The Problem Nobody Talks About
You've built something good. Your service works. Your clients love you. But getting new clients? That part feels broken.
You're spending money on ads that barely convert. You're networking, but it's slow. You're trying to close friends and referrals, but that dries up fast. And the whole time, you're competing against bigger agencies with bigger budgets.
The real problem isn't that there aren't enough potential clients out there. It's that you don't have a reliable system to reach them - one that actually works and doesn't require you to be a salesman or a marketing expert.
This was exactly where Myles Kreiner found himself about 18 months ago.
Where Myles Started
Myles runs a digital marketing agency. He was good at delivering results for clients. But sales? Growth? That was the weak link.
Like most agency owners, he was caught in the trap - too busy serving clients to spend real time on business development. He'd tried a few things: some Facebook ads, some LinkedIn outreach, a bit of networking. Nothing stuck. Nothing was predictable.
The income was stable but flat. He wasn't growing fast enough to hire more people. He wasn't building anything that scaled. He was just... surviving.
Then he realized something: he needed a system that didn't depend on him showing up every day. A system that could run on autopilot. A system that produced consistent leads, month after month.
The problem was he didn't know how to build it, and he didn't want to hire someone full-time to figure it out.
The Approach That Actually Worked
Instead of trying to fix everything at once, Myles focused on one specific channel: cold email.
Cold email gets a bad reputation. Most people think it's spam. Most people do it wrong. But when it's done right - with good targeting, good copy, good follow-up - it works. It works consistently. It doesn't require you to be famous or well-connected.
Here's what Myles discovered about cold email that changed everything for him:
1. It's Predictable
Unlike ads or referrals, cold email has clear math. Send 100 emails with a 2% response rate, you get 2 conversations. Convert 1 in 5 conversations, you get a client. Do this every week, and you know exactly how many clients you'll sign.
Once you know the formula, you can scale it. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every month.
2. It Reaches Decision-Makers Directly
You're not trying to get past gatekeepers or compete in an ad feed with a thousand other businesses. You're sending a message directly to the person who can actually hire you.
Most agency owners and service business owners check their email. They respond to personalized, relevant messages. Myles found that when he reached the right people with the right message, conversations happened naturally.
3. It Works For Any Service Business
Myles wasn't selling a product. He was selling a service. Cold email is actually better for this because it allows for personalization and relationship-building. You can reference specific things about the prospect's business. You can show you understand their problems. That builds trust before a single call.
What The Results Actually Looked Like
In the first month, Myles wasn't expecting much. He was testing, learning. He sent emails to people in his target market. He got some responses. A few conversations turned into meetings.
By month three, he had a clearer picture. His conversion rate was stabilizing. He was signing 2-3 clients per month from cold email alone. That was 2-3 more than he was getting anywhere else.
By month six, he'd refined the approach. His team was handling follow-ups consistently. He'd figured out which types of prospects converted best. He was signing 5-6 clients per month.
By month 12, he'd stopped thinking of cold email as an experiment. It was his main lead source. He was signing 8-12 clients monthly. Some months higher. The growth was consistent enough that he could actually plan around it.
He hired another team member. He took on better clients because he could afford to be selective. He stopped wondering where his next client would come from.
The Key Things He Got Right
If you're thinking about trying this yourself, here's what actually moved the needle for Myles:
- He targeted the right people. Not just anyone who might buy. Specific business types who had the problem he solved and could afford his solution.
- He wrote like a human, not a marketer. His emails weren't slick or trying to be clever. They were direct, honest, and showed he understood the prospect's specific situation.
- He followed up consistently. Most people give up after one email. Myles built a sequence - follow-up emails over 2-3 weeks. A lot of his clients came from the second or third email.
- He actually closed people on calls. Cold email gets the conversation started. But if you can't close, the whole thing falls apart. He got better at understanding what prospects actually needed and positioning his service accordingly.
- He built it as a system, not a one-off campaign. This wasn't something he did once. It was something that ran continuously, producing leads every single week.
Why Most People Don't Do This
Cold email works. But it requires doing a bunch of unglamorous stuff over a long period of time before you see results.
You have to find good leads. You have to write emails that don't sound like spam. You have to actually respond to people. You have to handle rejections. You have to follow up consistently without being annoying.
Most agency owners would rather do literally anything else. So they don't do it. And they stay stuck.
The ones who do it - the ones who stick with it for 90 days - they're the ones signing multiple clients per month now.
The Shortcut, If You Want It
Here's the reality: you could figure this out yourself. Spend a few months learning, testing, failing, adjusting. Eventually you'd probably get similar results to what Myles got.
Or you could skip the learning curve. There are teams that have already figured this out. They know what works. They do this every single day for different businesses. They handle the lead research, the email copy, the follow-up sequences - all of it. You just close the calls and deliver the service.
If you're serious about getting to 5-20+ predictable client signups per month and you don't want to spend six months learning how to do it yourself, that's worth exploring.
BEC Growth is one of those teams. They work with service businesses and agencies specifically - the exact type of business where cold email actually works best. If you want to see whether they're a fit for what you're building, that's a conversation worth having.
Either way, the lesson from Myles is clear: if you implement a reliable lead generation system, growth stops being something you hope for and starts being something you can predict and control.