I once ran the entire social program for a Fortune 1000 company for $2,500 a month.
Not a campaign. Not one channel. All of it.
And if I’m honest, we weren’t working for a profitable account. We were working for the logo on our website. I told myself that was strategy. Land the big name, look legitimate, the real money comes later. So I watched the scope creep. I watched them noodle every caption, every post, every frame of video. And I said nothing, because I was afraid that if I brought up the price, they’d walk.
I wasn’t being smart. I was scared.
Maybe some of it was our younger years. Trying to be scrappy, trying to be endearing, trying to be the underdog who’d do anything to win the account. That plays for a while. But as you get older it stops reading as hungry and starts reading as untidy. Unprofessional. Not the firm that can handle a big client. The low price wasn’t charming anymore. It was a signal, and it was the wrong one.
So we repositioned.
We started going after bigger brands and charging what the work is actually worth. Not out of ego. Out of math. When we charge more, we can staff with the best people, and the best people make the best content. That’s the entire flywheel. Higher prices fund better talent, better talent produces better work, better work earns the higher price.
Undercharge and you snap that chain at the first link.
Here’s what gave me the nerve to do it.
My company keeps taking over accounts from the big traditional agencies. And every time we get inside, it’s the same picture. They don’t know how to do social. They’re stuck in 1985, leaning on paid distribution through archaic channels, buying attention because they never learned how to earn it. We come in and outperform them on a fraction of what they charge.
They weren’t better than us. They just believed they were worth more, and they priced like it.
That was the whole gap. Not talent. Nerve.
And I’ll be straight with you. Pricing with confidence is still something I’m working on. It doesn’t flip like a switch. But every time I make myself say the bigger number, the fear turns out to be lying. The higher price doesn’t scare off the good ones. It scares off the tire-kickers. The serious brands lean in.
Because we’re not the scrappy shop hoping to keep a logo anymore. We built the systems. We grew. And now we don’t just handle the big client; we grow the big client. They do better on social with us than they did without us, and that’s the whole point.
So if your revenue is stuck, don’t just chase more accounts. Revisit your pricing. Revisit your positioning. And make sure the message you’re putting into the market says the same thing your price does.
If you’re doubting yourself, increase your prices.
-Jordan
This is from our series, Building The Agency. Read more from the series below:
