I ended up actually paying attention to them and I'm like, you know, what should I do? And they were like, you'd be good in marketing. And I said, yeah, marketing, those people make that stuff up. And fortunately, I had a really good marketing prof who said no.

Good marketing is all about the numbers. And if you do marketing and you don't pay attention to the numbers, you end up with award-winning advertising that doesn't sell product.

Christian Brim (02:55.197)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (03:03.677)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (03:04.236)
And so that kind of became my guiding principle. I had a career in corporate marketing and one day I looked around and went, yeah, I don't need to be here anymore. You people are too resistant to change. The world is changing. Things are different and we need to move fast and you can't get your head out of wherever it is to move. And so I left and I started at the time a traditional agency, but I was

Christian Brim (03:12.689)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (03:24.476)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (03:32.153)
fortunate enough to surround myself with young professionals who kept saying, you know, you should look at this. And so we did. And I spent a number of years on the bleeding edge. There are not a lot of agencies that even remember when Facebook launched their own markup language, FBML, and you could create landing pages for your business on Facebook. And we were building them and making money doing it until Facebook changed the rules.

Christian Brim (03:59.176)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (04:01.806)
Imagine that that was sort of the pattern for Facebook over the next decade. We were doing live tweeting of our early podcast episodes 16 years ago. We were essentially. We we really did. We we we tried things. I wasn't afraid because I I would try things that didn't cost a lot of money because social media didn't and we would try it on us first and if it worked, we would do it for our clients.

Christian Brim (04:04.208)
Yes.

Christian Brim (04:15.099)
Wow, you were on the cutting edge.

Lorraine Ball (04:31.628)
And that was kind of how we grew the agency. I think like a marketer. I look at the world through a customer's eyes and figure out what makes sense for them. And I've used that kind of again as a guiding principle. And in late 2020, I had somebody approach me about buying my agency. I'd done it for 19 years.

Christian Brim (04:42.215)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (04:58.336)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (05:01.056)
I was a little tired. 2020 was a tough year to be in the business, but we had made it. You know, we made it. We made a profit. But the offer was really good. And I was like, you know, I can do that. And maybe I'll go off and do something else. And so I sold the business in 21 and then spent a couple of years trying to figure out, you know, really, where did I want to be? I was smart enough.

Christian Brim (05:07.676)
Right.

Lorraine Ball (05:29.314)
And if I'm rambling, you feel free to interrupt me. But I was smart enough to pull aside what I called the intellectual property, the podcast, because that was all me, the training programs, the books that I had written, all of that I moved into a separate company so that when I sold the agency, I kept the IP.

Christian Brim (05:40.326)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (05:57.179)
Yes.

Lorraine Ball (05:58.115)
And so I had these things and figured, okay, I'll keep using them and then figure out how it all fits together. And had a number of kind of epiphany moments over the years. And one was that the podcast was fine. The content was great. I had no clue who my audience really was. I always thought it was business owners, but the truth is business owners didn't want to listen to my podcast. They wanted to hire me.

Christian Brim (06:16.027)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (06:25.821)
Mmm.

Lorraine Ball (06:26.712)
who was listening to my podcast, who was chatting with us when we were live tweeting. It was other agencies, it was other marketers. And coming to that realization reshaped my creative outlet because today I work with agencies helping train their people to do what I taught my folks to do.

Christian Brim (06:31.25)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (06:34.855)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (06:45.511)
Right.

Christian Brim (06:52.527)
I love that. I think that seems to be a natural trajectory. When people are successful in some industry, I think of Vince Puglisi was a commercial photographer, you know, very successful and then moved into coaching others. that seems like a natural trajectory. Do you

Lorraine Ball (07:13.912)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (07:21.885)
Do you have any regrets about selling the agency or is there anything that you miss about owning and running an agency?

Lorraine Ball (07:29.966)
I miss having a team when, there are little things to do and all of a sudden it's like me. I have one person that I can kind of reach out to if, if I really need to. One of the big things, and this was a really surprise, but it shouldn't have been if I had thought through it. When I was doing the podcast as part of the agency, I had.

Christian Brim (07:33.719)
Mm-hmm Mm-hmm

Lorraine Ball (07:56.239)
10 other people who would share and reshare every episode. My download numbers were great. When I sold the agency, they still loved me, but they don't share every episode every week. And so all of a sudden my reach...

Christian Brim (08:08.209)
Right.

Lorraine Ball (08:15.084)
declined and so my downloads declined and it's taken a long time to kind of rebuild that secondary audience. You my subscribers are my subscribers, but beyond that, you know, the casual listeners, it's taken a long time and a lot more work and particularly in a much more crowded environment because these days everybody and their brother has started a podcast and

Christian Brim (08:42.257)
Yeah, my understanding is that that happened at the time you sold your agency like that was when it exploded.

Lorraine Ball (08:48.96)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Well, and the other thing, though, and here's the real truth, is everybody and their brother has started a podcast, and 80 % of the people who start a podcast never get past episode five.

Christian Brim (09:02.405)
Yeah. And, I think a lot of this is just from where I sit. I think a lot of people started a podcast with, in my case, no idea what my intentions were. or they, they had some idea that they were going to reach a level where they could attract, you know, sponsorships and advertising. And that's

you know, the pool of listeners out there is not growing. I mean, I'm not saying that the numbers of podcast listeners isn't growing, but like the human population with access to podcasts is not changing, right? And so there's only so many, you know, Joe Rogan shows that can exist and attract sponsorship. And I think what the shift is

Lorraine Ball (09:46.19)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (09:57.998)
is using a podcast as part of your marketing ecosystem. It's not a revenue generator, right? And that's a completely different play and it is long-term. can't be, you know, I did five episodes and I'm not getting any leads. This isn't working out.

Lorraine Ball (10:03.224)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (10:20.844)
Yeah, and you're absolutely right. And actually I teach classes on podcasting kind of in general, and then the more specifics on the how tos. And I say the same thing. If you think you're going to get Rich Quick and knock sponsors out of the park, you need to think again and...

the most successful secondary podcasts, not the Joe Rogan's of the world, but the really successful business podcasts are the ones that treat the podcast as part of their lead generation system. Hey, if you like the podcast, go here, you can download an expanded X, Y or Z, you can sign up for consulting, you can do all these other things and you have to have that pipeline.

Christian Brim (10:45.03)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (11:08.935)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (11:09.556)
in place that really talks to that or do it the other way. And this is the way we did it when I was podcasting for the agency. If I had a client and I was talking to them about why they needed to be thinking about blogging.

and adding that kind of content to their marketing mix, I could say, you know, I just had a great conversation with Insert Person's name here on my podcast. The show's only 15 minutes. Can I send you the link? And those audio files were a great sales tool. They were a great credibility builder. And so I was using them not at the beginning of my

Christian Brim (11:29.628)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (11:45.394)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (11:50.545)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (11:58.792)
Yeah.

Lorraine Ball (11:58.943)
my sales process. I was using it in the middle of my sales process and it worked really well for me. I was doing a lot of training in those days so the webinars and the seminars were my front end. The podcasts were kind of in the middle to push people over the edge. So I think you need to look at your sales process and figure out where does the podcast fit or are you simply doing it because it's fun?

Christian Brim (12:27.613)
No. No.

Lorraine Ball (12:27.896)
And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with, I have a message and I want people to hear this. I just want to express myself this way. Go, do it. But understand that's what you're doing and don't expect it to generate revenue just because you put it out there. This ain't Field of Dreams.

Christian Brim (12:48.987)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's where I started. I started it because I wanted to have the conversation that I didn't have on any podcast shows as guests. And I couldn't find a podcast that was having those conversations. So I'm like, well, I'll just, I'll just start that conversation. but, it took me about a year to be like, okay, why, why am I doing this again? What, what exactly am I expecting to happen?

And, I'll be honest, I mean, we still haven't really dialed that in. mean, we're, we're getting more traction, but like how to use it to, with the commercial intent, that, that, that takes some refinement. Like you said, like how, how I have, I have done that, like I'll go on LinkedIn and I'll connect with somebody and I'll look at their profile and rather than like send some, you know, generic.

Lorraine Ball (13:25.922)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (13:45.018)
introduction or pitch, I'll be like, Hey, I see that you're, you're in the movie production, business, check out this, this, episode I, I recorded, because I think, you'll, you'll really like it. but I haven't done that systemically and at scale. So I don't really know. that, that going back to your numbers thing, I couldn't agree more. I think, I think.

Lorraine Ball (13:55.864)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (14:14.981)
And this is a new revelation. You're hearing it live for the first time. think marketing is marketing departments, marketing agencies are kind of like a, a, microcosm of the whole business problem. You have to have a creative element and you have to have an analytical element. You can't just run your business by the numbers, but you can't also just go out there and create shit willy nilly because you know,

Lorraine Ball (14:31.661)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-mm.

Christian Brim (14:44.541)
You have no idea what works and what doesn't work. So all of that to say, I agree, you've got to kind of figure out what your process is and figure out how to best use it. And you test it. You can make good guesses. One of my favorite books, have you read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland? Yeah, great book.

Lorraine Ball (15:08.888)
Been a long time, but yeah, yeah.

Christian Brim (15:11.921)
And it really wasn't a book about marketing. mean, it really kind of was, but it was really, to me, just a, a treaties on, the failure of the age of reason. Like humans are unpredictable and you're fooling yourself if you think that you can predict them with, with any precision. So.

Lorraine Ball (15:23.416)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (15:30.945)
Yeah, I think two things that popped into my head as you were talking. The first one is that creating content is never going to be a bad thing. Having a series of podcast interviews, even if you don't know quite what you're going to do with them, having that library can work for you. Writing blog posts, even if you're not

quite sure exactly how they fit, but having that content, that information, it improves your SEO, it gives you stuff to share on social media, and eventually you figure out how it all fits together. While you're in that figuring it out phase, you don't want to be dedicating a significant amount of time to creating the content, but carving out a little time each week to create some content is not a bad thing. And creating those systems.

Christian Brim (16:08.188)
Right.

Lorraine Ball (16:24.566)
My podcast episodes run for my solo episodes. They're usually three to four minutes and my interviews are usually 10 to 12. So they're short. Most of my solo episodes, I do a first draft recording in my car. I have a random thought. I had one today. I went through the drive-through at Hardy's and had just this horrible customer service experience.

Christian Brim (16:34.129)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (16:48.717)
Where do you live that there are still Hardys?

Lorraine Ball (16:51.522)
I live in Indianapolis.

Christian Brim (16:53.147)
Okay, I haven't seen a Hardee's in decades. Sorry, go ahead. Okay, okay.

Lorraine Ball (16:56.482)
That's okay. I haven't eaten at a Hardee's in decades and maybe now this is why I know why, but I had this experience, but it just prompted me to think about kind of the marketing application, what they had done wrong, why I was annoyed and how do marketers make that mistake. And so on the drive home while I was eating my car, a hamburger in the car, I turned on the recording device on my phone, five minutes and I've got a great blog post and a script that I can use.

Christian Brim (17:13.127)
Hmm.

Lorraine Ball (17:26.114)
for a podcast episode. So finding ways to kind of fit that content creation into your day, especially in that early stage when you don't really know where it's going is great. And the other thing is I just saw an excerpt from one of my favorite movies, Men in Black. And one character says to the other, Will Smith asks,

Christian Brim (17:27.548)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (17:37.223)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (17:45.853)
Good movie.

Lorraine Ball (17:54.079)
Why don't we just tell people that aliens exist? People are smart. And the response is, individual people are smart. Collectively, they're stupid. And that kind of plays to that unpredictability factor. You can look at one person and say, I know how they will react and try to extrapolate that, you know, with those personas and stuff to that larger.

Christian Brim (18:04.955)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (18:10.683)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (18:22.762)
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Christian Brim (18:26.619)
Yeah, like I said, think marketing and sales is the hardest thing in any business to do because you're dealing with humans and humans are predictably unpredictable. That's another good book, by the way. Predictably unpredictable. Okay, yeah, and largely irrational to your former point. They don't behave rationally.

Lorraine Ball (18:35.48)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (18:48.686)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (18:53.709)
If you were going to start a agency now, well, let me, let me beyond a non-compete. Is there a reason why you didn't start another agency?

Lorraine Ball (19:06.508)
Well, okay, there was a non-compete. And also the reality is I didn't want the day-to-day hassles of staffing and agencies and multiple clients. The nice thing about consulting with agencies is every now and then they're like, Lorraine, we just lost somebody, can you do X?

Christian Brim (19:08.732)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (19:18.332)
Mm.

Christian Brim (19:33.746)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (19:34.306)
And I'm like, yeah, for six weeks, no problem. for a month, fine.

Christian Brim (19:39.331)
Okay, so you're a utility player.

Lorraine Ball (19:40.323)
But I don't have to, yeah, I mean, honestly, over the years, again, we went from being a traditional agency to a digital agency. I learned how to use, to do web design. I taught people, new college grads that I hired, how to use WordPress. Can I build a website in WordPress? hell yeah. Do I wanna do it? Not on a regular basis.

Christian Brim (20:07.74)
Right.

Lorraine Ball (20:08.578)
Can I write blog posts any day of the week? Can I do social media? Absolutely. Don't do AdWords. Don't really like that. I have friends who can do that. But if a client says to me, we're playing a man down, can you pitch hit for an ending? Yes.

Christian Brim (20:12.305)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (20:27.196)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (20:31.517)
So, okay, just for reference point, how many employees did you have in the agency when you sold it? When you sold it? No. Okay, so a good sized organization and that comes with a lot of constraints. You know, you can build a business the right way, delegate.

Lorraine Ball (20:39.598)
When I started, me, when I sold it, there were 10 of us.

Lorraine Ball (20:56.962)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (20:58.339)
automate all of those things. But if you're the person in charge, there's that's still a lot of bandwidth and it's a lot of constraint of like your time and your energy for sure. Okay. So if, you were counseling someone and maybe you do in your consulting, people starting a marketing agency in, in 2026, how would, how would you go about it?

Lorraine Ball (21:11.31)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (21:28.067)
What would you do differently than how you started yours?

Christian Brim (21:34.577)
Those may be two separate questions.

Lorraine Ball (21:34.959)
So let me go this way and then I'll circle back around. One of the biggest lessons that I learned, it took me a while to get there, is matching capacity, is understanding capacity.

So I came out of manufacturing environments. I understand capacity. If your production line can make this much, you want to sell right here. Because if you sell here, now you need another line. And now sales here aren't enough. You got to be up here. So what I finally learned was anytime I started bumping up against my capacity,

Christian Brim (21:54.909)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (22:03.814)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (22:07.357)
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Right.

Lorraine Ball (22:19.136)
instead of hiring that next person, upping my capacity, I just raised my prices. And so I was able to say, okay, I need a person that can do this, a person that can do this, a person that can do this. Do I hire a second person in this category or do I just raise my prices?

Christian Brim (22:24.774)
Hmm

Christian Brim (22:41.052)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (22:41.278)
not get as many, I mean not get as many projects, but get more profitable projects. And that was a tough lesson to learn because the first instinct is always, I gotta have more people, I have all this work. Well, great, but do you have enough profitable work? Are you still doing those little piddly at, those little piddly projects? Can I say piddly ass on your show? Great, okay.

Christian Brim (22:46.589)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (22:53.413)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (23:03.503)
You can say piddly ass, it's fine. Yes, you just did, yes.

Lorraine Ball (23:07.328)
Yeah, you know, are you still doing those little piddly ass projects? So that was a tough lesson. I guess another way of looking at it, my sales coach always said, you know, there are five kinds of clients. There are squirrels, deer, moose, elephants and whales. Where you want to be is in the deer, moose and elephant. Squirrels run around, they take a lot of your time. They don't know what they really want, but they try to convince you

Christian Brim (23:25.117)
Hmm.

Lorraine Ball (23:37.219)
that they're a deer or a moose. They're not. They're not paying anywhere near as much as those bigger clients, but they demand the same kind of time and attention. And so you need to be surgical. Anytime you get near that, that capacity line, who's taking too much time and not paying enough? Can you have a conversation with them about, dude, you got to cut back or you got to spend more.

Christian Brim (23:39.228)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (23:54.801)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (23:59.26)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (24:05.862)
Right.

Lorraine Ball (24:06.344)
Or, you know what, we just don't do this kind of work anymore. Let me help you find somebody else. So I think understanding where your capacity line is, where you want it to be. Once I figured that out, I made a really limiting and freeing decision. I owned a small house that we were running the business out of. I could sell it and move into a bigger space, or I could remodel it.

Christian Brim (24:11.559)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (24:36.512)
at X size and if I remodeled it and made that investment, we were going to stay but we were never going to be more than 10 to 12 people. Because I couldn't stack the bodies any deeper and higher. And in those days, I very much and I still love that in-person experience. So I made a decision to cap my capacity and just keep raising my prices. And we were worth it because I also held on to my people because I could pay them more.

Christian Brim (24:46.173)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (25:05.704)
and we could do higher level work.

Christian Brim (25:09.177)
Yes. if, if, if you've listened to the show, any length of time, you know, pricing is one of the things that I talk about a lot. I'm assuming you said squirrel, you didn't explain the others. I'm assuming whales are the same problem in that they're large fee, but you don't make a lot of money on them, but you hold onto them because there's a large fee involved. Yeah.

Lorraine Ball (25:17.24)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (25:31.215)
They are so big and they are asking you to do things that are outside of your core. So now you have to start hiring extra people or outsourcing to keep them happy and they crush you and suck all your resources. Before I left corporate,

Christian Brim (25:37.692)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (25:45.35)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (25:52.367)
I worked for a company that ended up going bankrupt and our agency, we were a whale for them. We were 80 % of their business. so overnight, they lost 80 % of their business. of their offices was 100 % dedicated to us. Every one of those people was out on the street the next day. And so that

Christian Brim (26:03.612)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (26:09.699)
Not going to survive that.

Christian Brim (26:15.493)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (26:21.07)
Lessons stayed with me when I started my agency. The rule was no client could be more than 30 % of my total business. Cause I felt like 30 % it would hurt, but I could manage it. I could find other things to fill in the gap short term and long term. And in 19 years, never, I think my biggest client maybe

20, 25%, never went higher, I just didn't. that was, if they started getting too big, I started looking for somebody else who could play at that level. And yes, it would stretch us in the short term, but it also gave us that flexibility that if if somebody,

Christian Brim (27:04.434)
Yeah.

Lorraine Ball (27:17.334)
was facing financial issues that had nothing to do with the job we were doing. It wasn't going to take me down.

Christian Brim (27:23.325)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think what you're describing is a scalable business is you don't have all of your eggs in one basket, so they can't be disruptive. And it takes longer to, to build that kind of business. I mean, there's, there's that allure of going after that, that one customer that's going to be, you know, take you, you're going to double your business or whatever.

Lorraine Ball (27:33.72)
Mm. Mm.

Lorraine Ball (27:46.999)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (27:48.806)
and the prestige probably of that, like, you know, there's some ego involved, but, you, also kind of speak to this, this underlying theme of what, what do you want from the business? What are you building the business to do? And you kind of drew that line of saying, I'm not going to go above 10. I'm not going to have a client that's more than a third of my revenue.

Lorraine Ball (28:03.628)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (28:15.931)
because you knew what kind of business you wanted to serve what you needed, as opposed to where a lot of us, and I raise my hand and include myself in this, you get on the growth track and it's just growth for the sake of growth. And that's not sustainable. It just, it doesn't work.

Lorraine Ball (28:43.148)
Well, and it was so funny because one of my, I don't know if she was an intern or she was really an employee at the time we were talking about adding another person to help us do this. And she says, yeah, let's run the numbers. How much more will you have to sell? How much more margin will we have to have? not top line, but bottom line.

Christian Brim (28:58.237)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (29:02.738)
Yes.

Lorraine Ball (29:10.388)
Will you really make more money?

Christian Brim (29:13.241)
A hundred percent. I, I was sitting, this has been probably 14 years ago. I was sitting in a room of about 40 entrepreneurs, all of them North of a million dollars in revenue. Vern harness was speaking, author of scaling up and Rockefeller habits. And he asked the group, how many of you could, shrink your company in half, make more money and work less.

And this is all different industries. Like this is not a specific industry. And virtually every hand went up and, and, you know, it took me, it took me a decade to figure out the lesson that I saw there. But, but the reality is, is that you absolutely can build a business where you're working more and making less money, which is wild. Like, why would you do that?

Lorraine Ball (30:08.386)
because that top level number, that revenue number, there's so much ego and there's so much status in being a one million or a $5 million business. And you're not really looking at how much am I taking home? You know? And...

Christian Brim (30:27.673)
No, I I've been in conversations with with hundreds of entrepreneurs over my life and I've never heard one, not one. I might be a thousand entrepreneurs. I don't know. I've never heard one talk about their bottom line. Never like that's never the conversation. It's it's always this is our top line. This is our employee count. This is, you this is our growth rate, you know, blah, blah, blah.

No one ever comes so yeah, but you know what? I didn't make any money and I don't know how to make payroll next week, right? That those conversations don't happen.

Lorraine Ball (31:05.794)
Well, depending on the kind of consulting you do. I had a couple of those conversations with clients and I'm like, okay, let's step back and let's look. appears, yeah. Mm-hmm, yeah.

Christian Brim (31:13.881)
No, I'm talking more of like a peer, like entrepreneurs getting together and, know, chatting about what they're doing. No, not in a consultancy way.

Lorraine Ball (31:22.118)
No, because you when you're talking with peers and I saw this a lot. I belong to a mastermind group of agency owners. We were from around the country and get together twice a year. And since I could say piddly ass, I'm assuming I can say bullshit. So there was a lot of bullshit coming out of people's mouths about how much money they were making and how much they were doing. And you know, I'd be sitting there going.

Christian Brim (31:40.365)
Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (31:51.343)
Yeah, I ain't buying this crap. I'm not buying it because I'm listening to the other things you're saying. I'm listening to you talk about your turnover rate. I'm listening to you talk about your clients. My two biggest clients, the ones that were 20 and 25 % of my business, one was with me 11 years, one was with me 13. So that kind of longevity has a value that is hard to quantify.

Christian Brim (31:52.997)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (32:00.221)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (32:13.277)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (32:17.479)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (32:21.164)
But my selling expense was so much less because I did not have to keep replacing my biggest clients.

Christian Brim (32:28.697)
that was, it's been, it's just over a year ago. I went, I got invited to a mastermind of agency owners, right? And I'm the accountant sitting in the back, just kind of observing. And they were doing a session where they were going over their numbers, their performance numbers. And one of which was retention. And they threw this number up and they were like, this is this trend and this looks good. You know, like this is they're sharing all of their data together.

And they were happy that their retention was 50%. And I'm like, just as an observer, if you have to replace a customer every six months, something's broken. that's not working.

Lorraine Ball (33:05.326)
Mmm.

Lorraine Ball (33:12.29)
Yeah. But that's typical in agency world.

Christian Brim (33:17.534)
Mm Don't know that's because I asked the question like, no, this is the way it is.

Lorraine Ball (33:21.934)
It is typical, but it doesn't have to be. And that was one of those other decisions we made was investing in long-term relationships, creating, and the really cool thing is one of those two clients that was with me like forever, when I sold the business, they didn't like the person I sold it to. You know what? And I told this whole different story about the people that bought the business.

Christian Brim (33:42.717)
Hmm.

Lorraine Ball (33:49.657)
But they went away for a year or two and then they called me and said, hey, Lorraine, I know you're not in the business anymore, but do you know somebody? Well, you know, as a matter of fact, I do. have this company I'm working with and I think they will be perfect for you. And I called the company and I said, look, these guys, if you treat them right, if you take care of them, you will have them forever.

Christian Brim (34:04.295)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (34:14.428)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (34:15.074)
and they've been with him for about 18 months now. And I was talking to the account manager and she's like, yeah, he loves everything we do. And I'm like, do you call him regularly? Yeah. Do you send him bite-sized reports? She says, yeah. Do you listen to him? Yeah. Guess what? They're gonna be with you forever. understanding that about that client.

and understanding what each one of my clients needed and it was different. Some needed lots of flashing numbers, some needed pretty graphics, others needed me to be on the phone once a week just saying, hey, whatever it was, but our clients stayed with us. And so my retention rate was much higher than that 50 % and my sales expense was that much lower and did not need.

Christian Brim (34:54.791)
Right.

Lorraine Ball (35:08.788)
Now for my web business it's different. You know the the content side forever and ever web projects turn but a good web kind so if I if we did four websites a month and I could turn one of those into a content client bonus

Christian Brim (35:11.143)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (35:15.835)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Christian Brim (35:25.091)
Right. So I have a client and a personal friend that's been in the marketing agency space for at least 15 years. he made the comment to me a few months ago when we were having lunch, he said, the old agency model is dead. I'm not going to define it for you. I'm just going to give you that statement. What say you?

Lorraine Ball (35:37.774)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (35:59.407)
That is an interesting, because what I'm trying to figure out is what he considers the old model versus the new. Well, from my perspective, we built our business on retainers. You pay a sex amount of money every month. We do approximately the same things every month. However, if...

Christian Brim (36:12.411)
Well, from your perspective, I mean, you've been in it a long time.

Christian Brim (36:19.858)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (36:27.502)
We think something is working or something is not working. We're going to make those changes and we're going to stay at your investment will be the same, but you're going to trust us to make the best use of your money. And that model served me for, I don't know, 15 or 20 years I was in business and.

Christian Brim (36:32.487)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (36:39.399)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (36:48.812)
companies that I'm working with and the companies that I see that are successful are still doing it that way. Now, I'm also seeing a lot of companies that sell retainers that aren't doing it the right way, that are doing very cookie cutter. Every client gets exactly the same package. That model is dead. You can't be doing that crap. You've got to be in a situation where you are adjusting what you're doing. But

Christian Brim (37:04.797)
Mmm.

Lorraine Ball (37:19.628)
that retainer model, yeah, I think it still works. just think you have to take that retainer model and acknowledge that this is what the customer is gonna pay every month, these are the results they're looking for, but you have to have that flexibility to go, you know what, we've been doing ads for six months and the ads ain't doing squat, we need to try this platform, we need to try.

Christian Brim (37:24.285)
Okay.

Lorraine Ball (37:45.364)
more video, less video. We need to do other things. You can't be locked into, this is all we do.

Christian Brim (37:55.462)
Yeah, I think about my experience with agencies and you know,

I, his agency, this, this client that I'm referring to, we were a client of his for three years, Uber creative, really great at, at the content, the creative piece, um, didn't feel like there was the strategy behind it. Right. Um, we hired another agency and we were with them less than a year.

because their approach was, we're strategy first, but then it became, I thought the strategy was tailored to us. Really, it was, well, this is what we've seen work somewhere else, so we're gonna do it with you. And after about the third iteration of that, I'm like, this is not, there's some disconnect.

What you're doing does not work and it's not resonating with who we are. Right. So I totally understand the need for strategy, but like, think, I think from your, what you're saying, I think what, what persists, what's worked in the past and will continue to work is the, in the agency world specifically is being that strategic layer and a creative layer.

to solve the problems on a custom basis, unless you're just going to say, I'm only going to work with accountants and then you're right.

Lorraine Ball (39:41.039)
But even if you say, I'm only gonna work with accountants, you've gotta understand even within that world, there are different accountants. so, okay, so when I talk about strategy, and this is one of the things that I'm really passionate about is part one of your strategy as you're approaching a client, the very first question you have to answer is,

Christian Brim (39:51.089)
Yes, and their customers are different, right?

Lorraine Ball (40:10.188)
who is their customer. Not what industry are they in, but...

Christian Brim (40:14.097)
Well, and let me interrupt you there because I think that right there, naming that, is the foundational problem because their customers, me,

Don't know the answer to that question. Right. I think there is a huge swath of businesses out there that are unclear on who their best client is, their ideal client is, and, just the basic blocking and tackling of, okay, what problem is it that you solve? Because if you don't know that the agency can't do anything. Right.

Lorraine Ball (40:57.026)
But-

Lorraine Ball (41:00.334)
And so the, if you're sitting down with a customer and they can't answer that, then you have to have the background, you have to have the experience to look at them and go, okay, so you come to me, I'm an accountant, we're accounting firms, everybody needs us. Great. Let's narrow it down. Let's look at the center of your circle. Let's look at who do you like working with? Let's look at...

Christian Brim (41:20.829)
Hmm?

Lorraine Ball (41:30.092)
Let's look at your last year's worth of clients. Okay, everybody you've worked with. Now let's start putting them into groups. Who falls into the, I wish I had 10 more clients like that. Who falls into the, my God, I never want to work with that. And if you can't help as an agency, if you have a client that doesn't know who their target is, if you can't help them define a target,

define a niche and then that then lines up with their expertise. as an agency, I'm sorry, ain't worth a crap. So step number one is always who is the customer? Step number two is what is their pain point? And then what makes you uniquely qualified?

Christian Brim (42:14.167)
I would agree with that. I would agree with that.

Lorraine Ball (42:30.872)
to address their pain point. But then also the other side of it is who do you really compete with? And a lot of, and you would be amazed at the number of businesses that have more trouble answering that question than they do answering the who is your customer question.

Christian Brim (42:33.073)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (42:40.785)
Yes.

Christian Brim (42:54.705)
Well, yes, and I would say that's symptomatic of not really understanding the first question of who their customer is. Because if you really knew who your customer was, with clarity, you'd know exactly who your competition was. accountants are a great example, because we're absolutely horrible marketers. We're marginal business owners.

Lorraine Ball (43:04.014)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (43:19.609)
yeah, I know that.

Christian Brim (43:24.213)
the, the, the problem with accountants is they come to the table and they want to be everything to everybody. Right. We're the general practitioners. We're the country doctor, the county doctor, right? You know, back a hundred years ago and we do house calls and it's like, we, we don't have any level of specialization or expertise and, it largely comes from the fear of saying no. It's like,

Lorraine Ball (43:34.894)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (43:40.354)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (43:53.118)
Okay, I'm not working with these people. These are people that I'm not. And maybe that's the exercise that you start with as a business owner is defining who you don't serve. Like if you're not real clear on who you serve, who is it that you absolutely don't want to work with?

Lorraine Ball (44:08.436)
I used to do this with my team and I've done it with customers as well. I would have them make, we'd look at all of our current clients. And the question I would ask is, if we could only work with three customers on this list, who would you pick? And each person got to put their three on the board. And we'd look for the overlap and the commonality. And then we could have conversations around, well,

Christian Brim (44:28.091)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (44:34.924)
everybody put this company on the board, how do we get more customers like that? What is it about that customer or that project? And then the other side of it is, if we could fire one client, who do we fire? Now, when everybody in the company points to the same customer, it's really easy, you know. But you also can have that conversation about...

Christian Brim (44:42.929)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (44:51.677)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (44:57.383)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (45:01.326)
What is it about them? Why do you all feel like we got to get rid of them?

Christian Brim (45:03.43)
Yes.

Christian Brim (45:08.561)
Well, and I can tell you who's on that list. It's engineers. You absolutely don't want to work for engineers. There are no engineers listening to this program, so I'm completely safe saying that.

Lorraine Ball (45:11.822)
See, you know what, because

Lorraine Ball (45:19.47)
And I'm going to tell you that I came out, because I came out of manufacturing. So I worked with a lot of engineers and I developed a skill at translating engineering into English. I would rather, and I hope there are no lawyers, I would work with a dozen engineers every single day than one lawyer.

Christian Brim (45:25.127)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (45:32.881)
Hmm

Lorraine Ball (45:42.829)
because at least engineers, will, bless you, they will nitpick, they will be engineering, but they also, they understand their limitations. They will embrace the fact that they don't know marketing, whereas attorneys think they do.

Christian Brim (45:45.629)
Excuse me.

Christian Brim (45:50.908)
Yes.

Christian Brim (46:05.605)
Yes, yes, I don't work with attorneys either, but you know, they can sue you, so I didn't say anything.

Lorraine Ball (46:06.584)
Yeah

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I'm OK with it. I have said I have said that to my friends who are attorneys. I mean, I think in the tall full time, the whole time I was in the business, I think we had three law firms. None of them stayed with us for very long because I would tell the attorney, look.

I'm not telling you how to write a contract. Please stop telling me how to write a blog post.

Christian Brim (46:40.421)
Yeah, as a professional, that's probably the most frustrating thing you can do is have to argue. I mean, not to support or give reasoning, but like you, they're paying you to give your professional advice. And then they say, well, no, no, that's, that's not right. And now with the advent of, of LLMs, everybody's an expert. And it's like, Hey, look, dude, go, go, go with God. That's fine.

Lorraine Ball (46:44.27)
you

Lorraine Ball (46:57.763)
Yeah.

Lorraine Ball (47:05.198)
Yeah, yeah, and I think that's again, that was one of the luxuries of keeping the practice at a certain level. I could choose who I wanted to work with and who you know what? I I don't think we're a fit. I I think you need somebody who is going in a different direction and it's not me.

Christian Brim (47:30.417)
The power of no. Lorraine, how do people find your show and how do they learn more about you?

Lorraine Ball (47:40.942)
So morethanafewwords.com, that's my website. You'll find the most recent episodes of the podcast. You'll find my training classes, white papers, things I'm doing. If you wanna chat with me, if you want a one hour consulting session to say, Lorraine, I just need somebody to look at this and tell me where to go. You can book an office hours appointment all from the website. And if you wanna...

Christian Brim (48:04.786)
Mm-hmm.

Lorraine Ball (48:10.146)
follow my adventures on a more regular basis, you can always look for me on LinkedIn. I'm sure there are other Loraines there, but Lorain Ball is pretty active, so I usually come up and search pretty well.

Christian Brim (48:22.365)
Perfect. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, share the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, hit the little envelope button, shoot us a message, tell us what you'd like to hear and I'll get rid of Lorraine. Until next time, ta ta for now.