In this candid vlog, Ben Sharf walks viewers through a day in the life of his rapidly scaling Shopify agency in New York. He discusses high‑stakes sales calls with major brands like Vitamin Shoppe and Pure Hockey, the difficulty of designing digestible retainer and outcome‑based pricing plans, and the grind of "clip farming" short video content for social media. Ben explains his strategy of building relationships with consumer‑focused investors to generate deal flow and provide value to both investors and their portfolio brands. He shares the concept of an "overflow agency" for low‑budget clients, outlines the agency’s operational cadence (2‑3 large builds per month, 120‑150 day timelines, ongoing CRO retainers), and reflects on the emotional roller‑coaster of agency life—angry customers, hiring challenges, and the need for relentless content creation. The vlog also features a mentorship call with a viewer from Australia, highlighting Ben’s willingness to guide newer agency founders. Throughout, Ben emphasizes confidence, value exchange, and incremental improvement as the core mindset for scaling a $3 M agency.
Chapters
Dude, that was the chief brand officer of Vitamin Shoppe. You just gotta fucking sell the dream. We need to build retainer plans. Trying to put them together in a way that is like digestible is really fucking complicated. I don't know how to respond to this, but I'm honestly just like sick of dealing with him. Oh dude, the agency life is hard sometimes. Okay, what are we doing right now? What are we doing right now? We're filming, we're clip farming actually. Adam's gonna ask me a bunch of questions and we're gonna film a bunch of shorts and then just pump them all over the place. What's the plan for the rest of the day? Oh, what's the plan for the rest of the day? We have some big sales calls today. We're pitching some big brands actually, which I'm excited about. Pure Hockey, which is a mega brand that I used to shop at every day when I was a kid playing hockey. Vitamin Shoppe, I'm sure you guys have heard of that company. And then a couple others that aren't as big but still equally as exciting. You ready for the sales calls though? You always gotta be ready. Always be selling. Selling doesn't stop. You're always marketing, you're always selling your business. It's important. Everyone you meet needs to know what you do. We build websites. This can be enough. I'm hit by a wave of boredom. It's just to get that thought. How was the clip farming? It was efficient today. I think we got some good clips. So how was the meeting? How'd it go? Was it worth it? Uh, yeah, that guy was an absolute savage. He has been investing in consumer for like the last decade, knows everyone in the industry, and it was again like a value exchange conversation. Like, I have a lot of people he should meet that he doesn't know, get a lot of deal flow that he'd be interested in, and he also is going to start sending brands to me. It's very simple. We just sit down, have a coffee, talk about overlap and what we're seeing in the industry, become friends, and over time, hopefully we'll start doing deals together. Thanks so much. Have a good one. Bye. Dude, you missed the best soundbite. She was like, it's so great to see people who like understand the nuances of what we do in our industry and blah blah blah. Dude, that was the chief brand officer of Vitamin Shoppe. You just got to fucking sell the dream. You don't always have all the answers, but if you operate with confidence and conviction, you can just like exert an energy where they trust you. And we work with other supplement brands. It's a very early conversation that needs to be figured out, but they are one of the biggest giants in their— in the industry. Here's a hack. Find investors who invest in your target customers and become best friends with them and add value to them. Let me explain that to you. I love meeting with consumer investors, so people who invest in consumer brands, because I will meet with them and there's a value exchange there. I can send them new brands that are raising money because I get to see all the numbers and I talk to the founders so I can provide deal flow to them. I can also provide a service to these investors for their brands. So I'm going to go meet with this guy, tell him what Platter does, and I'm sure he has one or two brands in his portfolio who need work on their e-commerce website. So I want to generate more leads by building these relationships. So I spend a lot of time meeting with as many consumer brand investors as I can to open up that channel of communication so I can send them deal flow and they can send me brands that I can work with. Because the other thing you have to remember is that if we do good work with their portfolio brands, it makes them look like a more value-add investor. So it's all just positioning and value creation for both sides. What did you just say? Break my fucking laptop in half. I'm sitting here trying to build pricing plans for literally 4 hours unsuccessfully. Good. What, what's, what's the problem here? We need to build retainer plans. When you offer a service that is like outcome-based and one that's hourly-based, like trying to put 'em together in a way that is like digestible is really fucking complicated. I don't even want to fucking film this. I just like, I'm just angry. Um, okay, well then I, yeah, I don't know how to respond to this, but I'm honestly just like sick of dealing with him. I never do mentoring calls or coaching calls, but this was the first person that has ever reached out to me from a YouTube video asking if I'd be willing to mentor him because he's also working on Shopify agency but is based in Australia, is a lot earlier in his journey, and wants to just ask questions, better understand. So I decided that I would do one call because he was the first person to do it. And with the YouTube channel that only has 1,000 subscribers, I respect his courage to just ask because closed mouths don't get fed. So I'm gonna jump on a call with him and see how I can be helpful.
Ben, how are you?
I'm good, dude. How are you? And I want to include you in the next video right now. Yeah, dude, my videographer's right here.
How you going?
You could just, just tell the camera how you found me.
I found you through your amazing LinkedIn profile, and, uh, you promoted the boxing video. I used to box, so I was like, wow, this is going to be interesting. I want to see someone that's never boxed, uh, do some amateur boxing. And then I got even better value by getting insights on how a platinum Shopify agency is run in the US. The thing which I would think about with you, and this is just something I'm floating, if you ever needed an overflow agency, which basically if a client is just too crappy for you, like they're just like that guy on the phone that was like, oh, you know, I can't pay that retainer, but you still don't want to lose that client or you want to have a good partner agency to refer to or still clip them in some way. Some deal we work out, we're happy to take any overflow.
We definitely get a lot of leads that are just under budget for what we'll touch. I think one of the natural progressions of an agency and a service business, you still have finite amount of time you can offer people because you're trading time for money, right? So I'll give you an example. We right now, we do like 2 to 3 new builds per month. Most of them are doing anywhere from $3 to $100 million, and a build takes like 120 to 150 days. Because we're doing full analytics of their old website, full strategy, full design, full development for full QA, onboarding, etc. And then we have a retainer practice for a lot of those brands who are like ongoing CRO work post-implementation. But there's brands that come to us who need sites that are just way below the budget we'll touch. And the reason I say that is because if we sign a brand to do a build that's very cheap, not only are you reducing the amount of revenue you're making, but that's an opportunity that could have been allocated elsewhere, right? So now it's like there's two sides to the problem. It's like I just said yes to a really low deal and now I can't put those people on a really big deal. But of course, like, there's the cold start problem where like you need enough deal flow to be able to increase your prices, to be able to walk away from shit. And it's always like the hardest part is always the beginning because you have no credibility. People don't know who you are. But when you start to get a lot of customers and you do good work, they start referring new customers. You just build deeper relationships with like referral partners and it kind of just compounds. Oh dude, the agency life is hard sometimes. It's undeniable. It's like you have angry customers, you have people that are— you lose candidates you're trying to hire, you meet with billion-dollar brands. Like, it's like so up and down. It's, it's the natural progression of just like building the business. But I mean, that's why you do it, right? Like, that is the fun part of the game. It's like the highs are highs, the lows are lows. You need to have a sick bone in your body to be a founder to begin with. So you might as well just lean in and embrace it. But then it's cool to like, you know, meet other people like that that came from the YouTube channel. Just like with anything else, man, brick by brick, you just got to keep building, put the content out there, share your story with the world. And it's really fucking cool to like see these things all materialize. It's starting to work. I mean, look, the game plan is just to continue sticking with it week after week, putting out videos, getting 1% better every single time. But I got to get back to work because it is going to be a late frickin night tonight. I hope you guys enjoyed this vlog. If you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below, and we'll see you guys next week.
