How Increasing Retention Can Take Your Business to New Heights with Ben McLellan
Key Takeaways
- Take a front-end offer from 10% retention to 30%, change nothing else, and by Ben's math the business grows 46%.
- Results aren't enough. Ben has watched clients leave while getting a 5x ROAS because the relationship was weaker than the numbers.
- Stop working with every client the same way. Ben trains account managers on four client archetypes: controlling, follower, warrior, and doer.
- Revisit expectations on every regular call (here's what we agreed at kickoff, here's where we are, how are you feeling?) and run a strategic review about every 90 days.
- Onboarding is almost always the first thing Ben rebuilds. Both refunds his own company gave in 18 months traced back to a rough onboarding.
- Around 15% churn is standard in Ben's experience, with clients ranging from 5% to 25%. Before blaming Slack or your PM tool, check how you set expectations around it.
Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode with Ben McLellan, founder of Ethical Scaling, which works with agencies and coaching businesses on client experience through what Ben calls the Raving Fan Formula. Ben got there by way of a personal training studio, a small Facebook ads agency, and a client success director role at Traffic and Funnels. The conversation covers the math behind retention, why clients leave when the numbers are good, and what Ben usually has to tear up first.
Going from 10% to 30% retention grows the business 46%
Gray opened with a tweet from former guest Mike Lisovetsky: too many agencies try to scale with ad spend and not enough with retention. Ben agreed and pulled a number from a presentation he’d just given.
If you took your retention from your quote-unquote front-end offer, or whatever that is - could be an agency, it could be a coaching program - if you go from a 10% retention up to a 30% retention, your business grows by 46%. Like, if you change nothing else - pricing, same number of clients… same everything - your business grows by 46%.
The trap, in Ben’s words, is feeling like you have to keep feeding the machine with new clients.
He had a dozen clients for 12 years before he had a method
Gray asked where the principles came from. Ben’s first business was a personal training and yoga studio. It was profitable and paid him a six-figure salary, with a weakness on one side and a strength on the other.
I sucked at marketing in that phase of my life. I still don’t consider myself a great marketer, but I always had trouble getting new people in the door. What I was a master at, though, was retaining people. And I had some personal training clients for like 12 years, no lie. And not just one or two, I had like a dozen.
He didn’t have a method yet, just the results. After selling the studio, he ran an ads agency and then became client success director at Traffic and Funnels, overseeing about 250 active clients at a time and taking over a thousand people through a 10k front-end program. Not everyone got invited to the back-end mastermind. Decide, Ben said, who you want to serve long term versus who you’re fine serving short term.
Clients leave with a 5x ROAS when the relationship is weak
Gray asked what agencies are getting wrong on retention right now. Ben’s answer was clear communication and what he calls relational KPIs.
Results are important, right? We know that if someone’s not getting results, they’re probably not going to be happy. But we’ve all had those instances where we got amazing results for someone and then they left, and we’re left there scratching our head going, like, why would you leave when you’re getting a 5x ROAS? It can be puzzling. But what we forget about is that the relationship can be as important, in some cases more important, than the results we’re getting for clients.
Part of the fix is what Ethical Scaling calls client archetypes: controlling, follower, warrior, and doer. Most agencies work with everyone the same exact way, and a controlling type needs different handling than a follower. Ben delivers this as a short training to account management teams, and the light bulbs go on fast: “oh, that’s why I struggled to connect with Joe.”
Ask “how are you feeling about that?” on every call
Gray asked what feedback loops Ben plugs in. The first one costs nothing.
Most agencies are going to have a one-to-one call with clients on some regular cadence, right? At least monthly. So we actually encourage our clients to get back to that expectation piece on every one of those touch points. So it’s like, hey Gray, when we kicked off a month ago, this is what we talked about in terms of what you wanted, and here’s where we are. How are you feeling about that? Any feedback for us?
There’s some vulnerability in asking, Ben admitted, but the more regular the cadence, the easier it is to get things back on course. The second loop is a strategic review about every 90 days: where you are, what results you’ve gotten, where the client wants to go next. It can also cue up the next engagement.
Onboarding is almost always the first thing to rebuild
Gray asked what Ben finds himself ripping up and redoing early in an engagement.
It’s almost always the onboarding process. The onboarding call flow itself is just typically not that good… It’s too short and in the weeds, or it’s too long and all over the place, or you’re repeating stuff that should have been shared from the sales call that already happened. The client’s repeating themselves from the sales call - that’s one of the worst things, because then it’s like, well, is the sales team even talking to the fulfillment team?
He backed it up with his own company’s numbers.
People might balk at this, but of the two refunds we’ve given over the last year and a half, both of them were because the onboarding wasn’t smooth, in our own business. So to me that’s just a reminder of, like, gotta nail the onboarding. Gotta nail the onboarding.
The other recurring problem is whether the client feels heard. On benchmarks, Ben said 15% churn is roughly standard, with one client at 25% and another at 5%, and industry matters. On tools, he had no hidden gems, just a mindset: agencies blame Slack or their project management software when the real issue is expectations. “Slack doesn’t suck, you suck at setting expectations.”
Ben’s site is ethicalscaling.com. The full conversation is in the video above.