Should you offer custom deliverables for every client?

Should agencies should offer custom deliverables (tailored scopes, bespoke work, unique packages for every client)?

It sounds premium. It sounds client-centric.

It's also probably destroying your margins.

Let’s say a client asks for something slightly outside your standard scope. You say yes because you want to keep them happy. Another client needs something a little different. Sure, no problem. A third client has a unique situation that requires a modified approach. Of course, we're flexible.

Fast forward twelve months and you have 30 clients who all get delivered to differently. Thirty different scopes, thirty different sets of expectations, thirty different definitions of what "done" looks like. Your team can't build repeatable processes because nothing repeats. Every client is its own little universe with its own rules. Now you're running 30 micro-agencies inside one company and wondering why your margins are stuck under 20%.

The fix isn't complicated but it does require you to look at a number that most agency owners have never calculated, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

It's called your effective hourly rate, and this is how you find it:

List every client from the past three to six months. Write down the total revenue collected per client. Then write down the total hours your team spent servicing each client - across all team members, not just the account lead. Every hour of strategy, execution, revisions, internal meetings about that client, everything. Divide the dollars by the hours. Then rank them from highest to lowest.

What you're going to see will probably make you a little sick.

Your best client might be at $200 an hour. Your worst might be at $40. One client is generating five times the return per hour of effort. That gap is custom work eating your margin alive. The $40 an hour client isn't necessarily paying you less. They might be on a perfectly respectable retainer. They're just consuming so much delivery time - because their scope is unique, because the work doesn't fit your standard process, because every deliverable has to be built from scratch - that the actual value of every hour your team spends on them is a fraction of what it should be.

Once you have the list ranked, start from the bottom and work your way up. For each of those low-effective-rate clients, you give them two options. Either a price increase to match the scope they're getting, or a scope reduction to match what they're paying. They don't have to spend more. You can also just deliver less.

If they take the price increase, you win. Same work, more revenue. If they take the scope reduction, you win. Same revenue, less work. And if they take neither and leave - you also win, because you just freed up capacity that was being consumed at $40 an hour and can now be allocated to a client generating $150 or $200 an hour. There is no losing outcome in this conversation.

I ran this exact exercise with an agency partner recently.

We went through their bottom 20 accounts one by one. Only 4 left. The rest accepted either a price increase or a scope reduction. The additional revenue collected - for the exact same work being done by the exact same team - was $35K to $40K. Not annually. That's $35K-$40K in found money that was sitting right there the entire time, invisible, because nobody had ever calculated the number that would've made it obvious.

The thing I love about this exercise is that it doesn't require you to find new clients or cut anyone's salary or restructure the business.

It's just seeing clearly what's already happening and making rational decisions based on data instead of gut feel and the vague sense that things "seem fine."

Most agencies have at least a few clients right now that are bleeding them.

In the workshop, this is one of the frameworks I walk through - along with how I increase team capacity when everyone says they're maxed out, how I build dashboards that show you where profit is actually leaking, and how I operate your agency on data instead of instinct.

It’s on March 12, 2026 at 2:30pm EST (11:30am PST / 12:30pm MST / 1:30pm CST)

$99. Full recording. Live Q&A at the end.

Register here →

Nick