The Tariff Crisis: Survival Tips and Advice for Advertisers

Episode Description

The 2025 trade war is here, and advertisers are feeling the heat. In this special PPC Town Hall, Frederick Vallaeys speaks with economics-savvy marketer Sam Tomlinson to explain how the escalating U.S.-China tariff war is shaking up the ad world.

Episode Takeaways

As markets plunged with historic volatility over the recent tariff crisis, businesses were forced to quickly reassess pricing, messaging, and costs.

Fred and Sam emphasize the importance of taking a calm, strategic approach instead of reacting with panic. They provide a blueprint for emerging stronger through strategic adaptation and customer-focused innovation that goes beyond simply weathering the tariff storm.

1. Monitoring systems and value chain analysis

The tariff announcements on April 2, 2025 has had a significant impact on the economic situation.

At this point it is critical for businesses to have really solid monitoring systems in place to understand in real-time, how the current tariff changes are going to affect their operations.

These monitoring systems can act as early warning detection and help you with maintaining situation awareness while helping you keep your sanity in check. More importantly, these systems help you move from reactive to proactive by having systems that alert you to changes requiring immediate attention.

Sam also emphasizes the importance of being very clear about the value you offer to your customers.

“It’s also you know getting very clear about your value chain right every organization has their own value chain. You understand you know how money flows through your organization.

So tariffs are loud. They are headlines. They are the big thing right now but they are not the only thing that goes out the door." shares Sam.

2. Cost management beyond products

Sam also highlights a critical insights businesses often overlook and its that the product itself often represents only a fraction of a business’s total cost structure.

This shifts the focus from stressing over high tariffs to finding savings across the whole cost structure. Looking at the bigger picture makes even big tariffs easier to handle.

“If you have to lose some of your margin on the cost of goods, you might be able to make it up on other sides of the equation and those are in your control at least to some extent.

We have some some ecommerce brands who are immediately renegotiating some of their agreements. If you’re spending $1,000 a month on a widget X, you might be able to negotiate that down to 500. Well, that’s 500 bucks that you’ve just saved, right?” explains Sam.

• Some strategies businesses can use to manage costs include:
• Optimizing customer acquisition costs
• Refining your supply chain and logistics
• Improving operational efficiency

3. Marketing and messaging strategies

Both Fred and Sam point out that although the recent tariff disruptions are a cause for concern, they can also be used to create opportunities. Rather than viewing tariffs as simply an unavoidable cost increase, forward-thinking marketers can leverage the situation to differentiate their brand, adjust their messaging, and potentially gain market share.

Sam suggests using ‘country of origin’ messaging very carefully. He also talks about using transparent pricing strategies to get the trust of your consumers. You can use limited time pricing promotions, communicate price increases honestly, and offer pre-orders with fixed or guaranteed pricing.

4. Alternatives to discounting

This can be a tricky time for e-commerce sellers to offer outright discounts on their products since it can erode profit margins.

Sam’s key point is that people buy based on perceived value, not actual cost. You can use this to offer incentives that feel valuable to customers but cost less than traditional discounts.

“For a lot of ecommerce brands, one of the first places money flows out of the margin tends to be pop-up offers. You can get rid of that offer and replace it with something that is more difficult to value.

For example a brand says— we’ll preserve an acre of rainforest. We’ll plant a tree. Planting a tree costs like 32 cents for the brand. So if it’s a $100 purchase, you went from $10 in margin that just literally went poof out the door to the customer to 32 cents. So you’ve saved $9.68 in margin with no measurable decrease to your marketing efficacy.” said Sam

5. Adapting to consumer psychology during economic uncertainties

Economic uncertainty, like a tariff crisis, changes how people think and shop. When money feels tight or the future is unclear, consumers tend to:

• Focus more on value: They ask “Is this worth it?” more often.
• Buy for emotional reasons: They look for comfort or a sense of control.
• Need stronger reasons: Especially for non-essential purchases.
• Avoid risk: They become more cautious about spending.

Marketers need to understand these shifts to respond effectively during uncertain times.

Sam Tomlinson highlights that in uncertain times, focusing on benefits—not features—works better. Benefits show clear value right away, while features take more effort to understand.

“Move your messaging as much as you can from features to benefits. Apple’s classic example is 100 gigabytes versus a thousand songs in your pocket. The 100 gigabytes is a feature. The thousand songs in your pocket is a benefit and the benefit sells.” Sam shared.

6. Agency and client relationships during a crisis

Sam sees client relationships as partnerships, not just revenue. In tough times, focusing on trust and support is crucial for building long-term value and resilience beyond short-term gains.

“If you’re working with a client, you kind of know when they’re getting hit. It’s a good thing to just reach out and be like, ‘Hey, know you’re probably getting hit. Would love to talk about how we can help you, what you need in order to make sure that you can weather this.’” explains Sam.

He emphasizes that being flexible with your clients is just the right thing to do. But beyond ethics, there’s also a compelling economic case for supporting clients during a crisis.

Retaining clients through tough times can lead to years of future revenue, saves the high cost of acquiring new ones, and strengthens your reputation—turning support during a crisis into long-term growth and valuable referrals.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also co-founder and CEO at Optmyzr. And this is a special episode. This is not going to be the the full normal length, but it’s also something we wanted to do to put some content out there quickly in response to what’s happening in the economy and a lot of the questions that that’s raising for PPC and digital marketers.

Obviously the questions are broader than that but we’ll bring the perspective that’s hopefully useful to you in in your business and your jobs. And so one person who immediately came to mind for me was Sam Tomlinson. He writes amazing newsletters basically. So most of it is through his newsletter. If you don’t sign up for that do sign up. But he tends to take a very economics driven perspective on everything to do with marketing. So, I thought this is the perfect guy to at least share his perspective on what he thinks is happening, what we might do about it and so let’s go have that chat hopefully it helps everyone.

So, thanks for joining. Sam, good to have you on.

Sam Tomlinson: Of course. Yeah, thanks. Good to be back. Always love to be on PPC Townhall.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Well, great! So, it’s been a stressful couple of days here. The markets are obviously a little wonky. The tariffs are all over the place. They seem to be going up, depending when you watch this, but what’s the what’s the latest? What’s going on right now?

Sam Tomlinson: Well, on April 2nd, President Trump announced a wide ranging and very sweeping number of tariffs. So, I think everyone’s more or less caught up on that. His team used a very interesting formula to calculate that, which is mostly just a trade deficit related formula versus an actual tariff formula. Since then obviously that’s kicked off the largest two-day selloff in the United States equity markets in history in terms of total dollars not percentage but total dollars. Somewhere between six and seven trillion went bye-bye. And then things kind of stabilized on Monday a little bit

And then today China responded with a 34% tariff on US goods and President Trump responded and implemented a 50% additional tariff on Chinese goods. So if you’re keeping score at home, anything that’s being imported from China is now at 104% tariff. So, you know, if you bought an item for for $100 from a Chinese manufacturer and it lands here in the United States, you, the importer, would be responsible for paying a $104 tariff to the United States in addition to that $100 for the product.

And that comes as a bit of a shock to a lot of people in in the e-commerce world, but I think across the entire PPC landscape as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so one thing that was interesting and I don’t maybe want to lead with is when we think about a tariff, whatever the percentage is and you think about buying an iPhone for $1,000 it doesn’t mean there a 104% tariff or tax on top of what the consumer pays. It’s what the importer pays to bring it into the country. Right?

So if Apple say pays $600 for that $1,000 iPhone that they’re going to sell to you for $1,000, the tariff is on the $600 they bring it in at. So that buffers the impact a little bit but still I mean these are huge numbers we’re talking about and they keep going up. So the net net is that things are going to change but let’s talk about what are the potential responses that we’re going to see here and and for each of those let’s maybe think a bit about what you might do in marketing.

Sam Tomlinson: I think the most obvious response and what we’re what we’re seeing the most of if you know subscribe to the news is a lot of countries eager to cut deals with the United States and President Trump in order to preserve access to the market. I think what you’re going to see is a lot of, maybe we’ll call them secondary or emerging manufacturing economies— this would be Vietnam, India, even Indonesia, etc., right? Mexico, Canada. These are all, they don’t produce the capacity that China does, but they are all very willing to come to the table and to cut deals as we we already saw Mexico and Canada already, you know, making deals with the president thus far in his term. So that’s probably the initial impact is probably the most likely, the bigger risk, I think, is an ongoing and escalating trade war with China, which will likely involve all kinds of instruments of economic war, right?

You’ll see China selling treasuries to essentially weaken the United States economy. You’ll see the United States trying to impose additional export controls, and it just gets messy really quick. The United States and China are the two biggest economies in the world and predicting what happens when they go to war is not a fun exercise.

Frederick Vallaeys: And one of the big elements of what happens in a trade war is the uncertainty, right? And it’s the tit for tat and there’s a back and forth. And so it’s sort of we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow and if we’re running advertising campaigns or an e-commerce store, how do we price it? How do our competitors react to what’s happening? Are they more invested in China than we are and hence is it impacting them more and so does that mean their prices are going up and that it creates a market opportunity for us. So there’s all of these moving pieces.

So from my perspective I would say one of the key things right now is is make sure you have really solid monitoring systems in place because that’s going to keep your sanity right. Like let the things happen the way they happen. We can’t really do anything about it ourselves directly but at least we can know the moment it’s impacting us and then respond to that. So that for me that’s number one— monitoring systems.

Sam Tomlinson: Yeah 100%. I think it’s monitoring but it’s also you know getting very clear about your value chain. Every organization has their own value chain. You understand how money flows through your organization. So tariffs are loud. They are headlines. They are the big thing right now but they are not the only thing that goes out the door. So if you think about you know an e-commerce brand right? You might have, you know, for every $100 widget you sell, 30% of that might be the actual widget and the remaining 70% is a combination of the cost to acquire the customer, the costs of operating your businesses, your profit, your shipping, your pay, your insurance, all that stuff, right? So the the best thing I think you can do after you have monitoring and you understand what’s going on is to understand where the other dollar, how money is flowing through your organization.

Because if you have to lose some of your margin on the co on the cost of goods you might be able to make it up on other sides of the equation. Those are to your point in your control at least to some extent. So, you know, some very concrete examples, right?

We have some some ecommerce brands who are immediately renegotiating some of their SAS agreements, which Fred, I’m sure as a SaaS person, you don’t really want to hear. But you know, if you if you’re spending $1,000 a month on SaaS widget X, you might be able to negotiate that down to 500. Well, that’s 500 bucks that you’ve just saved, right?

If you can renegotiate your shipping rates, you can, you know, potentially try to find additional optimizations in your paid media to drop your CAC. There’s all kinds of ways that you can control your margins and use this as an opportunity to either preserve what you currently have while your competitors raise prices or potentially even get ahead.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I think that’s an important point if you sort of liken it back to what happened 5 years ago. It was drama. A lot of people didn’t know what was happening. I mean, nobody knew what was going to happen, but it ended up being a huge opportunity for certain industries. And so this is certainly a moment where if we think about it the right way, it’s going to create opportunities as well, right? You just have to find what they are. And I think it’s a bit unknown at this point, but being nimble. You make a great point like, what I saw in my career is understanding how things work and you’re basically saying well you know as a marketer you may have always come in and your client told you here’s the ROAS target but we’re not going to share anything about how the business works. That’s not helpful because then you can’t help them steer in the right direction and figure out different ways to cut costs and still maintain the ROAS when the cost of the widget goes up 100%.

Sam Tomlinson: But I mean it’s also it’s worth having those conversations even if you are an agency or an in-house marketer now and saying okay, well you know number one to your point about monitoring if our competitors are made in China and we’re not, that’s not just an economic point it’s a messaging point. Right? You can lean into that. If you are made in China but your competitors are not, that’s a different messaging point. Like hey we’ve deliberately structured this to reduce your costs and make this as affordable as possible so we’re doing x, y, z. You’ve got opportunities, but you need to be able to have those conversations and understand what’s going on.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And you bring up a great point, which is informing the consumer about why you decided to go one way or another. And we’re already seeing this. We see some mattress companies that now say here is the pre-tariff pricing. You can still lock it in now because we still have the inventory already landed. But the counterpoint to that, like you’re saying is even if you as a company decide you’re going to stay with China as your source of or country of origin where everything’s made, that is not necessarily a horrible thing.

You may still end up having that be cheaper even after the tariffs than producing it in the United States. So it’s about instilling that confidence in the consumer that they’re still getting a good deal. So I assume there’s going to be a lot more price comparison shopping, but the more that you can lead with sort of what to expect with your customer through the ads, through the landing page, that’s probably going to help.

Sam Tomlinson: 100%. And the other thing you can always do is, you know, I think a lot of brands as you go through, like for instance, we’ve had a lot of ecommerce brands and you start to look at, you know, where does money flow? And one of the first places money flows out of the margin tends to be like those 10%, 15%, 20% pop-up offers.

Well, you can get rid of that offer and if you replace it with something that is more difficult to value, maintain that conversion rate or even improve the conversion rate without having to give it away.

Right? Like Jones Road Beauty is a great example. They have a quiz that they often send people to. There’s not a discount per se, but it reduces it, right? For some brands, we’ve done we’ll preserve an an acre of rainforest. We’ll plant a tree. Do you know planting a tree costs like 32 cents?

Does the customer know that? No. They think they’re doing something great for the environment that’s on brand that supports this. Great. Amazing. Love that so much for you. But for the brand, if it’s a $100 purchase, you went from $10 in margin that just literally went poof out the door to the customer to 32 cents. So you’ve saved $9.68 in margin with no measurable decrease to your marketing efficacy, your customer acquisition, or anything else. Just because you are willing to look at something and be like, is there a way that I can make this 10% or 12% or 15% not as painful?

So, I mean, I’m all about find the opportunity.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, it makes total sense and I mean, I love the idea of standing for something and if it’s about doing good for the environment, that’s great, right?

And it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. We’ve seen great examples too. So you were in Amsterdam for the friends of search. And I think you were even judging, but one of the cases that that won was KLM because they figured out how to take the emissions data and bake that into their smart bidding algorithm so that consumers would buy flights that were better for the environment. And guess what? The ROAS for KLM actually went up.

So they made more money and they did good for the environment, so it doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. I love that idea because we’ve become so used to everybody offers that 10% for just giving your email address. There’s no differentiation in that. And so let’s shift here a little bit because I think the consumer is also going to start asking questions due to the stock market falling like— is this even something I need? So differentiate yourself and and that’s one way to maybe still pull them over the finish line. But what else do you think is going to happen based on you know six seven trillion dollars of value being wiped out. This is money that you know wasn’t in their pocket but like I’m thinking about my safety cushion, a lot of that is also gone. So I make different decisions. How’s that going to impact the different types of sales?

Sam Tomlinson: So I think there’s a couple things you have to look at. There is a very valid point that the vast majority of Americans have very limited or long-term exposure to the stock market.

There is truth, it is not completely true that the economy and the stock market are not exactly the same thing, right? You’re measuring somewhat different things, but they do have impacts. So if you have a customer that’s higher end, that is you are selling luxury watches or higher end vacations or even something like Ridge wallets, just to use a very specific and concrete example that’s a $100 discretionary item, right? Those are people that are probably going to be feeling it more. So I think you need to sell the value more. You need to build more value. And I mean fundamentally the equation of commerce is always the same, right?

It’s the total value versus the total cost. If the total value is higher, you’re going to get more sales. So you know, one way you can increase value is by including more things, by bundling things up, by personalizing the offers more, by tailoring the offers more. Right?

Something that makeup companies have gotten great at, that I think a lot more organizations should take is like this five question quiz. And they’re like here’s this custom thing for you that’s built just for you with all of this stuff. That builds a lot of emotional and psychological value. You know we have cognitive biases. It leans into that but you end up in this position where now somebody looks at this basket of stuff and it’s not a basket of stuff. It’s a basket of their stuff based on what they need and they have. Well, that’s more value. So, when they compare prices— oh, this is all for me and this is this is based on what I’m going to need to make me feel like my best self. Well, the cost doesn’t feel as bad, right?

Conversely, if I were to just be like, here, no leadup, no value building, no explanation. Well, now it’s just like, well, that’s really expensive for face cream because you haven’t done the work. So I think you have to build the value and show people how it will make their life better. I think that’s one.

Number two, it’s obviously moving your messaging as much as you can from features which every brand, every product marketer loves to talk about to benefits, right? Make your product an indispensable part. Apple’s classic example is 100 gigabytes or whatever it was versus a thousand songs in your pocket, right? The 100 gigabytes is a feature. The thousand songs in your pocket is a benefit and the benefit sells.

I think the third one is emotional connectivity, right? People join people. People want to buy from things that reinforce or showcase who they are and what they believe in. Organizations that share their values to the extent that an organization can share your values. Right?

So if you do have a brand position, play it up. If you’re not sure what the emotional connection is or the emotional appeal of your product is, well, now’s a really good time to figure that out because competing on price just got a lot more difficult from a margin perspective. So, the next place to go is like, well, you know, what do you stand for? What is your organization about? Put that front and center. And if you can tie all three of these things together, all the better.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, these are fantastic points. Whatever you stand for, make it real. We saw some great examples where Banana Republic was trying to be the sustainable jene company and it’s like, no, that’s not who you are. I’m not going to buy it. So, be real.

Sam Tomlinson: Every brand can find something that they’re all about, right? Like I mean Shein should not be a sustainable brand, but I’m sure they could be something like, you know what, we make great fashion available to everybody. We believe everybody has the right to get things that look great for them or that fit, that make them feel great or whatever you want to do. That ties into their affordability message. Amazing, right?

I know there’s like that sock company that’s all about giving back. Is that Bombas? They are all about paying it forward. They’re all about giving back, right? That’s a whole thing. You know, Patagonia is obviously all about the outdoors. Harley-Davidson, all about made in America. You can do something like this and you can play it up, but I think as a PPCer, your job in this environment is to think a lot bigger than the ad account. There’s always this temptation I keep hearing. I was just on a call with a potential client and their marketing director was just so about the ad account and at some point you’re like dude you need to take a step back and realize that 80% of the success of your ad account is not in your ad account. It’s in everything else that you’re doing. And are you making those things work? Are you pulling the biggest levers or are you pushing the most convenient levers? Because this is the time to pull the big levers, not the little ones.

Frederick Vallaeys: Another example of that would be a brand that comes in, they don’t have free shipping. And they’re like, hey, we want to compete on PPC and hey, well, Amazon has their free shipping. They probably have a better price. So, what are we going to do for you in PPC? Sure, we can get sales, but you’re going to lose a lot because of your business. You’re going to have to pay for it and until you fix those business issues but PPC is not the silver bullet here.

Totally agree with everything you’re saying. The the other thing you know sustain for something as a brand. I think also you made the example of a face cream and a luxury watch. Like within that spectrum, there’s this notion that in tough economic times, there’s the lipstick indicator. And people want to have small luxuries for themselves. But they they’re going to gravitate towards the things that are more accessible, where it’s like a $20 purchase that’s more accessible than, you know, maybe that $100 or $1,000 purse. So if you as a brand or as an advertiser you have access to that lower cost product, that could be a good way to get in and eventually build that brand loyalty so that when the economy gets better or more certain, then people will buy those more expensive things again. So that’s one thing I think people can do.

Sam Tomlinson: We’ve got one brand now that’s starting out with like some trial kits. They’ve never done those before where they’re taking a few of their SKUs and putting them together into a lower cost bundle. The idea is basically to get you interested, get you kind of hooked on a few and then upsell, which is an easier thing to do versus this. Obviously you could go the other way too and you could do the Fabletics thing where they have a tariff search charge. If you go into their check out, there’s like a little tariff surcharge item that they’ve had on there for a few months. They’re like we’d love to lower your price by this much but we can’t because of the tariffs.

That’s one way to be really transparent about it. It’s like the utility theory on regulation where you show the cost of the cable service or the phone service and you put the little regulatory button at the bottom and you try to get people mad about it so they don’t think you’re up charging.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think that made sense with phone companies because yes, you get mad but you have no other option or back in the day you didn’t have another option. You pay it anyway and you complain with your legislators. But when it comes to Fabletics, sure, now I’m angry, but I’m also like, is Lululemon maybe eating more of that because this is ultimately another thing, right? Like not the whole cost of the tariff has to be passed on to the consumer. And what I’m hearing is, well, Foxcon is going to bear some of that burden. So, they’re going to lower the wages of the people working in the factory building the iPhone and then Apple’s going to not take a 40% margin. They’re going to reduce that. But everything gets split up. And so from a consumer perspective, it’s super interesting because now it’s like, well, if I have options and Fabletics is clearly saying, well, the consumer, you’re paying it, then I’m going to go somewhere else because I want you to share that with me.

Sam Tomlinson: Yeah. 100%. And I think, you know, we have some some brands that we’ve been talking to and one of them is taking a pretty big hit on the tariffs. I mean they’re upside down on some stuff that’s already on the water. I think that’s the that’s the unintended consequence of this policy. For instance there’s a brand that I know of that has several containers on the water. They were launched back in end of March. They will be landing in port at the end of April, about 45-day period but the products on those containers are sold. They are pre-purchased at a certain price and with an additional 75 points on the cogs and margin on the products. So when those land and they pay the tariff, they will have lost money on every single sale they made.

Frederick Vallaeys: And they literally don’t know what the tariff will be on the day that it arrives.

Sam Tomlinson: They are better off you know potentially refunding the customer versus delivering the product.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so that’s a bit similar to the supply chain issues that we saw 5 years ago. Back then it was also like the the shipping containers doubled in price. But it was quite interesting because that meant that for something really large, like a dishwasher, you can only put say 100 dishwashers in a container. So the the extra cost due to shipping was much higher, right? Whereas if you put 10,000 light bulbs on that same container while you could split the cost between the 10,000 light bulbs. I mean they’re cheaper product but maybe that was better. Now it’s a tariff on basically everyone and so the supply chains are definitely going to react.

Sam Tomlinson: There’s all that and then I think I mean the other thing that we’re looking at really specifically is like where can we make our marketing work better? Can we create more moments around this? Can we push to your point earlier like the stuff that we already have in warehouse can we accelerate revenue? Can we cut costs? Can we create new holidays? Can we lean on our current customers more? Can we do more email or SMS? Can we improve conversion rates on the site?

The idea is basically not to use like a moneyball quote but we can’t there is no single point for almost any of our clients where we can make up, for instance, on China 104% on the cogs which would be effectively for most of those brands, anywhere from an additional 25 to an additional 30% of margin. We don’t have it but what we can do is scrape out 20% if we crush everything And if we can reduce CAC, if we can trim OPEX, if we can chill out customer service costs, if we can do all these things, we can trim out 20%, we can raise prices maybe 5 or 10%. And we can come out at a point where, like you said, it’s shared pain, but at the very least, it’s not catastrophic.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Now you mentioned you mentioned negotiating with your SaaS vendor. But I’m sure people are coming to you as well and saying okay well listen we have an agency cost and it’s x dollars and hey there’s a Gen AI. Could we maybe let go of some of the people working on my accounting and can you put more tools in place for that? How do you respond to that?

Sam Tomlinson: I mean positively, right? We are already proactively doing that for a lot of brands. We’re already trying to do as much as we can to to keep their costs reasonable because I mean, number one, it’s just the right thing to do, right? No matter if this was happening or not, I would say the right thing to do is to deliver as much value as you possibly can to the client because that’s whatmwe’re in the business of doing.

I’m a firm believer that if you do right by clients, you’ll end up fine. And at the very least you’ll be able to sleep at night. So I’ll just do right by clients. It’s easier.

Number two, you know, work with them on payment terms. Right. The other thing that we haven’t touched on that’s absolutely crippling is cash. Because all these brands now, to your point, they don’t know what the tariffs are. So you need to have more cash on hand than you’d prefer to in order to deal with the fact that you may need to stroke the US customs a much larger check. So if you as a provider can say— hey, look, instead of net 15, I’ll give you net 60. Well, that’s basically an interest free loan to them that lets them build up their cash reserves. I mean, yeah, you’re going to float the interest cost, but the interest cost to float that is amount to nothing.

Compared to losing the revenue as an agency or as a service provider, right? The cost of losing that customer is many thousands of dollars. The costs of floating $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month for an additional 30 days at 4%, 5%. Who cares? You’re talking about 50 bucks or 500 bucks a year, but it’s not even that, right? You can help them immensely because now they have an extra 10 grand available in this hypothetical scenario for handling this. You get paid a little bit later, but you know, that’s a way you can help them out.

The other way is you want to work with them. Um, you know, reduce fees for a few months. Obviously, my recommendation is always, you know, keep it defined. It’s a three-month reduction of fees for this amount or whatever until the situation blows over.

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, totally agree. Back to what we had five years ago, right, where we had customers highly uncertain times and and we just said, “Listen, you still need a tool to be efficient. Even though you’re asking us to potentially cancel, why don’t we give it to you for a couple of months and get through this?” and you’ll be happy.

You’ll have saved your business. At least the cost for the tool is not one more stressor that you really shouldn’t be having to deal with. And it builds a lot of goodwill and it builds the brand. So, totally agree with you on those things.

Sam Tomlinson: I would say my other advice is always just be proactive. I mean, most agencies, if you’re working with a client, you kind of know when they’re getting hit. It’s a good thing to just reach out and be like, “Hey, know you’re probably getting hit. Would love to talk about how we can help you, what do you need in order to make sure that you can weather this? Like we’re here to be a resource to you because then you’re controlling the narrative. You’re the one that’s coming to them versus them coming to you and saying, “Hey, we’re trying to cancel.” And you going back and being like, “Well, what if we did this?”.

If you’re proactive and you’re like, “Hey, the answer might be we need to do something.” And that’s fine, then you do. But at least then you’re the one that’s been that’s controlling the conversation a little bit.

Frederick Vallaeys: I like your analytical perspective there and just actually calculating the cost of the interest by extending payment and it’s really sometimes not that much, right?

Just like the example of planting a tree, if you get creative, there’s many low cost solutions that position you in great light that help your customer, that drive value. So that’s all we can do.

Thank you for um sharing some of that perspective, Sam. Always super useful. Where should people connect with you?

Sam Tomlinson: I’m on Twitter all the time @digitalsam. As you mentioned I do write a newsletter every week. That’s um ddl.media or samtolinson.me. You can sign up on either one. It goes to the same place. LinkedIn I check once in a while. But yeah, would love to talk. I can ever be helpful. Always happy to help.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. Well, thank you, Sam. Thanks everyone for watching and we’ll be back with another episode soon. If you want to get notified, do subscribe and thanks again. We’ll see you on the next one.