How I Moved From Doing Nearly All Client Work to Training a Delivery Hire

I run an e-commerce email marketing agency. When I joined Client Ascension, one large client accounted for much of the roughly 5K a month I was making. When that company brought the service in-house, I was left around 1K a month.

Getting more clients solved one problem and created another. Several joined around the same time, and I became the person doing strategy, copywriting and much of the rest of the delivery. The next useful change was hiring and training someone who could take on that work.

Email marketing was already the direction before I joined

I had started with Facebook ads and moved into email marketing before joining the program. E-commerce was the niche I was working in.

By the interview, I described the business sitting somewhere around 10K–15K a month. That was separate from the earlier point when losing the big account left me around 1K. I did not give a net-profit breakdown for those figures.

Client Ascension related reading: Abdul’s retention-agency account describes email and SMS services alongside outreach and operations.

Signing clients changed what filled my day

Before the new clients arrived, I spent much of my time trying to work out sales and get people signed. After they joined, my days filled with their tasks.

I had some help with design, but I was still doing the strategy and copywriting. I could start the day with client messages and end it still working late at night. I preferred that to having no clients, but it was not the setup I wanted to keep.

A connection helped me find candidates

I asked Andre about the problem on calls. I recalled David as the person who connected me with Kyle, who sourced talent. I chose one of the candidates.

Hiring was not the end of the process. I was training her after bringing her in, and I described her as a good fit. The handoff involved developing someone to do the work, not just adding a name to a team list.

Client Ascension related reading: Kyle’s Ukrainian hiring account describes Hire UA and finding Ukrainian talent.

The result I described was less client work with me

I estimated that about 80% of the client work had been delegated. I also said the quality was roughly comparable to what I had been delivering myself.

Those were my estimates about client work and service quality at that stage. I was getting out of much of the delivery, not claiming the business required no work or that every responsibility had disappeared.

Meeting other owners gave the progress a different context

I valued the online community and meeting other owners on the West Coast. Seeing people doing work beyond my current level was motivating and made me want to step up my own work.

That was a different kind of help from the hiring introduction, but both mattered in the story I described: practical connections for a current problem and people around me who encouraged further progress.

Adapted by Client Ascension with AI assistance from Max's interview. The first-person narrative follows the source speaker’s account. Watch the original video