Last week I got on a sales call with a founder who runs a meta-ads coaching business for ecom founders.
Good fit for what we do. All of our clients are in ecom growth space.
Then mid-call he made me an offer:
Lower retainer, plus a percentage of every sale generated through his YouTube leads.
His reasoning? It would make me "more committed" to his channel.
I told him no.
Not because the math didn't work. Honestly, for a channel like his, that deal could have paid me more than my retainer.
I said no because of what the offer implied.
A rev share deal only makes sense if there's extra effort I'm holding back. Some higher gear I only shift into when I have skin in the game.
There isn't.
There is exactly one objective for every single video we create, for every single client, with zero exceptions:
Make the best damn video possible.
The best idea we can find. The best title. The best thumbnail. The best script. The best edit. Every time.
That's the ceiling of my effort, and every client gets the ceiling. Whether they're paying a retainer, offering me equity, or promising me a percentage of their business.
So the honest answer to "this will make you more committed" was:
Committed to what? There's nothing left to unlock.
And here's the part that made the call worth writing about. He didn't get defensive. He just paused, and I could tell it landed. He realized the refusal WAS the pitch. The thing he was trying to buy with a rev share deal, we already give away by default.
I think about this a lot with agencies in general.
"Aligned incentives" sounds great on paper. But if a vendor needs a bonus structure to do their best work, the bonus isn't fixing the problem. The problem is their standard.
You can't incentivize someone into caring.
You can only hire people who already do.
Till then,
Alex