I was on The Unforget Yourself Show with Mark and Katie, and the episode is now live. It is called “Rebuilding Success, Identity, and Business in a New Country,” and it runs about thirty minutes.
It is not an ecommerce podcast. That is exactly why I said yes. The show is built around the messy, human side of running a business rather than the tidy version people put in their pitch decks, and the questions I got were not the ones I usually get.
One of them stuck with me afterwards, because I answered it faster than I could edit myself.
“Who Do You Love to Work With?”
My honest answer was that it does not matter how big the business is, and it does not matter how much they are willing to pay.
If I believe in the founder, and I find the idea behind the business genuinely interesting, I will find a way to work together.
That sounds like something a person says to seem principled. I understand why it lands that way. So it is worth explaining what it actually costs, because a filter that costs nothing is not a filter.
What This Filter Actually Costs
Almost every agency of our size publishes a minimum monthly spend somewhere. It is a sensible business decision. It makes revenue predictable, it protects the team from work that will never be profitable, and it saves everyone the time of a conversation that was never going to end well.
We do not have one. That means I have said yes to projects that made very little commercial sense on paper, and I have said no to businesses that could comfortably afford us. The second one is harder than the first.
The reason I keep doing it is that a minimum spend filters for budget, and budget is not the thing that predicts whether the work goes well. What predicts it is whether the founder actually cares about the thing they are building, and whether they will tell you the truth when something is not working.
You cannot put that on a pricing page. You can usually tell within one conversation.
Why This Only Works Without a Contract
The two decisions are connected, and I do not think one survives without the other.
We have never locked an ecommerce client into a multi-year agreement, and we do not charge a retainer. Clients can leave at the end of any month. I have written before about how MageCloud earns trust without contracts, retainers, or sales pitches, and about what three years with a client and no contract holding them there actually looks like.
If I chose clients on budget alone, the absence of a contract would be a serious problem. I would be filling the team with work nobody believes in and hoping the invoices keep clearing. Choosing on whether I believe in the business is what makes the month-to-month model survivable, because both sides are there because they want to be.
It also means the pressure never lets up. There is no contractual floor catching us in a bad month. That is uncomfortable, and it is the point.
The Part That Is Not About Business
We have around 40 people on the team. Most have been with us for years, some through circumstances I would not wish on anyone.
You do not hold a team like that together on margin. You hold it together with work people are not embarrassed by. When I turn down a business I do not believe in, that decision reaches further than my own calendar — it decides what my team spends their week on.
That was the part of the conversation with Mark and Katie I did not plan to get into, and it is the part I would keep if I had to cut the rest.
Listen to the Episode
The full conversation is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Related Reading
If the themes in this conversation are useful to you, these go deeper:
Building From Scratch: The Immigrant Founder’s Guide to Resilience — the longer version of what rebuilding in a new country actually took.
Why Clients Choose to Work With Us — It Comes Down to One Word — what five clients said when I asked them directly.
No Contract, No Hard Sell — The Visit to Wales — what the first conversation actually looks like in practice.
How Gravel Shed Became a Client Without a Pitch — the same approach, and how it played out.
Paul Ryazanov in the Media — the full record of podcast appearances, interviews, and press features.