How I Scaled & 'Exited' My 7-figure Agency At 29-Years Old

Every agency owner dreams of one day scaling to $100,000 a month and having a team to run the day to day operations without them. But the problem is most agency owners don't know how to get there. You know you need more clients, you know you need a better team. And deep down you also know that you need to become a better leader. In this video I'm going to share with you how I've been able to scale my agency to seven figures in just under two years. And how I've been able to exit my agency and have it continue running without me so that I can now all my time and attention on scaling our education business. By the way, my name is Brian Moncada. I'm the founder of Adspend.com, the most sought after YouTube ads agency in the entire info marketing industry. But it didn't start here. So let me take you back to the very beginning. It all started about five and a half years ago now, where I was actually working full time for a popular marketer who was my first mentor who taught me the ropes of advertising and marketing. And I worked for him full time at a job because I knew that that I had to work to learn, not to earn. You see, I understood the fact that I had to learn the skills I was missing in order to become the person I wanted to be. The next thing that happened was where the light bulb moment went off when I was working for this mentor. He always kept telling me masterminds are the reason why I'm successful. I owe all of my success to masterminds. Bringing together a group of people where we're all sharing information to scale our businesses and our lives. And I heard that so many times on enough to the point where I said I need to join a mastermind because if I want to make more money at this job or in general, I have to learn what it is that I don't know and be around other people that want to have a similar business to me eventually. So I actually flew out to Toronto, Canada for the very first time during my birthday to attend my first Mastermind event. And at that Mastermind on day one when I was introducing myself, my life changed forever. I was there in front of a hundred other people in the room and I said, my name is Brian Moncada. I'm currently running ads for this person and I want to lear to build my own fitness business on the side. And the coach who was running the mastermind, my first business coach Vince Del Monte, in front of everybody, said at that moment, he said, I'll tell you right now, man, you got to cut the fitness stuff off. And it was dead silent in the room. No one said anything. And I was just like, what? What's up? I came all the way over here to learn how to build, do this fitness stuff. And then he pulled me aside at lunch and he said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I don't know, I'm a little bit confused. I came here to learn how to build this fitness business on the side from you because that's what you're teaching in this mastermind. But you don't think I should do that. He goes, well, dude, do you want to be, you know, selling how to build bigger biceps when you're 35? And honestly, at that point, I never thought about that far ahead. Right? I didn't think that far along. And what he really said after that was, what I'm really saying, Brian, is you're skipping over dollar bills to chase pennies. You are the one who runs ads for this big name marketer spending thousands of dollars a day online, scaling his business and his companies with advertising. That's a skill that everybody in this room doesn't have but needs in their business. From someone like, you go all in on this YouTube ad stuff, man, I need that. And I definitely know that you can build a business around that here because you can teach it, too. Even though at that moment I didn't really want to listen to what he was saying, I took some time to think about it. And I realized this is the way for me to make a name for myself, to go all in on the skill I already had and learned and was doing for this one person and take that skill and make it into a business, into an agency. And that mastermind changed my life forever. Because if I hadn't gone to that Mastermind, that light bulb moment would have never happened. And I wouldn't be sitting in front of you here today saying all the things that I'm saying, being at the place where I'm at. But of course, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I may have made the commitment to go all in, but I had to learn the hard way through trial and error. And so, although I kept my job until I was able to have enough money coming on the side with my agency, you know, I didn't know how much to charge. I didn't know what to price myself. At the very first client I signed who wasn't my official job, they were paying me $1,000 a month. And at that time, I was like, oh, man, this is a lot of money. Like, the reality was I was undercharging, and I didn't know what I didn't know. But I was able to scale to $30,000 a month eventually, just by myself, with a few clients, about four or five clients at that time, and I was able to work my way up to charging about $5,000 a month per client. Pretty cool. Now, keep in mind, at this point, I was a solopreneur, okay? I was doing everything by myself. Finance, accounting, customer service, running the ads, getting clients, marketing, everything, okay? But I had a really cool lifestyle, too. I was having fun. I was making a lot more money than I've ever made in my entire life. However, you know, I couldn't help but think at that time, how long is this going to last? How long can I keep doing this by myself? And more importantly, 10 years from now, do I want to still be doing this by myself? Is that going to be even fun? And that thought just kept crippling me every night. I realized at that moment that if I don't think bigger, right, if I don't go big and really go all in and push all my chips onto the table here and try to go for broke, I'm always going to be at risk of having to do everything by myself forever. And it was at that moment that I knew I had to build a company. I had to hire a team. I had to build a brand. And so that's when I shifted from solopreneur to becoming a business owner. That's when I started hiring my first team members. And quickly after I started hiring, we actually scaled to $100,000 a month in about a year. Okay? Now, the reason why this happened was because not only did I go from being a solopreneur, I also started building a legitimate brand. I bought the domain. Adspend.com was for a steal of $5,000 at that time. And I built a company around it. Not around myself, not me, but around adspend.com. it's a brand now. It's bigger than me. And so that was able to allow me to attract the right talent, the right people who wanted to work for a company who saw the vision of where we were going. This is the domino that allowed us to scale to $100,000 a month. I started hiring the right team. My mindset changed, and I was able to get support. So I wasn't doing everything by myself anymore. Now, one of the very first hires I ever made. Who's still with me to this day was one of my best friends, Nick Grapondo, who now runs operations for our company today. I met him actually in college, freshman year, rushing the same fraternity. And ultimately he actually reached out to me after seeing what I was building with adspend.com and seeing it become a brand and knowing that how much money I was helping clients make that he wanted to be a part of it. So I was actually marketing myself and my company on my social media and naturally people were starting to pay attention who were in my network. So much so that he reached out to me and said, hey man, like I kind of want to come do something bigger, right? I kind of want to. I kind of want to join forces. I see what you're doing, I want to help you. And at that time, again, I was doing everything by myself. I just needed someone to give the work to who can learn the business so I can focus on sales and marketing and really scaling this thing instead of doing the day to day operations and the manual labor. So he actually flew off from California to Arizona to spend two weeks with me. We worked every single day, day in and day out. And I taught him everything he needed to know about the business, how the agency was running, how I was helping clients, how to run YouTube ads day in and day out. And he actually got really good, really fast. So much so that I was able to offload all of the fulfillment to him and the operations to him so I could focus on taking sales calls, doing sales calls, making sales calls, doing sales calls, and I was growing through sales. But then it got to a point where me and him was no was not going to be enough anymore. We had too much work, we had to hire somebody else. So we hired another media buyer still doing full time sales and marketing. We had two people now. Then we hired another media buyer. The reason why we hire these people again, keep in mind, I'm not posting on job boards or like spamming people on dms of will you come work with me? All I'm doing is tapping into my network. The second person we hired was another person that I already knew who actually was working and at my previous job. And I said, yo dude, why don't you just come do what you're doing there for us, Vision, where we're going company and how you can be a part of it, right? So I was selling them on the opportunity and how much more fun it would be because the reality is people don't just want to come work for you because of the money. They want to come work for you because of your vision, your mission, and your values. And at that time, they weren't as clear as they are now, which we'll get into later. But it's still important you have that as a CEO and. And as a founder of your business. A big vision. It's not a lifestyle for you to be selfish anymore. It's bigger than you. And that's why I was able to attract my friends to come work for me and work with me to build this thing together, as opposed to everybody doing it by themselves, stuck at their own house, working solo. And so we hired from my network, and I was able to bring on a few more media buyers as well. And quickly after that, we were able to scale to $100,000 a month based off word of mouth and referrals and getting great results for clients, which is the next part that I want to talk about. We didn't run any paid ads. We didn't do any cold outreach. All I did was post on my personal brand on Facebook and Instagram and get great results for clients. That's how we scaled to $100,000 a month, focusing on the client experience and the client results. Now, of course, it wasn't perfect. We did churn clients. I will admit that it's never perfect. I learned a lot of lessons along the way. But we did it through pure hard work and actually caring about the clients we were working with. So much so that all of our business came from people referring us to more people. Our clients became our best salesmen, and that became a core value of our company because we saw it happen. One person introduced me to 12 clients. The next person introduced me to seven clients. And we just started growing through word of mouth and referrals, which was amazing. To be able to scale to $100,000 a month of word of mouth and referrals is unheard of. But we did go to 100k a month because we were no longer charging, you know, $3,000 a month or $1,000 back when I first started. Right. We started upping our prices because I had more team members. I had to pay them salaries, and I had to pay myself as well. So I had to charge more for the labor we had. We went from charging $5,000 a month to $7,500 a month, then to $10,000 a month. And now at this point, we charge $15,000 a month to 01. Work with us. At the bare minimum. Again, it was stepping stones, by the way. So not only did we hire more team members, not only did we grow through word of mouth and referrals, but we also upped our prices to make up for the extra headcount and to be able to scale to $100,000 a month a lot quicker. We didn't need as many clients because we were able to charge more for our services. Does that make sense? And when I say it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, trust me, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. The people that we hired out of everybody we hired at that point in the business, the mistake we made, and this is very, very key, the mistake I made was I scaled through fulfillment. I didn't scale through sales and marketing. You see, I had the luxury of being able to be introduced to more people who wanted to work with us. So much so it clouded my judgment that this is a never ending acquisition system. We're always going to be continuing to get more people who want to work with us randomly and all the time. That's a big mistake. Because what ended up happening was there would be lulls in the marketing and lulls in the agency where clients would leave, clients would not pay us, right? Or no new clients would be coming in. Yet I had this team to pay and all of them were just focused on fulfillment. Running the ads for the clients, doing the service for the clients, executing on the operations. I was still the only person doing sales and marketing, which is a big problem, because if I don't work, if I don't post, if I don't talk to people, there's no new revenue being made for the the business. You see the problem there? We scaled through fulfillment. We hired a bunch of people to do the work before we scaled the ads or the marketing to actually create a predictable, repeatable way to get new clients that didn't depend on me. That would allow us to be able to confidently get more leads and clients for the business. So that was the big mistake I made. The lesson for you here is if you're someone who's wanting to hire more people, someone who wants to scale your agency, you have to make sure you have a predictable, repeatable way to get new clients that doesn't depend on you. Because if you don't do that and instead you just keep hiring more people to fulfill on the services, before you have that figured out, you're going to run into the same unfortunate mistake and lesson that I had to learn the hard way. The friends I hired, I had to let a few of them go. And that was a very tough and hard conversation. One of the friends that I actually brought on too actually ended up leaving too. They went to go back to their other job before they, you know, before they even came to work on to me. They went back to their old job. And it was a tough lesson. I learned because I realized at that point that I'm not as good as I thought I was. I'm not as good as a leader, I mean, as I need to be. It was a big mistake and I, I learned that mistake. And now looking back, in hindsight, it was as obvious as day. But sometimes you have to go through, through those mistakes. And so I had to fire, I had to make hard conversations at that point and just really look at the numbers of the business and say, is this efficient and is this working out? And it wasn't. And so we had to make some hard decisions. But in that process, I also learned how to make the model better. Okay, so we reduced the team size. We gave more work to the people that were filling on the work more and wanted them and wanted to do the work. And we just simply gave them more work, paid them more, and the service kept running as it was. And I've now been able to bring on a proper leadership team to handle the different aspects of the business. We have a operations manager for the operations department. We have a client success director for the fulfillment team, and we have a accountant and you know, everybody we need on the leadership team to be able to run the agency without needing me. We have someone in sales and we have marketing. I'll still do marketing for us. That's where I'm at. But fulfillment wise, I'm completely out of the business. And I'm proud to say that because I've hired the team but brought on the team that's better at me at the things that I was doing all by myself so that they can give a better experience and better results to our clients, which makes for a better service, which makes for a red carpet customer experience. Now this also costed more. You can't be cheap here. This costs more, especially to bring on the right talent. And the way to bring on the right talent is you have to develop a clear mission, vision and core values for your company. And I really want to stress this, do not overlook this part. Please do not skip this. A clear mission, a clear vision and clear core values. That's how I've been able to exit my agency and bring on the talent who's better at me to do the things that I'm not the best at. So I can focus now all my time and attention on the things I want to do. Creating content like I am right now, scaling the education business, coaching my clients inside of the Mastermind and our coaching businesses. That's what I love doing. And I'm now in the point where I can do it because I brought on the right team. But the only way I was able to do that is by having a big vision, bigger than me, way bigger than myself. Probably something I'll never be able to accomplish in this lifetime. But it's so big that it attracts the superstars, it attracts the A players. It gets them excited. So excited they want to be a part of it. So excited that they have a mission that we're fighting for day in and day out to get. Get closer to our goals, which is to create entertaining ads that educate the world to make better decisions. Because you and I both know it's not about the money. Yes, of course, in the initial stages, it is, but once you have enough money, it becomes, what's the end goal? Why am I really doing this? Why am I waking up every single day struggling and fighting through these struggles, these problems, these issues? Why. Why is my. Why is this so important to me? And I realize it's so important to me because what changed my life was courses, coaching programs, and masterminds. I literally told you the light bulb moment went off in a mastermind, which allowed me to be here today. And so now we give back to people just like my younger self with the products we sell for our clients day in and day out. And we know that our ads have the power to impact someone who was just as young as me today and get them to click, to get them to convert, to pay for a course, to pay for a coaching program, or to join a mastermind to change their lives forever. Because we're fighting a war right now, whether we want to believe it or not. And this is why the vision, the mission and values are so important, because this is what I believe at my core root. Okay? We are fighting a war right now for attention. And the mass media is fighting against us to control our thoughts, to control our life, to program us to think things that shouldn't be right are right. And I don't want to speak on it more than that, but you can probably take a guess at where I'm at, right? You can probably take a look at the media and seeing what's being preached to your kids, to your family, and how they're trying to mess some things up. That aren't really supposed to be messed up. And I don't agree with that. And so our mission here is to fight back against the mass media that's our enemy. Okay? And that's why I've been able to attract the team I have because I've been able to sell them on joining forces with me to fight this enemy together and to do it in a way that's fun and where we can all grow together. Because our core value here@adspend.com is team. Together, everyone achieves more. You want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Together, everyone achieves more. And so we have our core values listed out every Monday. Everybody repeats the core values. If you miss it, everyone on the team has to do push ups. It's a very fun culture. The point being, your vision, your mission and your values are so key if you ever want to build a team and scale to 100k a month, because you can do it by yourself through blood, sweat and tears. But I promise you, if you get there by yourself, you're going to have a lot of stress, a lot of heartache and you're probably going to hate your life. But if you build a team that can take care of the day to day operations for you, just like I have, you'll be at a place where you can finally breathe again and say, now I can focus on what I really want to work on next or how I really want to grow this thing to the next level. And that's a place, my friend, that I hope you can get to one day. And I hope that this video was able to give you a clear blueprint through my story to be able to do it yourself. Just like I have to get to this place where I'm at today. So now that I'm here, what's next? Well, like I mentioned the beginning of this video, I'm now focused on scaling. Our education business agency was always the stepping stone for me to be able to create a business that successful, successful seven figures, to create a leadership team and to be able to exit it myself so I can focus on the next thing, which is scaling through education and impacting more people, more agency owners, just like myself, my younger self, who wished I had all these learning lessons before so I could have avoided all the sleepless nights, the trial, the errors, all of those things that I've had to learn the hard way myself by teaching it to the people that are wanting to learn it themselves as well. And now I'm coaching them through our masterminds and our coaching programs. And yeah, I'm able to to do that confidently because I have the team in place now. So that's what my focus is. And it didn't happen overnight. You know, it's been almost four years now next March to get here, but it's been a fun ride and I wouldn't have done it any other way. So if you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. And if you want more content just like this one, I want to encourage you to click this link right here to actually watch. Now that you know how to build a team and scale to 100k a month, how do you actually land whale clients? How do you build a personal brand? And how do you speed up the process of being able to close more clients and grow your brand to be able to attract more of the right team members as well? Click this video. It shows you our exact process to land whale clients and build a personal brand, just like we have@adspend.com and I'll see you there.