Most agencies are trying to escape referrals, but Joe Rinaldi thinks that is backwards, because referrals were never the problem, the missing piece is an actual plan to create more of them. He sits down with Adam Weil to make the case for never selling, building community, and giving so much away for free that the work comes looking for you.
Overview
About Episode
Joe Rinaldi has spent his career around studio-sized agencies, as the biz dev guy at Happy Cog in its celebrity-agency years and now as a consultant who has worked with more than 90 of them. So while the industry tries to escape referrals, Joe runs the other way. Referrals were never the problem, he tells Adam Weil. Almost no agency has a plan to make more of them, so most owners just wait super hard, and great work stops being enough once your need outgrows your inbound.
His answer catches people off guard, because it is to never sell. You show up in community, you give things away, and you treat business development like a verb instead of a noun you sit on. Joe walks through the math he believes in, where you can't make one person 100% more likely to hire you, but you can make a hundred people 5% more likely to think of you when they need what you do, and over a year or two that becomes actual client work.
Joe and Adam swap real examples too, the content spreadsheet Happy Cog dressed up and gave clients for free, the biotech resource guide that grew into an AI-powered quiz, the iPhone templates Teehan+Lax dropped after every Apple launch. The thread through all of it is generosity over urgency and abundance over fear, the kind of partner energy from day minus one instead of begging for work. Stick around for where Joe thinks the strongest small agencies are heading, a tight ride-or-die core wrapped in a membrane of brilliant partners.
Guest Bio
Joe Rinaldi is the founder of Clutch and a partner at Pine Works, a design and development studio in Philadelphia. For two decades he has lived in and around studio-sized agencies, the small and mighty teams trying to grow without turning business development into a soulless outbound machine.
His way in was always relationships. He founded PhilaMade, a creative community in Philadelphia, helped get the Bureau of Digital off the ground, and learned business development on the job at Happy Cog during its run as one of the original celebrity agencies. Through Clutch he has since helped more than 90 agencies, design studios, and dev shops build sales and business development they can actually live with.