We almost set a fortune on fire

Twenty perfect clients, and we would have had to say no to half of them.

That is the exact moment I realized the business we had spent years building was quietly broken, and that running ads would have made it worse, not better.

Let me back up and tell you the whole thing, because I have a feeling you might recognize yourself in it.

For about two months, we had been seriously thinking about running ads at CocoSpark. The plan seemed obvious. Put our agency front and center, reach more high-end clients across the world, more visibility, more demand, more growth. On paper, a no-brainer!

And then, the deeper we got into it, the more one uncomfortable thought started to nag at me. If twenty perfect clients suddenly fell out of the sky tomorrow, we would not have the human capacity to take care of all of them. We would be paying good money to attract beautifully qualified people, perfectly targeted and genuinely right for us, only to turn around and tell half of them no. Spending a fortune to disappoint the exact people you worked so hard to reach is not a strategy, it is a very elegant way to set money on fire!

That was the wake-up call.

Some models reward you for growing. Ours was fighting back.

Here is what makes our agency what it is. When we take on a founder, we handle everything for them, the website, the social media management, a SaaS platform built specifically for their company, the sourcing, the press relations, all of it. They stay in strategic contact with me and the team for the decisions that genuinely move their house forward, and we run the entire engine room so they never have to touch it.

For the client, it is close to heaven. For us, it comes with a hard ceiling.

Everyone who touches one of our clients has to understand the codes of luxury, and that is a very specific kind of knowledge most talented professionals simply do not carry. So we either find the rare profiles who already have it, which means fighting over a tiny pool of people, or we take promising talent and train them ourselves until they meet our standard. On top of that, I am the one holding the big decisions with each client, and my time runs out long before my ambition does!

Put those two things side by side, the scarcity of the right people and the limit on my own calendar, and the problem reveals itself. We had built something that delivers something close to magic, and refuses to scale just because we want it to.

The reframe that changed everything

So we stopped asking how do we get more clients, and started asking a far more useful question. How do we build something that can actually absorb that demand, something that depends far less on our internal human resources?

That question sent us straight back to a part of our business we had been neglecting. For a while we had an online training, but let's be honest, it was a bit messy. No real support around it, a little all over the place.

So we decided to go full focus and turn it into something serious. A way for the founders who do not necessarily have the budget for the agency to still upgrade their business into the luxury space, without needing deep pockets to get started. And the beauty of this one-to-many format, I will be completely transparent with you, is that it lets us sell almost infinitely without hitting that human wall all over again!

There are still one-to-one moments, there are group calls, and you can reach us when you need to think a decision through. What changes is that we are not doing the full "we do it for you" the way the agency does. You stay in the driver's seat, with the right people in your ear.

Why I'm telling you all of this

That reframe is exactly what we are launching on the first of November, and it is called The Upgrade.

So if you recognize yourself in any of this, the founder doing under a million a year who wants to move upmarket, attract genuinely wealthy clients, stop negotiating your prices and finally be valued for what you actually do, take this as your sign.

Until the first of November, you can get in at an early bird price that is honestly a ridiculous slice of the full one. After that, the door closes on that offer and it will not come back.

→ Have a look here: www.cocospark.com/the-upgrade

And if you have been wrestling with that same question, the "how on earth do I scale this" one, I would genuinely love to hear your story. That tension between staying small and building the next version of your company is exactly the kind of thing we work through together inside The Upgrade.

See you next week,

Maddy