Khalid shares how his firm built a referral engine by prioritizing authentic client engagement and delivering consistent value. He explains how strong relationships translate into steady growth, why referrals are the highest-quality lead source, and what practices sustain long-term trust with clients. This episode offers a clear roadmap for boutique firms that want to scale by deepening client connections rather than relying on heavy outbound sales.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to this show, this show is dedicated to people in the expertise business. So if you market, sell, and deliver expertise for a living, and you would like to grow your firm, scale your firm, someday exit your firm, this show is for you. And on today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about deepening client relationships as a deliberate and intentional growth strategy. If I was standing on a whiteboard right now, I would underline the word deliberate and intentional, because I think all of us intuitively know and like to invest in relationships, but as an intentional growth strategy, I think there’s an area for improvement for us. So joining me on the call today is somebody who has expertise in this area, that has done this well at his firm. His name is Khaled, and he gave me permission not to butcher his last name’s pronunciation. But, Khaled, as I understand it, I guess you’re relatively new to Collective 54. Not a lot of people have met you yet, so maybe we should start with an introduction of yourself and your firm.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: Sure, I’ve been with Collective 54 since October of last year, which was a great time because I got to come to the full day, few-day event. That was wonderful. I started this business about 16 years ago. I’ve always been somehow involved in the creative and marketing space. I’m the CEO and founder, I have a couple co-founders and a few partners. And we primarily focus on marketing with B2B enterprise organizations. And we’re doing an alright job, and we don’t really put much time and energy in marketing ourselves or doing sales, which is a testament to our strategy of deepening client relationships.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, you mentioned, before we hit the record button here, that you purposely kind of stay under the radar screen, you don’t do things like put your clients’ logos on your website and all that, which I found is interesting, and we’re gonna get to that in a moment. It’s even more interesting because you’re a marketing agency. Usually, marketing agencies like to do all that kind of stuff, but you chose not to do that, so you’re a contrarian to start with. The thing I wanted to kick this off with is the idea that my team put in my head about your firm. And that is that culture converts. And that you start with making sure that you have a set of happy employees, and when those employees are happy and motivated and engaged, that leads to better client relationships, which in turn leads to growth. So, I’m going to start with that line of questioning, and let me start off with the first one, which is, what exactly makes your employees happy?
Khalid Mokhtarzada: It’s a great question. I think for each person, for each individual, it’s going to be different, but I think the philosophy here has worked well for us, which is prioritizing the goals and dreams of the individual ahead of the business goals and targets, which may seem a little bit backwards, but it’s actually not, because what ends up happening is, no matter how good a company culture is in an organization, if people aren’t tending to their personal needs and their personal goals, eventually the company that they’re working for, no matter how good the company is, becomes the obstacle to them living a good life. And slowly, resentment creeps in before they know it, before leaders know it, and all of a sudden they wake up and say, I can’t do this anymore, I’m not getting what I want, and so on and so forth. So, our philosophy is the individual team members’ needs come first. First and foremost, because if they’re taken care of, then coming to work at our organization becomes a vehicle to the things that they want. Not the obstacle, but the vehicle. Second is the company’s needs. Company needs come second. Not the client’s needs, which again, seems kind of counterproductive, but if we can take care of the individual, and we can take care of the organization, and make sure that the organization is healthy, then in a really interesting and weird way, the client work and the client satisfaction handles itself, because people come in, they’re happy, they’re energized, they’re well slept, they feel good, and it doesn’t become something that leaders have to instill, it becomes something that everybody on an individual level is pursuing. There’s a quote that an old mentor of mine used to say that, the human being comes before the human doing. And when people aren’t happy at home, or they’re dissatisfied, or they’re not achieving the goals or targets, and they said that they want to start yoga, and they haven’t done it for 6 months because they’re busy at work, all of a sudden, that human being brings that drama into the human doing, and before you know it, people are unhappy, and it’s not a matter of intention, it’s just a matter of the formula’s not there for them to succeed.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, the culture sometimes for Collective 54 members is aspirational. It’s not necessarily real. If you think about your firm, like, what do you see, what do you observe, maybe weekly or even daily, that lets you know that it’s real?
Khalid Mokhtarzada: And what do you mean by aspirational versus real?
Greg Alexander: Yeah, so they say, you know, these are our values, you know, this is how we want to behave. And not everybody lives the values, or, you know, they’re written on a wall somewhere, and it’s not kind of part of the operational fabric of the firm. That’s what I mean by that.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: There’s a really good article that Jim Collins wrote many years ago. I think you can find it on HBR. There’s a quote that is very loud and bold in that article. I think the article’s titled, Aligning Action and Values, or Culture and Values, something in that line. But he says that people are either predisposed to your values, or they’re not. And you can’t change that in people. Values are something that’s kind of hardwired in people. And so if somebody isn’t, you’re better off finding somebody that is than putting in the effort and trying to change somebody’s values. And so we start with trying to figure that out early on, before the hire. Do we get it right all the time? No. Sometimes people believe that they value certain things, but when, you know, rubber meets the road, they themselves can’t live up to their idealistic ideas of themselves. And that’s just part of life. But the hiring part is key. And then, outside of that, leaders do have a responsibility to vibrate at a certain level. And I say leaders loosely because we just recently changed the name of the people running the organization from the leadership team to the executive team. And we’re very careful about that, because we don’t believe that leadership is a position of authority, it’s a behavior. And so the next junior hire can come in and lead by example. And so we want to allow for people to naturally become leaders in their own right, whether they’re leaders in the craft or leaders of people.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: And so everybody has a bit of a responsibility in that. Outside of that, we do have systems in place. I don’t… I can get into that another time, because I can go on for a long… it’s a long conversation of itself, but we do have checks and balances, and we do pay attention to the day-to-day, to the week-to-week happenings of both what’s going on in these systems and the feedback that we’re getting, as well as putting an incredible amount of time in the people equation. And so, there’s only so many hours in the day an organization can only invest so many hours. What we’ve done is, instead of putting in time into marketing ourselves, or pitching, or responding to RFPs in sales, we just divert that time into people. And then the people become evangelists and ambassadors and do the things that they need to do, and that in itself kind of feeds into our sales in a really interesting way.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, so I want to go there next. You know, we’re talking about investing in the creation of deeper relationships with clients as an intentional growth strategy. And I kicked it off with an understanding of your culture and how that culture converts against that objective. Let’s talk about that. So… It’s been explained to me that you’ve built somewhat of a referral engine. That kind of feeds off of this unique culture that you have. Would you share a little bit about that with us, please?
Khalid Mokhtarzada: Yeah, there’s a lot of natural tendencies that the team have that make that possible, but then there’s also a lot of tactical and strategic things that are very, very intentional. What I mean by the natural things are, like, I discovered a few years back that I’m not the best person to be the face of the company. In a sales position, working with clients, I can do the job, I can train people to do the job, but man, there are people on my team that, when they meet with a client, the client’s just so happy to meet with them. They’re so energetic, a lot more than they would be if they meet with me. And I knew that I was doing something right when I’d get on calls, and the joke would be the client would laugh and be like, why are you on this call? I’m fine talking to Sarah, or I’m fine talking to Jed, and I’m like, okay, good, I’m doing the right thing. They don’t want to see me. So that’s one. Putting the right people in place in front of the client, that’s the first part, and then the training behind that. Like, we are really, really careful about the little details. Like, we pay attention to the tiniest of details. So, I’ll give you an example. Conversations, let’s just say the team’s going out for dinner with the client. The client could be talking about politics, the client could be talking about something negative. Our team are trained to take them off of those topics and take them to a better place. As good hosts. We’re not… We’re not gonna be their counselor or therapist, but we are going to be their friend and move them to a happier place. Now, the client may never know that this is happening, but when you see the plays, it’s kind of like a very coordinated football play, or a really well-oiled basketball team. They know what they’re doing. They know how to move individuals off topics that are not fruitful for anybody and move them on to topics that are going to be a lot more exciting, a lot more inspirational, a lot more happy. And so what ends up happening is, and we’ve heard this from clients not once, not twice, but we hear it from clients on a regular basis: my meeting with you guys is the best part of my week. And it’s because they come out of the meeting energized. And that’s partly because of the energy and the emotion that we make sure that we instill in that meeting. We want them to know that we’re happy, and we’re grateful to be able to serve them, and to be able to solve their problems, and to be there for them. And that’s a major component, but of course, you know, as I say, like, we… we have to deliver as well. So the delivery part is taken care of. I’m often surprised when I’m a client, and I meet with a vendor, how often vendors don’t know this. They don’t know these things, and they’ll trail off into conversations that it’s like, this is not going in a good place. I’ve been in dinners with other vendors and my client, and these conversations happen. Even in emails. We review emails that go out to clients every time we have a client interaction, we send out a contact report. We thoroughly review that contact report and say, you know, you could have said… I’ll give you an example. This solution costs $10,000. Well, we don’t use the word cost. We only use the word cost when we’re talking about our competitors or vendors we don’t want to work with. We use the word investment. This is an investment. Super small, super subtle, but we’re trying to optimize for all of these small, tiny interactions. Words matter, how you dress matters, we’re in the creative field. So many people in this field, especially with a team as young as ours, dress casually. Not here. We expect people to dress business casual, and even some of our young teammates who are in their early to mid-20s, they put on blazers, they put on nice outfits for the client. It’s not about comfort, but it’s about respect and how you want to be perceived. And I would say the young people have even more of a responsibility to themselves and the client to be able to do that. So we do pay attention to these little tiny things. That is above and beyond the work. If I had to summarize this into one umbrella, it would be: one of the secret sauces for us is that we’re good hosts. We love hosting people. And so we take that approach to calls, to the project itself, and when we’re meeting with clients outside of the work.
Greg Alexander: It’s a great conversation, and it reminds me of something that I learned when I was a young entrepreneur launching my firm. I had a mentor of mine say, 10 years from now, Greg, people are not gonna remember what you said or what you do. They’re gonna remember how you made them feel. And what you’re talking about, you know, just the word host.
Greg Alexander: You know, you mentioned words matter. I mean, that word by itself has a… implication of using that word. I mean, what does it mean to be a host, right? It’s a very interesting thing. Switching the word from cost to investment. And I think sometimes, particularly those in professional services, our community, they’re domain experts, so they geek out so much about their, kind of, intellectual side of things. They forget that they’re in the services business. And that relationships matter, how you make people feel, the experience they have, not just what they get, matters. Which leads me to my next question, right? Is… How does this translate to referral generation? Is it… Is it specific in that area, or are you just betting on the fact that when you do excellent work and you deliver great relationships, it’s just gonna happen organically?
Khalid Mokhtarzada: I would love to sit here and tell you that I was confident in my understanding of our strategy, but the reality was that we stumbled upon it, partly because I was deathly afraid of sales and not good at it for a very, very long time. And so my head immediately went into, how do we market ourselves in a way that people aren’t going to want to buy? How do we market ourselves in a way that differentiates us from how everyone else is doing things in our industry? And that translated into some really interesting and unique things that we’ve done over the years, and that we currently do, that keeps us, you know, under the radar, and when clients do interact with us, they… they notice that difference. So, I’ll give you an example. We don’t put our clients’ work on our website, nor do we put our logos. This safeguards them from any liabilities working with us, and their work is their work. It’s not ours. To them, especially with the clients that we work with, and I’ll share with you some of them, like, we work with Chase, JP Morgan, Deloitte, Workday we got as a client in the last, 9 months. We’ve been working with Salesforce for about 9 years, I think? Maybe 10? And we’ve picked up a few other enterprise-level clients this year. It’s always shocking to them to find out that we’re working with these caliber, this level of clients, but we respect them in a way that we’re like, no, we don’t need to show it off. I’m not saying that that’s the right strategy for everybody. But it does differentiate us in a really interesting way. … So, going back to the original question of how does this turn into a referral engine? Well. Because I wasn’t good at sales, and because we needed to figure out a way to market ourselves, and we ended up doing what we do, what we know, hosting was one of those things. I come from a culture that… Being a host is a very important thing, and your guest is the most important person, right? My wife, who’s also my business partner, one of my business partners, also comes from a very similar background, and so does my other partner. And so we would do things like host dinners, because we didn’t know how to have conversations about business. We’ve thrown art shows, we’ve thrown concerts, we’ve done a lot of really weird and interesting things to bring people out, and to give them a taste of the culture here at Pixel Dreams. So that they feel more… Like, a part of the family, a part of our community, versus they’re a client and we’re a vendor, and we’re just here to hit targets and do the work. I truly feel that when people feel that they’re a part of your community, they’re gonna go out of their way to support you, to be your ambassador. And so, the bet that I made was. If we can just focus on our client. And here’s another thing, if… If I had to choose between over-delivering for a client, or… pushing forward with a marketing plan to get another client, I would go for the… I’d go for the former, not the latter. Because what it signals to the client is that we care more about them than getting the next logo. And I think a lot of… a lot of agencies, a lot of professional services firms trap themselves in this kind of cycle of. They build this robust marketing and sales machine. Because they’re… there’s a nutrition, they’re losing the clients that they have, and that’s so costly. And if you could slowly move the needle to the other direction and just make sure. You’re not gonna get the same speedy growth, but you’re going to get long-lasting growth, and that’s the… that’s one of the things that we accidentally learned over time, that if we focus on an organization and their team and their goals. These people are… if you’re doing your job. If we’re doing our job, this person’s gonna look good, they’re gonna get a promotion, and they’re gonna take us with them. Worst case scenario, they’re gonna leave, and we’re gonna still get to work with them, with that organization, but now get introduced to another organization. We’ve had… teammates at various enterprise-level companies, Make it part of their deal when they were getting promoted, that they get to use us as their agency partner. Because they know that we’re gonna always deliver, and they’re willing to do that. So, over time, that’s exactly what happened. … People grew, people moved on. And we had a lot of natural growth. That was the bet we made, and that bet is paying off quite substantially now.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Another great point, and I want to add my own two cents to this. A pet peeve of mine. Is that professional services firms adopt the sales and marketing playbooks of a product company, like a SaaS company or something like that. And, you know, they go to market with all this aggressive outbound outreach, and they get a client, and… And they’re not necessarily thinking about performing for that client and retaining that client, they’re thinking about the next client. The net effect of that is the client feels that the relationship is transactional. And when you’re in a services business, you’re in a one-to-one business. It’s the relationship not necessarily with the company, but with the people inside that company. And if you think about that relationship over the course of a lifetime. You know, things like… client lifetime value get replaced with people lifetime value. And as they move around and their careers advance, as you mentioned. You know, they bring you with them, and that is the greatest compliment that you could get. Especially if any… negotiating the use of you pre-hire. I mean, that’s quite an endorsement.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: Yeah, we’re very fortunate that we have very close relationships with our… with our clients. It’s funny that people forget that your clients see you. And they’re gonna be more forgiving or less forgiving based on what they see. So, for example, if we fumble on a project. … It’s one thing, but if that client is also seeing how much time and energy and effort we’re putting on social media and on LinkedIn to get the next client. They’re gonna… they’re gonna look at that fumble differently. They’re gonna say, wow, they… they put in a lot of energy in… in promoting themselves, and yet they didn’t deliver on the promise of my work. And yet they got the gall to go out and try to get the next client? It’s kind of like dirt in their face. So I just… I just don’t want to play that game. I saw your post about Lincoln, and I laughed, because I was like, that’s exactly… that’s exactly my position.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve left LinkedIn myself, somewhat controversial, people don’t agree with me on this, but… I just… to me, LinkedIn is people looking for leads and looking for jobs, and I’m not looking for either, and I’d rather spend my time with our members, and communicate through our member portal versus LinkedIn. So, I’m glad that you noticed that, you know, I’m getting some grief for that, but that’s all for.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: I don’t think it’s wise to build your castle on somebody else’s land.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, I agree.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: It just doesn’t make sense. At any given point, they can change the game, and all of a sudden, whatever you’ve built is no longer viewable, seeable, the algorithms change, whatever. I made a bet. I made a bet with… with the universe and myself years ago, just… and it came from observing influential people in the world, and I… you know, the whole idea of social media sometimes is about influence. But I… the bet that I made was, I bet I would have much more influence in the world if I spent less time on social media. And that’s really hard for people to understand, because we’re a marketing firm. Marketing ourselves is different from marketing our clients. What I would recommend to a client is different from what I’m recommending for myself, or maybe a professional services firm.
Greg Alexander: So let me ask you one more question, and then I’ve got about 20 others, but we’ll save that for the private member Q&A session. You know, we’re talking today about intentionally investing in relationships, deepening relationships. As a growth strategy for a firm. And we’re living in the AI era, where… The role of the human is being diminished to a degree. We can debate by how much? But the machine is doing more today than it ever has. And there’s different points of view on this. I would love to get your point of view. In the context of today’s conversation about relationships. What is the role of the machine, AI, and what is the role of the human?
Khalid Mokhtarzada: Yeah, I think my position, and this is maybe a little bit contradictory, than most, especially amongst my peers who are very techno… tech-focused, which we are, too. We’re very bullish on AI. We actually have an AI show that has been running for more than a year now, about a year and a half, that comes out every Wednesday. So… AI is a huge, huge part of what we do, but it’s not the most important thing. I think a lot of organizations are bullish on AI, but still don’t know how to use it, and they still need someone to walk them through it. If anything, as professional services firms, what I’ve noticed is that our clients are decreasing headcount and expecting their teams to do more because of AI, and what that’s creating is this kind of scenario where those who are remaining in the organization need more support, not less. And I mean more human support. All the AI in the world, they still have 35, 45, 55 hours in a week. And so… what is contradictory about what I’m going to say is that this is an ideal time to hire people. If there’s ever a time to buy property, it’s when value is low. Right? When blood is on the streets, and…. We have a healthy, … we have a healthy war chest. And right now, there’s an incredible amount of intelligent, hard-working A players out there that are being let go. And this is the time to build your team. If you can afford to build a team, this is the time to increase headcount, while still, of course, you know, keeping the AI equation in. That’s part of a major part of your strategy, but… People, man. If I could have another Sarah, another Jen, a few other top players that we have on our team, we would just increase sales. That’s all that would happen. And we could easily find the AI people to… to support the work.
Greg Alexander: Yep. I think that the relative importance of humans is going up, not down. And I… but the reason why that is, in my opinion. It’s because there are things that humans can do that machines can’t do. That’ll be in such scarce supply. That, when it does show up. It will be such a differentiator. That it could be the difference between winning and losing. Something like empathy, as an example. The machine’s not gonna have that. It’s gonna be very logical and rational, right?
Khalid Mokhtarzada: So we haven’t been able to train any of our AI agents to take our clients out to dinner yet.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, right.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: What just happened.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, and until that happens, there’s still gonna be a place for that, so… All right, well listen, let’s end it here. I very much enjoyed the conversation. It is a good reminder that we are in the services business. We are there to serve the client. And the word there is serve. And I think if we invest in relationships, deepen relationships, invest in our team, make culture real. I think it is an intentional way to grow a boutique pro surf firm. So, with that, Khaled, on behalf of the community, thanks for coming and sharing today.
Khalid Mokhtarzada: Thank you for your time.
Greg Alexander: Alright. Couple calls to action for listeners. If you’re hearing this, and you want to have a conversation with Khaled about more details around what he’s doing. Attend the private member Q&A session, and you can ask your questions directly of him. If you’re not a member of Collective 54, and you might want to become one, go to Collective54.com and fill out an application, and we’ll get in contact with you. But until next time, I appreciate you working me into your busy day and listening to the show, and I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.