I'm a coach, designer, and educator who loves to talk about content creation, business & entrepreneurship, and marketing & branding. Subscribe to my newsletter.
How I stopped chasing clients
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In 2018, we sold our agency for a bargain. It was a fair deal, but man it could’ve been much better. You see, we founded our agency while still in college. I was 23. My co-founder was only 18. And we knew absolutely nothing about:
It resulted in low goodwill when we received the offer. After that, I took a long break and worked on a few interim and freelance projects. But soon I found myself in the same position again: Chasing clients → delivery → zero prospecting → repeat I wanted to break the cycle once and for all. I decided to use LinkedIn to get more (and better) clients. Soon, I realized visibility alone wasn’t enough:
I busted my ass off. I won’t downplay it: it was super challenging. But after 9 months, I surpassed my agency’s ARR. (As a solo business) In hindsight, it’s hard to believe that as a design agency, we were completely invisible. Nobody knew us. We had a website with 0 visitors. Even though we had great work to share with the world. Even though we were working 80-hour weeks and paying ourselves last. We all learn, right? Things have turned around. Today I'm 37. I work 3-4 short days per week. I live in Spain with my family. I play padel and do crossfit 4x per week. I finally have time for the good stuff in life. Time to build. Because I'm not chasing new business anymore. I'm attracting it. The reality is that still only 1-2% of LinkedIn users post weekly (and the 98% still chase leads the old way). And of that 1-2% most are cranking out AI slop. The bar is low. Very low. In 2 days, I'm kicking off my 2nd Content Design Cohort. It includes everything I teach and share with my 1:1 clients: It's built to help you move away from the feast and famine cycle. To drive sustainable revenue through power writing, visualizing and simplifying your offer, and warm DMing. My 1:1 coaching clients pay €3,000 p/m x 6 months. But my cohort's a small fraction of that. 4 weeks. Weekly calls. Async support. A private group. Accountability. Implementation. In cohort #1 members got inbound leads, booked calls in the DMs, and even went viral. Important: Enrollment closes in 48 hours. If you want the full details, reply: "CONTENT DESIGN" Tomorrow I’ll share the full details with 2,667 people. See you inside. Cheers, Nick |
Nick Broekema
I'm a coach, designer, and educator who loves to talk about content creation, business & entrepreneurship, and marketing & branding. Subscribe to my newsletter.
If you're like me, you're impulsive by nature. But when doubt creeps in? Then you lose your decisiveness. You see an opportunity – like a sales email or some kind of offer that looks like a no-brainer. And then you just freeze. You let the opportunity die. You wonder where that impulsiveness has gone. For me that was a $6k mastermind hosted by Greg Eisenberg in Florida. 50 like-minded people. One big Airbnb. 3 days. Been following the guy for years. But I just froze. I didn't act. Maybe it...
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Last week I had a 59-minute call with a friend who coaches the biggest founder brands on LinkedIn. (Think heavyweights like Adam Robinson, Sam Jacobs, Gal Ala) Every once in a while we jump on a call and geek out about LinkedIn. We talked about 3 things: what’s happening to the feed what will work in 2026 why AI is quietly making people worse at writing Here are my predictions and takeaways from that conversation. 1. The "human-written" renaissance AI has a huge negative impact on LinkedIn....