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Joined February 2007
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Two people sent me handwritten notes this month. One was a card in purple ink. The other was a letter on paper with little blue flowers around the edge.
Each of them wrote about what my work has meant to their businesses, careers, and lives.
I’ll keep the details to myself, but what I will tell you is:
IT FILLED MY CUP.
I’ve been carrying those two notes around all month.
I think it’s the handwriting. No one does that anymore, which is why it feels so special.
And… I had no idea. I didn’t know any of it had landed like that until they each took the time to tell me.
So I keep wondering about the people I’ve never thanked. I assume they already knew, but they probably don’t. I’m going to correct that this weekend.
Who’s someone you’ve been meaning to thank?
Consider this the excuse to drop some cash at your local stationery store on a nice pen and some great cardstock and put some more gratitude into the world.
Dan Mall retweeted
Before I visited Pennsylvania, everyone warned me that Philadelphia people are the toughest, most impatient people in America.
I believed them until I walked toward the front door of a Wawa gas station.
I was still forty feet away in the parking lot, walking between rows of cars.
A massive construction worker in steel-toe boots, carrying a twenty-four-ounce coffee in one hand and a paper-wrapped hoagie in the other, pushed open the glass door to leave. Then he saw me.
He stopped. He planted his boot against the bottom of the door. And he waited.
Forty feet is a very long distance when a grown man is holding a door for you in the wind.
In Japan, to make a stranger wait carries great shame. So I broke into that awkward half-jog every man performs when he wishes to show gratitude without looking like he is fleeing a crime.
"Go ahead, boss," he said as I passed.
Ten minutes later, as I walked out with my own sandwich, I saw an elderly woman locking her car thirty feet away.
I planted my foot against the glass. I held the door.
Another man behind me held the inner door. Within seconds we had formed an impromptu honor guard of grumpy men holding glass doors in complete silence.
Philadelphia may boo Santa Claus.
But inside the three-foot radius of a Wawa doorway, they have the manners of the imperial court.
Your agency’s problem isn’t that all of your prospects are now using Claude Design.
Your agency’s problem is that all of your prospects see Claude Design as an acceptable alternative.
One of my agency owner students had a client for 8 years. On the most recent call, the client said they’re going to use AI this time to build and maintain the website, so they didn’t need the agency anymore.
Here’s my read: that wasn’t a loyal, 8-year client who got stolen away. It was a client who slowly started leaving 8 years ago.
You have a client like this right now. They’ve paid you for years but never really CHOSE you. You were just good enough, fast enough, or cheap enough. They aren’t a client who would still stick with you even if you were slow or expensive.
For your best client, are you their top choice or just a vendor who hasn’t been replaced yet?
Jonathan Stark has been a guest on more than 100 shows, and his message hasn’t changed:
Stop billing by the hour.
This Friday, he’s talking to the agency owners in my Quest coaching program.
Jonathan is a former software developer on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing. He wrote Hourly Billing Is Nuts and The Freelancer’s Roadmap, hosts the Ditching Hourly podcast, and writes a daily newsletter on pricing.
Most of the agency owners I work with are capped by how many hours their team has. Pricing on the value of the result instead of the hours is one of the ways out of that, and Jonathan wrote a book about exactly that.
It’s the last guest session of the year. We’re doing a fireside chat, then live Q&A, so Quest members can bring him the pricing question they’ve been needing answers to.
This session is only for Quest members.
If you run a design agency doing at least 6-figures and want in on sessions like this, comment or DM JONATHAN and I’ll tell you how to join Quest.
I went through 193 registrations for the free outreach workshop I ran yesterday.
121 run agencies doing 6-figures or more. For 89 of those 121, this was the biggest thing holding them back:
Pipeline.
That’s more than sales, scaling, positioning, and pricing combined.
The written answers sound the same:
“We’ve lived off referrals for years.”
“Most of our work comes from word of mouth.”
“It’s drying up.”
They treat referrals like a farm that runs on rainfall. Rain is great when it happens but you can’t schedule it. So the whole business rides on lucky—or unlucky—weather.
Most agency owners only send outreach when revenue dips. Then they stop when it spikes.
The fix is boring math. Send 10 outreach messages a day. If you spend 6 minutes on each, that’s only an hour/day. That’s 2,000 inboxes you can find yourself in, whether you’re busy or not.
When’s the last time you sent a pitch while you were busy?
12 years ago this week, it was 9am and I was on my living room floor with my daughters.
At the job before I started my own agency, I would have been clocking in. Instead, I got to play with my kids. Work could wait a few hours. No client emergency would pull me away, because I’d designed it that way.
On the day my wife took this photo, my agency SuperFriendly was 2½ years old. I started it to be around my newborn daughter and my wife more, so that years later, I could have moments like this whenever I wanted.
Yesterday, I read through the notes of dozens of agency owners I coach, looking at the life they each want.
97% wrote about travel. 72% wrote about family and friends. 59% wrote about where they wanted to live. 41% wrote about time off.
Only 21% mentioned their agency at all.
For most of them, running an agency isn’t the dream. It‘s what they’re doing to pay for the dream.
My agency let me work with some of the biggest companies in the world, collaborate with my friends, make good money, and exit. None of that is why I started it. I started it for a random 9am on my living room floor.
Why did you start yours?
In year two of running my agency, we did $613,826. In year three, we did $384,638. The difference came down to one thing I didn’t have:
A system for getting new clients.
That’s at least $229,188 lost to a missing system.
I thought I could just do good work then talk about it when it was done, and that would bring the new clients in.
That’s not a system.
In tough times, agency owners send Desperation Outreach™ because they have to. Inquiries dry up or a big client leaves, and it’s, “Uh-oh, better send some messages.”
The outreach brings in a project or two. The pain goes away, so they stop sending messages. Crisis averted.
A few months later, they’re right back where they started.
That start-and-stop pattern is what causes feast-or-famine.
They treat outreach like an emergency fund. But nobody builds wealth by only saving when the account hits zero.
Wealthy people put money in savings in both good times and bad. Outreach works the same way: same time every day, whether you’re slammed or slow.
Next Tuesday, I’m running a free workshop for 6-figure agency owners on building that habit: 1 hour a day that keeps new leads coming in.
Reserve your seat here: danmall.com/go/workshop
Do you help nonprofits with growth, marketing, and strategy?
I know a small nonprofit leadership team that would love to meet you and hire you to consult with them if it’s the right fit.
Reply with to this post with a link to your work and I can connect you. (Please don’t DM me about this.)
Last week, one of my design agency owner students made $7,000/hour.
They were going to walk into a call and charge $3K. We spent the hour before the call writing a new script together. Nothing about the deliverables changed; we just changed the stories around them.
At the end of a call, the client verbally agreed to pay $10K, and the SOW was signed the next day.
Everyone says, “Raise your prices,” but they never say what to raise them to. So you end up raising them to a price that you’re guessing the client will agree to.
That’s enough guessing.
I helped my student make an extra $7K in a hour not by guessing, but by telling the stories of the highest price that’s still a steal for the client. I want to show you how to do the same thing.
On January 21st, I’m co-hosting Enough Guessing: Pricing & Sales Edition with my friend @vcastillo630. It‘s $149. You’ll get at least 10× return on your investment.
Registration is open: enoughguessing.com/
The best Philly branding shop works with one of my favorite Philly events?
Pairing beautiful flowers with beautiful typography?
Be still, my beating heart!
🌸 NEW WORK FOR THE PHS PHILADELPHIA FLOWER SHOW 🌸
Earlier this year Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) approached us to help come up with the identity and key visuals for their 2027 flower show. It was called ICONIC so we knew we wanted the flowers to feel monumental. We tapped local photographer Bre Furlong (breannefurlong.com) to shoot 18 beautifully unique florals in stunning detail. These beauties are gonna look incredible on banners and billboards all over Philadelphia this winter.
Marc’s agency ranks top three on Google for their niche and still can’t get clients.
I spent an hour with him on camera finding out why. It came down to one question.
Full episode is live now: danmall.com/go/yt-marc-rust
“Is your niche all companies?”
“Sure, but I don’t want to say that.”
That’s Marc, about twenty minutes into a conversation I recorded with him. He runs a branding agency for private equity firms and ranks top three on Google for the term.
They’re good at the work. They have testimonials most agencies would envy. One client is 80% of his revenue, and they’re running at only a fifth of the capacity that the team can handle. Like many agencies right now, getting clients is a struggle.
Tomorrow I’m publishing the whole hour. Marc let me open his numbers on camera, find what’s in the way, and make a detailed plan to get on track.
It’s a new format for my channel. I coach an agency owner live and you watch all of it, including the parts where I’m not sure I’m right.
Here are the first thirty seconds.
It drops tomorrow at 12pm Eastern. Subscribe to my YouTube channel “danmallteaches” so you don’t miss it: youtube.com/danmallteaches