STUCK WITH LOW-BUDGET CLIENTS?

Underpaid. Asked for too much. Feast or famine. You didn't spend twenty years getting this good for this. You want a real business, on your own terms. Not a big agency — a small studio. The kind clients chase. Twelve weeks. About four hours a week.

WHEN A CLIENT TELLS SOMEONE ELSE WHAT YOU DO, WHAT DO THEY SAY?

If they list the things you make, that's your ceiling. Not your work. Not your portfolio. Not your case studies. Not your website. You still look like someone who makes things. At the next level, clients call because of how you think. They want your brain in the room before anything gets decided, not your hands afterwards.

‍You've got twenty years of judgement. You've just never been asked for it.

The Budget Ceiling

Two paths, we're told. Stay freelance and stressed. Or scale into an agency with payroll, meetings, and thinner margins than you had alone. There's a third. The small studio, one to ten people, running a premium process.

What stops most people is a chain:
Known as a maker → you keep your opinions to yourself → nobody knows what you stand for → nobody hands you the strategy → you're never in the room when the money is decided.

Change the first link and the rest follows:
Known as a guide → you say what you think → people know what you're for → they bring you in to decide, not deliver → you're in the room before the budget exists.

That's the whole thing. It's just invisible from the inside.

Sagmeister. Rubin. Pentagram.

Names that don't chase clients. The ones clients chase. They're known for how they think. The problems they spot that nobody else does.Most creatives try to escape making by making more. Better portfolio. Nicer case studies. More polish. The market already knows you as a maker.

‍You can't polish your way out. You have to position your way out.
‍You already think differently. You just haven't learned how to say it yet.

‍It isn't about being louder. It's about being seen — by the right people, for the right work.

BY WEEK TWELVE YOU'LL HAVE

• A position you can say in one line and defend in a room
• An offer that opens doors
• A content rhythm that fits your energy instead of draining it
• One published piece that says this is who I am now
• A real route to the clients you want

TWENTY-SEVEN SESSIONS IN TWELVE WEEKS

Not too many. Not too few.

• 1 peer group
  
• 12 live Thursday calls — your questions, answered
• 3 guest sessions
• 12 weekly challenge modules
• Office hours in the group chat, throughout
• Everything recorded, with searchable transcripts
• My frameworks, tutorials plus an AI agent is coming soon

HOW IT WORKS

October 13 — Kickoff
Two weeks off at Christmas. Done by January 29.

Every Friday
The challenge drops. One asset, one week.

Every Thursdays
‍Live call. Bring your questions. About a client, a price, whatever's stuck.

‍In Between Friday—Thursday
Office hours in the chat.

Bonus: Monthly Guest
Past guests include: Danae Gosset, PJ Richardson, Radim Malinic, Santiago Carrasquilla, Enric Godes, Héctor Ayuso.

By Week 12
You leave with four assets and a position. The group stays open at €100/week if you want it.

THE ROOM

Thirty people. Not three. Not three hundred. Three is a coaching call. Three hundred is a course with a chat box.

Thirty is where someone asks you the question you hadn't thought of,. There are still enough of you to cover ground you'd never find alone.

Every question in that room gets answered.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS

One member was quoting €5k projects. By the end they were closing at €20k. Same work, same studio, different position. The twelve weeks cost them €3,000.

One landed a retainer after years of job-to-job. One stopped calling themselves an agency and finished the year proud of themselves for the first time.

Nine out of ten tell me the same thing, they finally feel allowed to be themselves in a business that rewards putting on a show. That matters more to them than the money. Bianca even said: "I found myself."

WHO THIS IS FOR

• You're good, you know you're good, and you're done being treated like a pair of hands
  
• You want bigger budgets because you want to make better work
• You've outgrown your positioning and your current clients
• You're ready to be seen — and afraid that means selling out

Not for you if you want more clients at the same budgets, or you want someone to build it for you. That's the advisory.

My Job

To tell you the truth about what works, and push you toward the things you're not willing to do yet.

Sometimes that means telling you your position is wrong, or your point of view isn't finished and here's what's missing.

I won't soften it. You don't need it softened.

YOUR HOST: MARKO PFANN

I've been the fast-growth, thirty-five-people-on-payroll studio founder myself.

Today I keep it lean. I work with independent creative firms from Berlin to Barcelona and Amsterdam to Austin, and I teach the rest through this twelve-week programme.

I've done some cool stuff. I travelled the world as a freelance motion designer, then co-founded a motion studio in 2012. We rebranded more than sixty TV stations, the idents, the titles, the whole on-air look of channels people watched every night without wondering who made them. Around twenty awards.

Then I exited, and advised a two-person studio that turned a five-figure execution brief into a seven-figure RedBull.tv project, with the mandate to lead it. Two people, against agencies fifty times their size.

Three hundred firms since. Several went from six to seven figures. One is now eight.

And since 2024, I'm building Paradiso Institute. A non-profit support network for our creative industry.

‍Twenty-five years in the industry, twelve of them advising. I work with studios who are good, know they're good, and are done being underpaid for it.