Screaming in the Cloud - The Power of Saying No: Growing by Narrowing Your Focus with Corey Quinn

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

What happens when you stop trying to serve everyone, and start focusing on the right customers?In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with Corey Quinn (yes, really) to talk about specialization, scaling service businesses, and the power of saying no. From growing a digital agency from $20M to $200M to escaping founder-led sales, this conversation dives into practical lessons for founders, marketers, and leaders looking to scale with intention.Show highlights: (00:00) Specialization Mindset(00:21) Show Intro and Sponsor(01:18) Two Corey Quinns(02:39) Guest Background and Book(04:41) Scaling a Service Agency(06:28) Inbound Limits and Outbound Shift(10:21) Cookie Gifting Breakthrough(12:12) Making Gifting Work(19:09) Retention Through Specialization(25:20) Founder Bottlenecks and Wrap UpLinks: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyquinn/Sponsored by: duckbillhq.com

Well, in the terms of specialization, it's about narrowing the addressable markets, who you're saying yes to, who you say no to. And I think we're all come pre-wired as entrepreneurs, people who want to start and launch a healthy business. One of the ways we get into business is just by saying yes to people. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And I've been trying to get this one set up for a very long time. Please welcome my guest, Corey Quinn. Thanks for talking to me.

And may I admire you on your excellent name. Thank you, Corey Quinn. I am excited to be on the podcast. Finally, it has been years, and we've been talking back and forth. Thank you so much for the invite. This episode is sponsored in part by my day job, Duck Bill. Do you have a horrifying AWS bill? That can mean a lot of things, predicting what it's going to be, determining what it should be, negotiating your next long-term contract with AWS, or just figuring out why it increasingly resembles a phone number, but no. nobody seems to quite know why that is. To learn more, visit duckbillhq.com. Remember, you can't duck the duck bill bill, which my CEO reliably informs me is absolutely not our slogan. So I grew up with a very different name. And when I got engaged in 2009, I realized that I was marrying someone who was a strong feminist and a lawyer. So the last argument I won was will you marry me? And we met in the middle on the last name issue and we both picked a new name.

It happened to be a family name on her side, but I became Corey Quinn in 2010. And it turned out that someone can't imagine who had the dot com and all of the useful screen names everywhere. Back in that era, my Twitter handle was, not kidding, my amateur radio call sign, which is the sign of someone who's really got it going on and is great at dealing with adept business things when you have a bunch of line noise no one can pronounce. But we have been passing like ships in the night. We've been forwarding each other emails over the years from people who are confused about how these things work. And I think recently someone sent me a screenshot of me being described by Google's AI answer bot with a picture of you. And it's like, huh, I don't remember being able to grow facial

hair. That would have been impressive. But yeah, what do you do? What is your story? And what's it been like to basically be more or less a constant namespace collision with as someone once called me a prolific shit poster well first off this is like a collision of two universes this is so cool that we're doing this and great to finally connect so what do i do so i've been in the primarily the digital marketing space for the last 20 years i graduated just prior to that i was in wealth management prior to that was an entrepreneur and i started off in a sales role it was basically the number one sales guy for a digital marketing agency. We sold PPC and SEO to large retail brands like Lulmon, Remax, Hyundai, Men's Warehouse. And I was pretty good at sales. I loved it.

And made my way into sales management. And then most recently, I was a chief marketing officer of a digital agency called Scorpion. And the interesting thing about Scorpion is that we grew revenue when I joined in 2015, we're doing about 20 million. By the time I left, About seven years later, we're doing about $200 million. But unlike many engineers, you don't describe yourself as a 10X CMO, as best I can tell. I don't know. I've since left. I wrote a book called Anyone, Not Everyone.

It's my five-step process to help agency founders escape founder-led sales. And yeah, now I work with, direct with agency founders. I have just bought a copy of it. I will probably not leave it on the workbookshelf and to imply strongly that I'm the one that wrote it. but I'm also not going to introduce it that way. So, you know, people can assume the things that they tend to assume. Your history is fascinating. My last real job was in wealth management before I started this place.

Black Rock bought the Robo Advisor I was working at. I started off doing sales. Unlike you, I was not spectacular at it. And I went in a tech direction instead aimed at more or less a well-honed sense of cynicism. And that was an interesting ride. I mean, you're in the Los Angeles area. You're the next neighborhood over from where I spent 10 years. We live in very strange circles.

It's weird that we've never quite connected with a few people on LinkedIn and common that, oh, yeah, I remember the L.A. days from that. It has been a fascinating story. I want to dive in, though. What does it look like to grow 10X from a CMO perspective? Because from an engineering perspective, oh, you're going to grow 10 times the users. Well, okay, great. I can give you chapter and verse around what that scaling is probably going to look like,

if you do it right, probably what it looked like when you do it realistically, which is a way of saying wrong. But the marketing side of it is a bit different. It is. I think the twist here also is the fact that we're talking about a service-based business versus software or SaaS, right, where adding an additional user is not necessarily incremental cost, maybe marginal costs. Whereas you think of a service-based business, typically you see costs associated with revenue. If you have 100 clients and you add an additional 100 clients, you're in a pickle because you have to hire a bunch of people. So the challenge is how do you create scalable service-based business? And I'll kind of paint the picture on what I stepped into back in 2015. It was a digital marketing

agencies, as I said. They were doing websites, PPC, SEO back then was the primary focus for attorneys. And it was about a 100-person company. They had a six-person team, sales team, and it was largely founder-led. And the challenge was that the founder, who had been the visionary behind growing this business, had done a great job, he realized he needed to bring some external people to come and help them get to that next level. And so my job, my responsibility coming into this $20 million company

was to not just kind of nurture the business as is, it was to grow exponentially. Yeah, it turns out the very few jobs have a description of great. So you know that chair over there that's starting to cool? Your job is sitting it, keep it warm. Don't make any sweeping changes and send us a post. guard every six months. Growth is sort of the definition of modern business. Yes. And I was an expensive hire compared to this was a homegrown company. The guy had hired all his best friends.

The challenge was that all of the business that they had been acquiring was all from inbound, which is awesome. And we love inbounds, especially warm inbounds, ready to, you know, hire you. But that only is good to a certain extent that you can't control inbounds. There's not an endless amount of inbounds. It's a finite resource. And you can, cannot scale revenue just waiting for the phone to ring. You are describing the last seven years of Duckbell, where it started off as the Quinn Advisory Group once back in 2017. It had a stylized Q is the logo, which looks disturbingly too close to the QAnon logo.

Had I not rebranded by the time that came out, I assure you I would have in a hurry. And it was all, I wanted to be the most notable voice in a space. So I niche down very tightly into fixing the AWS bill. and it sort of ran away from me, but even now, over 90% of our customer base comes from me making obnoxious noises on the internet. The other 10% of it is recurring customers and word of mouth from other folks in the space. And we've never done an outbound program with any seriousness or rigidity. Now that we're building software, and there's this established go-to-market sequence for a lot of these things. But yeah, my big challenge in the coming years

is going to be, how do I become the accelerator and not the pure engine behind all of it? But that's future Corey's problem, not today's. And I'm happy to problem solve with you if they fell full. So I remember when I first joined, there was a six-person sales team, and the founder was brilliant because he put this sales team in a separate room and a separate building away from the account managers and all the other people in the agency. What he built was was not a boiler room, but it was a sales floor, a proper sales floor with a big metallic gong that would use.

to celebrate one call closes. It was this really fun sales environment. Calls were coming in. People were closing deals. It's great, it's great vibe. But again, we were stuck with this inbound lead flow. And so what did we do? My job, expensive hire coming in, need to accelerate sales.

Well, we maximized all the inbound tactics leveraging, you know, the HubSpot, content marketing and landing pages and all that stuff. But that, of course, wasn't good enough. We weren't growing fast enough. And so we had to do. There's no dial you can turn up. on that or it is, but it's great. I almost killed myself in the pandemic years. I was putting out 11 pieces of content every week and it was depressing. I had no time to think about what I was writing.

Just quick, generate more. It does not scale. If you study kind of the topic of inbounds, we know that only 3% of any industry is coming inbound in any quarter, right? So there's a relatively small, really small percentage of the overall addressable market that you're trying to attract. They're coming inbound and, of course, you're sharing those inbounds with all of your competitors. And so the next phase that we had to figure out was, how are we going to start doing outbound? And the dynamic, again, on the sales floor was that these guys were just answering phones and making dollars. They were very well paid, got off work at about 4 p.m. had a wonderful life. And we had to literally go into that sales floor and say, hey, guys, here's a list that we just bought

from Dun & Bradstreet, and he just started picking up the phone and start dialing these attorneys. Dial for dollars. I remember those days. Smile and dial. Of course, that didn't work. We tried a lot. We put a lot of pressure on them. It's also really hard from a services perspective because so much of that is based on trust and relationships. And with founder-led sales, great. I can walk in and have an instant credibility that someone in a sales function does not necessarily have because they, you know, didn't spend the last decade being obnoxious on the internet about a particular topic. Yeah. And frankly, to hire a sales rep to come in and be able to replicate what the founder does

with any predictability is basically impossible. So what we did, we figured something out. So we were selling to attorneys. And if you've ever sold to attorneys, Corey, you know that they have a receptionist or an office manager. I married an attorney. I would say it's probably one of the best sales jobs I've ever done, but also one of the hardest. I mean, this is not a commodity flying off the shelves. Let's not get ourselves here. You are quite a talented salesperson, clearly.

Oh, I must be. Only when it matters. That's it. So what we figured out is that when we're, we would call a law firm, we would get shut down by the office manager or by the receptionist. We couldn't get through. So what we did is we sent a gourmet box of cookies to the law firm. What we did is we put these gourmet box of cookies in a FedEx box, overnighted it to the attorney.

It would skip the front office because it's an overnight package. It would go right to the attorney. They would unzip the box. It'd open it up. They'd pull out this amazing tin of like world-class cookies. like if you're not like holding the wall when you're eating these things you're going to fall on the ground like that that level of just incredible incredible moment those of course they ended up in the break room all of the office staff would stand around eating these amazing cookies drinking coffee

and they would say well you know who brought the amazing cookies and someone would say oh this somebody scorpion and someone else would say well who's scorpion someone else i don't know some company but before you knew it the name scorpions like bouncing off all the walls in the law offer them. Of course, we call to follow up. We don't just send a gift. We call to follow up. And the energy went from traditional, you know, like arms crossed. No, I'm sorry. You can't talk to them to. Oh, my God. You're the guys that sent those amazing cookies. Those were too good. He ate all of those. Thank you so much. Let me put you through. It feels like this is the sort of thing that has two failure modes. One is as soon as people hear this idea,

think it's great and they start trying to do it themselves and it starts to get lost in the noise. The counterpoint is what you just said though, that follow-up piece of it. There's a certain sense and a lot of marketing folks who, I don't want to use the word crappy, but pretend I did. And they will just go ahead and spam this stuff out without follow-up and a sort of a cargo cult approach of, oh, well, it worked for you, it must work for me without putting the work in, doing the follow-up, becoming established. Like, we need to be able to send 10,000 boxes of cookies. Try 50 and then do some calls and see how it goes. I'll tell you, so I've codified this now and I've started teaching it to my clients and others. There's really four things you have to get

right. Number one, to your point, is the list. This is not a spray and prey, spam your time type of approach. At Scorpion, we did a lot of that because we started off with 50, but we scale it up to 60 salespeople sending 250 gifts per quarter. It was madness. But we didn't start there, right? So what we want to do is we want to build what I call your 20% list, which is kind of think of like your dream 100. Who, Corey, are those ideal prospects that you can't otherwise get in front of those VIP prospects. If you know, if you got a meeting with them, you would build a relationship. You'd probably close them. And it would be a lifelong, amazing client.

Like that's who you want to target with us. That's number one in the list. Which is great. I wish I thought of the cookie idea. Instead, I started an interview show where it's like, well, all right. How do I get a, how do I get to talk to people? I've no business speaking to where the immediate response is not get the hell out of my office. It worked. It took a little bit more work and it was a little bit more flattering on the waistline, if I could be so blunt for in my case, where I'm

fighting it constantly. It's not a dad-bod. It's a father figure. But yeah, it's the, I'm dealing with now that approach, again, doesn't scale. And no one is going to like, by the way, coming on this show when the entire before and after show are me pitching them on things. It's build the relationship first, then see what happens. This episode is sponsored by my own company, Duck Bill. Having trouble with your AWS bill, perhaps it's time to renegotiate a contract with them. Maybe you're just wondering how to predict what's going on in the wide world of AWS. Well, that's where Duck Bill comes in to help.

Remember, you can't duck the Duck Bill Bill, which I am reliably informed by my business partner is absolutely not our motto. To learn more, visit duckbillhq.com. And so that's an interesting context in terms of this gift. This is not just you're pulling a Yeti cup off the mug and putting your logo on and send it to them. This is a relationship driver. This is a relationship focused campaign where we're trying to break the noise, put something in front of, of them that is unique, striking, it leaves an amazing impression. And to your point, you have to follow up. You can't just send the gift and wait for your phone to ring. You have to follow up

because we all know what it's like to receive an amazing email or amazing gift from someone. And then all of a sudden, guess what happens? The wife calls, the client emergency pops up. And whatever that situation is, and we lose that moment. So we have to diligently follow up. And then the other trick to this, I'll let you finish your thought. Please, please. I just want to point out how brilliant this is because you have that spark of life in your eyes that implies you have not spent a lot of time at tech company conferences. But when you have, you get surrounded by all the swag. And I only have two rules for swag. And almost everyone fails it. The first is you have to like the swag you're giving away, even if it has another company's logo on it. Because everyone loves their own logo. Great. And the second is, if this is the third one of these, that I'm getting at a conference, it still has to have some utility. Because as soon as you find

something good, everyone's going to bandwagon onto it. And then it still has to have that value and resonate. But there is a difference between things you give to everyone who can fog a mirror and scan a badge at your booth and the strategic prospects. So I'm in complete alignment with that. It must be unique. It must be useful. And frankly, if it's expensive, great. Just don't bring 10,000. Bring 100. And then those hundred people who get them, they'll remember that. Yes. And people like, well, it won't scale every, every attendee at the 60,000 person conference. What will? It doesn't need to. How many these can you realistically nurture in a quarter? I have a lot of perspectives and strategies around how to maximize conferences. So we could talk about that maybe some other time. But it's a topic that I'm

very passionate about because where else do you get in a room with all of your ICP buyers, like face to face, belly to belly. It's a very amazing, powerful place to build relationships. It is, especially when you have the complex enterprise motion, where very often you have to build multiple relationships. You can't single track through someone because they tend to transition or leave or something happens. It's a longer process. In some cases, you intentionally want to slow it down. But that's what you were doing at Scorpion. You recently have set out on your own. You've written a book, which is something that I very much want to do. I want to be clear. I want to be clear. I want to you have written a book. I don't want to write a book. You do not want to write a book. Yes.

Yeah. Every person I talk to with a couple exceptions is like, have you written a book? Oh, that was the worst thing in my life. I never want to do it again. And then there's a small subset of deranged people who are like, oh, I'm working on my seventh. Like, oh my God. What is your life? Like, are there windows in your house? Yeah, I've never been pregnant, but I've heard that. You almost forget the experience of having a child, right? So I'm actually in the process of writing a second book, which is I'm just the beginning stages and I'm beginning to remember. I did it the slow and expensive way. Like I took well over a year. I hired a lot of people to help me out and all these things. But I'm very, very happy that it's done. I'll tell you. You have recommendations from it for

people like April Dunford, who I'm familiar with. These are folks who the book resonates. And credit where due to the folks out there in the world, I've only gotten a couple of random cold outreaches that mentioned the book I wrote. I don't know that they even are referring to this. I, it may just be their dumb template not working out well because nothing sticks in your mind quite like great marketing or terrible marketing. The in between stuff fades in. It is well regarded. It talks about a lot of things that are just looking at the outline of this. It's stuff that I've internalized that it wouldn't occur to me not to. For example, chapter four is titled give a damn. I can't tell you how many founders I talk to.

who are just trying to, well, I built a solution and now I'm looking to see what I can sell it to, or the grifter set, who just want to make a quick buck, you have to care or nothing's going to work. So I'll tie this back to Scorpion because I think it's relevant to this. So sure, you can be really great at acquiring new clients, but we all know that the real value in business is the lifetime value. Toss a lot of money to acquire a customer, but you need to keep them for as long as possible, two, three years. What's it, four times easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one? That's right. And so the thing that allowed us to keep our clients at Scorpions so long, we kept them three years,

whereas our competitors kept them six months. As a result of that, we could pay a lot more to acquire our customer up front. The reason why, that's one point. I'll put it to the side, the reason why we were able to keep them so long was due to our specialization. And one of our mutual friends, Jonathan Stark, talks about specialization as far as you You could either specialize in what you do or in who you serve, or you can specialize in both what you do for a specific audience, right? It's counterintuitive.

One of the things Jonathan Stark taught me many years ago is it seems like when you start out, we put it the consulting head on, you would have be all things to all people. But that's not what customers want. The more narrowly defined your niche becomes the higher the rate you can command because billing by the hour is nuts, as he said for many years and wrote a book with that same title. and the more differentiated you become. If I said that I'm the best cloud architect, no one in this house is going to let me get away with that

because they're going to argue for the title. Whereas I'm the best at AWS billing in 2017. It's like, well, you can have it, you sad bastard. Who would ever claim that if it weren't true? And it was a mix of pity and, oh, thank God, I don't have to deal with this. It's not a fun, exciting problem. That niche into a very specific, very expensive,

very point in time problem, I more or less tripped over a gold. mind, so to speak. Yeah, but you had the wherewithal to recognize it when you did trip over it. Well, no, I had the wherewithal to hire people like Jonathan Stark to help me, who then beat me over the head with what should have been obvious, but wasn't at the time. And, yeah, honestly, the ability to self-correct through various means is sort of a mark of success. Like, can you surround yourself, A, with people smarter than you? Not that hard in my case. And then listen to what they're saying and said ego aside. I didn't have a problem with that,

but I've seen a lot of examples where people want to believe in their own mythos more than is warranted. Well, in the terms of specialization, it's about narrowing the addressable markets, who you're saying yes to, who you say no to. And I think we're all come pre-wired as entrepreneurs, people who want to start and launch a healthy business. One of the ways we get into business is just by saying yes to people, right? We serve clients. We over-deliver on those first clients, and that turns into referrals. And of course, we want to say yes to the referrals and becomes this sort of generalist trap, what I call it, right? It is a self-fulfilling kind of flywheel where you end up with a generalist agency or a generalist business,

especially this is very common in the service-based businesses because you can say yes and be flexible versus potentially less so in SaaS. But the thing that made Scorpion really powerful, and I think the founders, they kind of fell into this, not necessarily doing this intentionally, but it really worked, which was that we had to, a specialization in personal injury attorneys. And what that meant was we got really, really good at solving that expensive problem, which is identifying and helping them to get cases from the internet. As a result of that, we were able to charge a premium.

We were able to keep clients for a very long time. And what we were able to do with that model is we went and we repeated that with a couple of other industries. So it was... It's such a great positioning because the default for... I'm a personal injury attorney. I'm trying to get clients. Well, have you confirmed?

considered putting yourself with a dumb expression on your face in the back of a bus. That seems to be the default approach. These folks, hey, there are so many different paths. Yes, exactly. And in many cases, they need a trusted advisor who can guide them on how to manage their presence online, all these great things. And so how that translates into the book, Chapter 4, you got to give a damn, is that you can't just choose an industry to specialize in based on a spreadsheet, based on the total addressable market. and some assumptions around penetration, revenue, and whatnot. But you have to do, if you want longevity, my perspective is,

you actually, if you're going to specialize, which of course I recommend, that you identify a vertical market that you have some kind of connection to, whether it be familial, professional, somewhere that you are, for lack of a better term, a bias for, that you would like to show up every day, spend time in their conferences,

speak from their stages, get to know them, solve their problems at a very profound level. If you can't start there, you need to be able to get there quickly of being able to speak with a sense of expertise, of having a gravitous and authority in that space. Nowhere is this more obvious than on social media where you have these folks who are, they're just grifters, where, oh, they're terrific experts on blockchain technology. AI comes out. They can retool their grift pitch and way faster it takes to actually learn things.

And suddenly they're experts on that. This week, they're experts at international policy. and it goes on and on and on. And they're not adding insight. There's no value here. It's just noise. Yeah, it's very thin, right? There's no depth to it.

Now, the folks who did specialize in a vertical market or in solving an expensive problem, AI is a gift for us because now it allows us to magnify and multiply exponentially our impact versus someone who's just leveraging generic sort of best practices. Use correctly, absolutely. Human in the loop is important. I've also found that if you start diving into a topic you know well with AI, it doesn't take long for it to start absolutely falling apart to custard. And the trick is to remember this when you're asking about things you don't know super well. It's a galman amnesia, I think is what it's called when we're reading a newspaper article about something we know well.

And it's clear the reporter has no idea what they're doing. But it's like, oh, this guy's an idiot. But you completely forget that the next time you read about, oh, Middle East politics or something. And oh, yeah, clearly he must know exactly what's going on here. We forget that we're all dealing with brushes against things that are very deep, almost sarcasticly so. Yes, exactly. So that's effectively what I focus now is helping founders who have built some level of generalist approach. And as a result of that, they're struggling with retention, with marketing, standing out, positioning,

helping them to become specialists and then find ways to scale up revenue in a profitable way. Help me disambiguate what you mean when you say founders, because you're talking about again, with this audience, people will hear automatically startup. And then you're talking about things that are anathema for startups. Like, are you talking about agencies? You're talking about service companies? Are you talking about tech startups? You talk about all the above?

My primary domain of expertise is in the agency space, which is a service-based business, but I've also worked with clients who have a SaaS-based offering. The reality is that a founder is the most passionate person in the business. They should be the closest to the client. And eventually, they become their own bottleneck in terms. terms of their growth. And when that becomes a hindrance to get into whatever outcomes or milestones I look into achieve, that is typically when a question about specialization might be a way to relieve them from a bottleneck. The reason why is that, especially in an agency, where one day,

as a journalist, you may be doing a website and SEO strategy for a plumber. The next day, you're doing an e-commerce website for a widget maker, and the next day you're doing an influencer strategy. Like every day is different. So you have all this context switching. There's no way for the founder to truly step away from the sales role versus if you're selling an attorney, a solution to help them to get more cases. That sale by nature is much more repetitive. You're selling effectively a productized service. As a result of that, there's ways to step out, step away from the more productized you become, the easier it is to replicate and sell and teach other people to do it. When I took on Mike, my business partner, I was convinced that what I did was so bespoke that no one else

could ever do it. And he's like, oh, I bet you're wrong on that. And spoiler, I was. Good to know. It worked out. I'm glad I believed him on that. It's hard, though. It's very often the more specific you get, the better. One thing I often say I got wrong is that I fixed the horrifying AWS bill is not a complete positioning. Smarter move would have been. I fixed the horrifying AWS bill for SaaS companies in the Bay Area. You want people to hear themselves described in your go-to-market. I just happen to be noisy enough in an unpopular enough space for a very specific problem that I was able to skate past it. Yeah, you figured it out. That's for sure. And I do agree. People want to work with people who've already solved their problem for people like them. So the more you can project that into the market and say, hey, I understand your specific flavor of this common problem, the more you'll be able to stand out as that authority and expert. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?

Oh, you'll love this. Corey Quinn.com. I wondered who was squatting on that. And we will, of course, put links to that in the show. Nor should you be. I am looking forward to the mass confusion from people who just skim this and are convinced that we made a terrible editing error. But it's going in the show notes. Corey, thank you so much for speaking to me.

I appreciate it. Thank you, Corey. But real pleasure. Looking forward to speaking again soon. Corey Quinn, author, a founder, and oh so much more with an excellent name. I'm also Corey Quinn, Cloud Economist at D. Duck Bill. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform

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