Freelancer to Agency: #6 How to Get Your First Client(s)

Sponsored by

📈Hi there! 👋 

Welcome to the next edition of the Freelancer to Agency series. 

Now that you’ve branded your agency to attract your ideal customers and fine-tuned your offer, let’s talk about how you can get your first customers. 

Let’s go!

4 Ways to Get Your First Agency Clients 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Starting out, you probably don’t have the budget to run a big ad campaign, nor will you have had the chance to put out a lot of content to

attract inbound leads.

So, you will have to get proactive and reach out to people to get your first customers! 

Tap into your network 

Probably the best way to find someone to pay for a service you are offering is to reach out to people in your existing network. 

Since you’ve probably been freelancing in the field you are now running an agency in, you will have a network you can tap into. 

Hit up the people you have good relationships with, explain your offer, and ask them if they know (and could refer you) to someone who could benefit from your service. 

The funny thing about this approach is that the people you ask for referrals might just end up working with you if they like your offer. 

If you don’t have a large business network, you can also ask friends, family members, or anyone else you know who could either benefit from your service or refer you to someone who could. 

Ask your rich friends! 

Rich friends are a great resource if you want to make money. They could become investors, refer business your way, or become customers themselves. 

So, as you talk to your network as part of your client acquisition strategy, don’t forget to talk to your rich friends! 

I studied finance at a reputable university and worked in banking in my 20s, so I have a stack of friends who have way more money than me. When I do outbound client acquisition sprints, I always hit up my rich friends to see if they know someone they could refer me to for business. 

Do cold outreach on social media

Once you’ve exhausted your network, your next best bet to getting your first customers is cold outreach on social media. 

Yes, it’s time-consuming and can feel a little uncomfortable at first, but it’s still one of the most effective ways to attract customers. Just earlier this month, I secured a new customer for my agency by DMing someone on Twitter.  

To make sure your cold outreach on social media yields results, put a step-by-step system in place that works for you. 

The main steps it should include are: 

• Creating a list of target companies you want to work with

• Choosing the social network(s) where your target customers hang out

• Crafting a personalized message for each decision maker you contact that clearly explains how you can help them solve a problem they have

Everyone has their own style of outreach, and you will have to find what works best for you, but taking your time to write a personalized message (as opposed to the same copy-and-paste pitch) will convert much better. So keep that in mind! 

Start with a low-ball offer

While I am all for charging your worth, there’s a lot of value in onboarding your first client even if you are only making a small profit with them. 

Not only do you need to build a portfolio of clients for social proof but you also need to make sure that you can actually execute the services in your offer and deliver the desired results. You won’t know for certain how well that will go until you have done it in the wild!  

One of my agency’s first clients was a small Bitcoin remittance startup based in Nigeria. The monthly retainer was so small that I barely made any profit, but it showed me exactly what areas we needed to improve in our internal processes. It also taught me a lot about what clients really care about. 

By reaching out to prospective customers with a low-ball offer, you are very likely to get clients. 

In some cases, you may be able to upsell them, and if not, you will have to tell them further down the road that you are raising your prices. If they are happy with the results you deliver (and your new prices are within their budget), they will probably agree to the new rates.   

More on getting clients next week! 📈

Next week, I will share with you how to turn existing freelancing clients into agency clients, which is probably the easiest approach to securing your first agency clients. 

Until next week!

Alex

Keep up with AI

How do you keep up with the insane pace of AI? Join The Rundown — the world’s largest AI newsletter that keeps you up-to-date with everything happening in AI with just a 5-minute read per day.

Sign up with one click.