🤖 The Value of Not Having SOPs (No For Real)

My friend Kyle Mau is in town this week. He’s vacation-testing his recruitment firm, HireUA. We were talking shop at breakfast and he mentioned how he’s worked with several marketing agencies in the past and so far, none have been able to get results for him.

Side note: Whenever a business owner tells me this, it’s a red flag. Means there’s something wrong with the owner or the business, not the agency. But I happen to know Kyle for almost a decade. He’s been a successful entrepreneur for many years and runs a tight ship, so I’m inclined to believe him.

I had a similar conversation with one of my clients a couple of days ago. He was telling me how happy they are with our service and fulfillment. How they’d worked with so many vendors in the past who were all meh, 5/10s.

The Real Business of a Service Provider

I told him my secret is not having any systems or processes. We do everything hand-to-hand. Nothing is automated in my business. It also helps that we’re boutique and so clients who work with Dropkick Copy deal with the owners directly. It’s so easy to keep clients happy by doing it this way.

But the “best practice” these days, the s*** that goes viral, is to automate all the things. With Zaps and Make workflows and Airtable dashboards and their Slack bots. Just, no.

And so agency owners and service providers fumble the bag. Perfect example, Michelle and I hired a video editor to edit and publish Ask a CRO for us and make some clips. Before we hired him I told Michelle, I’d rather give a small business owner the money rather than Facebook and Google (for ads.) Michelle wanted to do the ads.

I wanted him to win. All he had to do to make 10 grand from us this year… was to not f*** it up. But guess what? He f***ed it up. He was difficult to get a hold of. Didn’t reply to communication promptly. Videos were published last minute. And the work wasn’t that great either. It was just meh. 5/10 like my client said.

So he lost his advocate. When Michelle told me she wanted to cancel his retainer and spend the money on ads, I was like, yeah okay let’s get rid of him. He’s not doing great work for us anyway.

The real business we’re in–agencies, freelancers, consultants etc–is the human relationships business. Which brings me to my second and final point…

The 10X Rule

I've been fired by clients for failure to adhere to the 10X Rule. I had to fire a copywriter recently because she failed to adhere to the 10X Rule. Before I tell you what the 10X Rule is, I must first tell you it has an axiom:

Everything is your fault.

If your default frame is to pass the buck, you won't be able to understand or apply the 10X Rule. This is both a mindset thing and a literal actual factual thing.

Every time I've had a client relationship go bad, I know it's because I made a mistake somewhere. Either I got complacent and started phoning it in. Or I didn't get the results I promised. Or I didn't meet the client's expectations in some way.

And even if you don't like the idea that everything is your fault, here's another way to say the same thing. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. This is true about life in general. It's even more true about your profession if you chose one that requires you service clients.

The 10X Rule is not new. I did not invent it. Other experts/gurus have their own way of teaching the same concept. Zig Ziglar, for example: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

Having said that, here is the 10X Rule:

You must give 10 times more value than you take.

Anyone who interacts with you should get a 10X ROI by simply breathing the same air as you. That means, if a client pays you $3000/month the minimum ROI you must give them is $30000/month. Directly or indirectly.

If you are unable to deliver a 10X ROI, you have 3 choices.

1. Get better (results, communication, management etc.)

2. Lower your prices to achieve a 10-to-1 ratio

3. Resign before you are eventually fired

Cool? Cool.

About Nabeel Azeez

Nabeel Azeez is a direct response copywriter and the owner of Dropkick Copy, a B2B email marketing agency.