When I started my agency, there was a sentence that paid for a lot of months.
“Your site isn’t mobile friendly.”
That was £700, right there, and it was true for basically every site we’d ever touched. Not a hard sell. Not an invented problem. A real thing that mattered, that the client couldn’t see, that we could fix.
Two years later it was a different sentence: “your site isn’t GDPR compliant.” £700.
Then Google changed the performance rules. £700.
Then accessibility, and now you’re breaking the law if you ignore it. £700.
Same shape every time. The industry hands you one thing that’s true of every client on your book, and for about eighteen months there’s a queue of work sitting there that nobody has to be convinced of.
Right now it’s agents
None of your clients’ sites are ready for them.
Not the content structure, not the way the information is organised, not what a machine reading the page can actually understand and act on. It’s the same situation as 2013 and a phone screen: real, technical, invisible to the client, and about to be obvious to everyone.
Which of your clients need that work? All of them.
How many have you told? 😅
That’s not a dig. It’s the actual pattern, and I did it too. By the time everyone’s talking about it, somebody else has already made the call.
The bit that costs more than the big ones
The industry-wide job is the easy example, because it’s loud enough that you eventually notice it.
The expensive one is the small stuff. The things you’d spot in ten minutes if you had ten minutes.
A booking form for the yoga studio client, because they’re still doing it over DMs. Better SEO for the restaurant, because they’ve dropped off page one and haven’t mentioned it. A site that’s got slower over three years, in the way sites do, a plugin at a time.
Every single one of those is work the client wants. You already know it’s needed — you’d say so instantly if someone put the site in front of you. And it’s much easier to sell to a client who already trusts you than to go and find a new one.
So why doesn’t it happen?
Because nobody looks. Not out of laziness — because looking is unpaid, unscheduled work, and the reactive queue is neither. There’s always something in front of it with a name and a deadline attached.
The opportunities have always been there. You’ve just been blocked from capturing them, and from charging for them.
What “getting ahead” actually requires
Here’s the honest version of what this takes, if you do it by hand.
For each client: open the site. Check performance properly, not a vibe. Look at what’s ranking and what isn’t. Look at what they’re doing manually that could be a form. Check what’s out of date. Compare all of that against what this particular client is actually trying to achieve, because a booking form matters enormously to the yoga studio and not at all to the accountant.
Then write it up. Scope it. Price it at your rate. Make it something the client can say yes to without a meeting.
Call it forty minutes a client, if you’re quick and you know the site well.
Ten clients is most of a day. Every week, so it’s actually current rather than a snapshot from March. Nobody does this. I never did it, and I knew exactly how much it was worth.
That’s the whole reason the reactive model wins. Not because anyone chose it.
The version that fits in a Tuesday
This is the part that changed for me, and it’s why Claro exists as a project manager rather than a chat box.
You can point him at a client project and ask him to go and look — against that client’s success criteria, not a generic checklist — and come back with what he found, scoped and priced at your rate.
If you want to try it on a real client, drag the project into the chat and paste this:
Hey Claro, apply the Upsell Opportunity workflow to the client I just dragged into this chat. Create a plan, scope it up and quote it based on my hourly rate.
Then do the thing I’d ask of anyone: check it properly. Some of what comes back you’ll bin, because you know something about that client that isn’t written down anywhere. That’s fine, and it’s the job. You’re reviewing a scoped proposal rather than generating one from a blank page, and those are completely different Tuesdays.
Now do the maths on running that across your whole book every week, and how long that would take you by hand.
Why this matters more than the money
The upsell framing undersells what’s actually happening here.
When you turn up with something the client hadn’t thought of, the relationship changes. You stop being the person who does the tasks they send you and become the person looking after their site. Those are different businesses with different prices, and only one of them survives a budget review.
The client can’t tell the difference between a good agency and a cheap one from the work itself — they mostly can’t read the work. They can absolutely tell the difference between someone who noticed and someone who waited.
That’s what the £700 jobs were always really about. Not the mobile fix. The fact that you were the one who mentioned it.
Pick your worst-performing client site — the one you’ve been quietly avoiding — and go and look at it properly this week.
I’d bet there’s a job on it you’d have found in ten minutes. What is it? 🤘
