Raise your retainer price and halve the client list

The friend had 15 clients paying somewhere around 800 to 1,000 a month. Elvis's suggestion was blunt: from next month, the price is 2K. Maybe 50 percent leave and 50 percent stay. You are now earning about the same amount of money with half the clients.

That's the part people skip. Nobody likes the idea of losing half the client list, but the revenue barely moves, and the workload drops by half. The time you get back doesn't disappear. Your team can put more hours into the clients who stayed and get them better results, which is what keeps them paying.

Elvis says this has worked for him in a lot of different situations. He adds one warning: find the point where you're not overcharging. If the client feels they're paying for nothing, the higher price won't hold.

For Elvis, pricing is a hiring decision before it's a sales decision. If you want to be premium and do the best work in your market, you need better people, and better people cost money. You can't charge 500 bucks or 1,000 a month and have clients expect top quality. As he put it on the show, he's running a business, not a charity.

He explains it with a water bottle. At the grocery store it costs around 50 cents. At the airport it's 5 euros. It's the same bottle. The difference is where it's sold and who's buying. His friend's problem isn't skill, it's staying in the market where the bottle costs 50 cents.

That's also why he keeps a floor on margins. Explode aims for 70 to 80 percent. Some projects have dropped nearer 50 when they needed extra resources, but Elvis says he tries not to get into any business that runs below 40 or 50 percent.

The podcast host, who runs his own agency in Latvia, said it straight: the clients who pay the least are the biggest headache. They micromanage. Elvis agreed and described the pattern. A client comes in saying they trust you, you're the professionals, do your work. Then the micromanaging starts, and not long after, the request for a discount.

Elvis is careful here. Some close attention is normal early on, when someone hasn't worked with an agency before, and he's strict about his own content too. The difference is the direction. Good relationships move toward trust over time. The low-budget ones tend to move toward more control and less money.

He connects it to wealth and mindset. People with more money, in his experience, understand what the work takes, and that makes them easier to work with. Going after clients who can afford you isn't snobbery. It's less stress for everyone.

The best clients Elvis has had came in saying: we're going with you for a year, minimum. The worst said: let's try it for a month. Early on, he admits, he took month-long deals too. Now the minimum is three months.

Part of it is results. A personal brand needs consistency, and ten or twenty videos won't change a business. One of his clients went from 30,000 to 100,000 followers in about three months, fully organic, and what made that work was her mindset. She understood that even a video with 5 million views is followed by the question of what you post tomorrow.

The other part is cost. Explode builds a team around each client and onboards them, in Elvis's words, like one of the family. Doing that for a new client every month is like starting a new relationship every month. The work you put in at the start pays off over time, and a client who leaves after 30 days never gets there.

Elvis couldn't turn people down at the start. Now he does, and the signals usually show up in the first conversation. One is a list of limiting beliefs, such as a prospect saying they have no time right after hearing the work takes three to six hours a month. Another is money. Some people can manage the first one to three months but clearly won't be able to keep investing after that.

Saying no feels like leaving money on the table. Elvis sees it the other way: a client who isn't ready financially or mentally will be hard to work with, and you can often see it coming before you sign.

The host shared a story from his own agency. A client started at 2K a month, which later became their biggest retainer at 4K. When the team said that doubling the number of videos would mean double the filming, editing and team hours, the client doubled the budget and said: 'Don't be afraid of big expenses, be afraid of small income.'

That's the client both of them are chasing: someone who sees the fee as the cost of the result they want. You won't find many of them if all your pricing is aimed at the people who think 800 a month is a lot.