Over the past few years, we’ve been incredibly lucky to grow a paid ads portfolio featuring brands that we one day only dreamed of crossing paths with. It’s always a #pinchme moment when we speak to prospective clients and they tell us the positive things they’ve heard about us, either from their business buds or just around the interwebs in general.
In reflecting on this amazing journey we’ve been on, we’d love to invite you in for a little behind-the-scenes look at what made this all possible.
We started proving ourselves before we started selling ourselves
While growing our portfolio has been a very deliberate experience, attracting clients to begin with wasn’t as much.
When Cherie started TDP all those years ago, it was to help small businesses find the practical and implementable social media training they were in need of and not able to find elsewhere. Clearly, she was onto something with attendees singing TDP’s praises and taking what they learnt to create real impact in their businesses.
One of the other themes that started to emerge though from the workshops was a deep trust in the knowledge that was being shared. Not only was she talkin’ the talk, she was also walkin’ the walk and is a real winning factor when it comes to finding an expert that you want to invest in.
Naturally, this led to attendees who loved the workshops and felt incredibly empowered by all that they had learnt acknowledging that they just weren’t able to carve out the time needed to undertake their own advertising activity and instead look to TDP to help.
Right here, is where the agency side of TDP was born.
As we’ve grown, we’ve remained committed to our training roots (and always will be!) because we know that when we demonstrate our vast skills and knowledge we naturally attract potential clients who don’t need to be sold on our prowess, having already witnessed it first hand.
It’s why we’ve never had a BDM for our social portfolio, because showing off our love of what we do has and always will be more powerful than even the best sales spiel!
We only take on work we can service to our best abilities
In all honesty, we could have grown a lot faster even than we have but we chose not to so that we could make sure we’ve stayed true to what makes our services so special in the first place.
At times, we’ve had 50 clients on our waitlists.
Being someone who loves new opportunities, this has always been hard to say no to taking on some amazing projects and businesses but if we can’t do our best work and put our best foot forward, then we’re just not doing things the TDP way.
I really do hate making anyone wait or not being able to work in with some quicker turnarounds, but this comes from experience that we’re well and truly best sticking to our tried and tested ways of working.
By growing sustainably we’ve ensured that not only can we do our highest quality work for every single one of our clients, we’ve been able to bring on board incredibly talented souls internally who continue to strengthen this amazingly talented team we have.
If something is outside our wheelhouse, instead of taking it on to make a quick buck we’d rather help that business to find someone who’s going to completely nail it!
This way, we make sure that everything we do is something that we can be proud of and that’s how we believe our reputation continues to grow.
We’re discerning about who we work with
It’s a very privileged position to be in to be able to be a little bit fussy about who we work with and we’re seriously grateful for that.
We know what our ideal client looks like and we’re willing to be patient in waiting for them.
It’s not that we have anything at all against the businesses that don’t quite fit that profile, but if we don’t think we can achieve the results that they would hope for (and need to see value in our services) we’re not about setting anyone up for disappointment.
This honesty is something that we lean into on a daily basis in trying to guide the businesses that reach out to us for our digital ads management services. We figure that our honesty is the kindest way we can respond and sometimes it means any barriers to success are removed so we end up working together extremely well down the line.
Sometimes it even means acknowledging that employing TDP’s services is going to be a bit too costly for the stage of their business and instead linking them up to one of the amazing freelancers we know who will totally nail it!
We lead with our values first
We might not be everyone’s cup of tea (and that’s totally ok) but when we make sure our values are present every day in the way we conduct ourselves and our services, we seem to attract some amazing like-minded brands in the process.
From accountability when we get it wrong (we are human after all!), to courage to have those completely transparent conversations and commitment to doing our absolute best for every single client, our values are the guiding light for us in every decision we make. This means representing our amazing client list and also laying foundations for what’s next for our burgeoning portfolio.
It’s amazing how great you can feel about work day in and day out when you get to be proud of the way you conduct yourself and that’s been a soul factor for me personally in making ‘selling TDP’ to prospective clients such a breeze! Not one of the calls I’ve had with future clients has ever felt like a sales call at all as I wholeheartedly believe in what we’re doing and feel completely comfortable being honest about what that entails.
So if you’re looking to grow your freelance business or just looking for the secret to TDP’s success so you might be able to apply that to your own biz, we hope this glimpse into what’s helped us along the way is useful to you!
It’s been such a wonderful learning experience to this point and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for our ads portfolio and the business in general!
If you did want to talk to us about any of our ads services, you can also reach out here.