How to Make Clients Choose You and Stay: Lessons You Can Steal from Caitlin Copple & Holly Conti | Ep #811

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How are you positioning your services as essential rather than optional, and accurately measuring growth and profitability to sustain long-term success? How are you measuring your agency’s growth and profitability? Today’s featured guests unpack how they scaled their PR shop past the million-dollar mark in under four years — and their journey offers valuable insights that any agency owner can apply immediately. Learn why they prefer growing the agency as partners, as opposed to sticking to being solopreneurs, how they’ve been tracking their growth, and how to over-communicate with clients openly so that choosing you is the easiest decision.

Caitlin Copple and Holly Conti are the co-partners of Full Swing PR, an agency that offers senior-level PR services to help amplify clients’ story or cause and takes pride in creating authentic, lasting relationships with clients. They discuss their unique partnership dynamics, their approach to quarterly planning and KPIs, and their philosophy on "practicing what you preach" in the agency world.

They also emphasize the importance of understanding client needs, demonstrating value, and the shift from focusing merely on publicity to generating tangible client pipelines.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Breaking the visionary and integrator partner mold.

• Making sure to walk the walk in your own business.

• How to make your business a ‘must-have’ 

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Caitlin started Full Swing solo, but always kept Holly in mind as the ideal partner for her business after they met working at an agency. It took some time, though, since Holly was first pregnant when Caitlin started the agency and then busy being a mom to a newborn. However, her involvement progressed, first as a moonlighter, then the agency’s first employee, and eventually becoming the co-pilot Caitlin had always envisioned.

Founder duos often get asked about who identifies as the “visionary” or the “integrator.” In their case, Caitlin and Holly both think big and get in the weeds. They take turns in both roles, which makes it complicated, but it works with a dose of brutally clear communication and mutual respect.

Why work like this? It all comes from their beginnings as working moms in the business. As they explain, they initially treated it like a job share tagging each other in and out in the early days so they could both keep the wheels turning — and the babies fed.

Some agency owners do prefer to fly solo, but for the ones stuck doing it all alone — losing sleep over payroll, client churn, or the next contract that might vaporize overnight — Caitlin and Holly are living proof that a solid partner is worth their weight in gold.

Having someone to say “we got this” when a contract gets pulled from underneath you is priceless. Sure, partnerships are basically work marriages (with all the ups and downs). But good ones make the tough days survivable — and the big wins that much sweeter.

Do you make sure your agency is practicing what you preach? Or are you one of the agencies that just “can’t find the time” to work on their own website or marketing?

Too many agencies hide behind ‘we’re too busy with client work’ while their own site looks like it was built in 1997 by a drunk intern.

In their specific case as a PR agency, Caitlin and Holly practice the tenacity they teach their clients to have. “PR is about tenacity. It’s not enough to do good work. People need to see you doing it.” Just like they tell clients to show up consistently, be visible, and ask for what they want. They make sure to do the same.

Furthermore, putting yourself in your clients’ shoes as small business owners will help you intimately understand the challenges they face and understand the investment they’re making on your agency and how much they’re betting on the results you can bring. For Caitlin, this means taking people “from publicity to pipeline,” because she understands as a small business owner how important it is to have four time the sales you need to meet your annual budget.

In other words, treat your own agency like your most important client — or watch it slowly bleed opportunities.

So much can change in just one year (as we all have seen with the last couple of years). In the six years they’ve been in business, Caitlin and Holly have been through a pandemic, an AI revolution, and the economy doing somersaults. At this point, planning once a year and forgetting about it seems like a rookie move.

They still set annual goals, of course. But quarterly check-ins are essential to running the day-to-day behind their million-dollar PR engine. Their leadership team meets every week to ensure that quarterly plan is still reality-proof.

Although they do have a topline revenue goal and a profit margin goals for the agency, their north star isn’t revenue — it’s discovery calls.

After realizing there was much more to building a profitable business than hitting the $1 million mark, Caitlin and Holly have been focusing more on pipeline and conversion rates. They know that if they keep discovery calls flowing, the revenue follows.

Right now, if they book 10 calls with good fits, five become paying clients. That’s a predictable pipeline.

Pro tip: Track leading indicators religiously — site visits, key page hits, opt-ins, booked calls, and conversion rates at each step. If something’s off (like calls dropping off, or deals stalling), they fix that exact leak before it kills the next quarter.

So, if you’re still flying blind, eyeballing topline revenue in your QuickBooks and calling it planning —you’re normal… but you’re leaving money on the table.

In this economy, how to get clients to see your work more as a must-have than a “nice-to-have”?

In down markets, budgets get slashed — but essentials don’t. So how do you become an essential? You don’t chase anyone who’s just looking for a PR vanity headline. You focus on clients who want a pipeline, not just press.

If you’re having a hard time to get clients to see you as an essential, you may be talking to the wrong people. Think about your ideal clients. What do they believe? What are their challenges?

If you define your ideal client and start targeting them, you’ll attract people who truly see the value you can bring to their business.

Caitlin and Holly share their process openly with prospects. Step by step. No secrets.

Some agencies worry they’re giving away the farm. Newsflash: they’re not. Clients want to trust you know what you’re doing — but they don’t want to do it themselves. Everyone loves steak but no one wants to butcher a cow.

Their transparency means no confusion, no scope drama, and no “you didn’t say that” fights later. It’s all upfront.

And they even turned this transparency into a smart private podcast: “How to Hire a PR Agency” — a brilliant piece of sales enablement they send to prospects to handle all the FAQs before a call. That way, discovery calls stay focused where they should be: the client’s business.

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