I gave a client away and got it back.
YES-terday, I won - but not alone. WE won. A bit of context : Yesterday, I had a meeting face to face with my first client - Or said differently, partner, because he was one of the first people that trusted me with the skill of Marketing that I didn't have. Two years ago, he gave me a full go (2K monthly budget) at generating leads for him in the Solar niche. I didn't know anything, started from scratch. I did have good results because of a law changing soon, so very high demand. But after the law changed, demand decreased A LOT, so I lost confidence. Recently, this client was approached by a marketing agency, and I gladly helped him & them because I wanted the best for the client that trusted me in the past. I had the impostor syndrom at that moment, I felt like I couldn't understand the Market anymore, ads & leads generation, and was in the middle of learning advertising from scratch from someone doing Meta Ads full time (I paid 2.8K € for this, which was half of what I had left after 1.5 years). The marketing agency didn't do well at all, and came up with tons of excuses, very low reactivity, tons of meetings and blaming me (lol) and the client about X or Y or Z. The client was unhappy and told me to come back. And this is what I did (leverage was high) - I told them YES I'll come back, BUT under some conditions. 1) I don't want to work with a monthly retainer of 500€ or count the hours spent for the client, and give an hourly rate because the faster/better I get, the worst it is for me. I wanted to generate as much money as possible for the client, even if I had to work more, and more frequently. 2) I wanted to invest myself fully in this, and for 2 months (July + August) try to generate as much leads as possible for him, while being fully transparent and communicate as much as possible with the full team in charge of calling leads, sales, delivery if needed. I wanted to automate most of the communications (mail, sms). And all of this, FOR FREE - Until I'm satisfied with the results. I wanted to negotiate at the highest point, which is when leads are transformed into MONEY for the client (It takes 30-90 days for leads to convert).