Building a $20k/mo HubSpot Consulting Agency in 180 Days (Marketing Agency, Client Ascension)

What's up everybody? I got Connor here. What's up Connor? How you doing?

I'm excellent. How are you?

Good, good. So Connor, you're in client ascension. Would you be able to share with everybody kind of where you started before you joined and then where you are now?

Yeah. So I effectively started at zero and started the agency about six and a half, seven months ago and I pretty much reset all of my consulting stuff, wanted to consolidate into one thing and that was HubSpot marketing and sales operations. So when I started the agency I was at zero and then got my first client at 7k a month within about 4 weeks. So and they've, they've still been with us this whole time. So lifetime value on that client is like pushing 70k at this point. And yeah, then it's pretty much off to the races from there. I've had some clients since then and then yeah, within about 6 months got to 20k a month.

Nice, good stuff. So you do like HubSpot stuff. Could you walk everybody through what you do in your service and what you do for clients?

Yeah, so it's HubSpot marketing and sales operations. So the way that I like to explain it is we manage like the supply chain of marketing, sales and customer success in a lot of cases. So all of that backend stuff that enables those teams to work efficiently, we manage so reporting automations, segmentation, overall CRM, cleanup, pretty much everything that you would think of when it comes to marketing and sales except like the customer or lead facing work. Right. So no content creation, we don't send the actual emails but we'll build them, we'll build templates, all the stuff that enables those teams to do their work.

Yeah. So you signed a 7k a month client, you're at about 20k a month now. And that's, that's obviously a result of working with high quality clients.

Right.

So if we looked at like, I mean you don't have to share the number but like total like in, in the six months you've done this is probably somewhere in the range of like maybe like a quarter million dollars of revenue.

Let's see. So we, I hit it was 96k in about, in the first five months and then yeah, looking at the deals for this year. Yeah, probably closer to like 160, 170, I think in about, in about six and a half months.

Yeah. So you basically went from a zero dollar company to a multi six figure company in a, in a six month time and.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I reset I reset everything. And that was the, that was the intent. Right. Is to start from zero. Take a very like hyper practical approach to growing a business, you know, following you and everyone else on the team and yeah, it's worked well so far.

Hey, real quick, if you want to build a 10,000 to $50,000 per month profit agency and get results like Connor here in this video, I'm going to leave a link in the description client ascension.com we will build your client acquisition system, fix your ops, fix your offer, guarantee that you get the results or we give you a full refund. I'm going to leave a link to the description in there. Go to that page. It's going to explain our whole offer. You're going to see a whole bunch of other client results back to the video. Yeah. So like obviously you went through a learning curve in the first six months.

Right.

So it took a lot of like maybe unlearning some things you thought were true before and then like implementing the stuff that's inclined ascension. So if you, if you took like, like imagine that six months and you're probably seeing this now, like it's all at the end you start to get like the best results. So like it's probably happening to you right now and now take that six months, don't double it. Where do you think you'll be after another six months from now?

So the goal for at least for this year is to get to 350k in revenue. So we're, I'd say probably about almost a third a quarter of the way there right now. So yeah, that's, that's essentially the goal for this year is to get a 50 to 100% increase from revenue over last year.

Yeah, yeah, you're easily, you'll, you'll probably hit that.

Could you got some good stuff in the pipeline that should make it happen.

Could you share with everybody kind of just like a broad overview of. Because like obviously we teach acquiring customers inside Client Ascension. So like a broad overview of like how you are acquiring customers.

Yeah, so it's a combination of a few things. One is cold email. So I have learned a lot about cold email through Client Ascension. So that's copywriting with Christian or like deliverability and just building audiences from Nick and just how to, you know, how to find that right fit between the angle that you're going after and the audience that you're targeting. That's been a huge thing. Cold email have gotten some deals from client essential referrals. So just people in the community that's probably netted, I don't know, probably at least 15k in revenue just from people saying, hey, this is the HubSpot guy with inclined ascension and have gotten a few warm leads and I think one deal from Twitter. So I also, I created a brand new Twitter account when I started the agency as well and I've grown to about 1500 followers in that time. So yeah, I've gotten some leads through there. So it's a mixture of those channels. Yeah.

And this year doing the content marketing now you're posting shorts and everything.

Yeah, I got to get system going. Yeah. Working with some. Someone inclined ascension to help out with the shorts and. Yeah, just that system around video, Twitter thread giveaway, like all of that. Creating that system, there's such a tangible connection to the value that you get and the audience growth.

Yeah. So this is like the entire premise of what I'm trying to show people inside and like obviously is working, is creating systems around client acquisition. Because like what happens if somebody's maybe they're running like a consulting business or some kind of like marketing agency or any kind of B2B company and they're at, I don't know, like 5k a month or like less than 10k a month in revenue. It feels like a grind to acquire customers. And it's like a scattered operation where you really just like only do what you feel like doing. But what we do is show people how to make like a mechanized structural system to do it, where it's basically just check this box, check this box, check this box, check this box, and then like just check the boxes every single day for months on end. And then you just arise to a situation exactly like yours right now at 20k a month.

Yeah. And that speaks to what I was doing beforehand too, because I've been doing on and off consulting for a long time. And a lot of my previous clients came through LinkedIn. And it wasn't like I wasn't doing much outbound on there. It would just be like I would get messages every now and then, but it was always correlated with when I would post. Right. So if I posted more consistently, which I was doing a lot of last year, I would get more inbound messages of people interested in working with me. But it was very sporadic. Right. Or if I happen to come across someone on LinkedIn that I think would be a good fit, or they posted something that was relevant, I'd message them. But there was no system around it. Right. It was just, oh, it comes in when it comes in and that's great when it does. And fortunately I had a pretty high close rate at that time, but there was, there was no system around it, so there was no, there was no scale there. Like I couldn't predict anything. And I was doing all different kinds of consulting work. So it made growing that business pretty challenging.

Yeah, I feel like the reason why people, they won't ever kind of make a system around it is because if someone engages in something for the first time during a testing period, they don't know if it's going to work. So you have to go through this series of iterations where it's like, try this, doesn't work. Try this, try this, try this, try this. And then what happens is if you have no context as to what actually does work on that channel, you just quit it because you just make the assumption that it's not going to work for you. So, like, not something like client ascension is. We have all these different channels that we operate systematically. So like Twitter, LinkedIn, cold email, YouTube. And you basically just get to skip the line of the testing period where it's like, no, just do this, just check this box every single day. And like, I promise it's going to work. I in fact guarantee you it's going to work or I'm going to give you a refund.

Yeah, yeah. And like, I think a big part of it too, for a lot of people when you're just on your own is like, there is that there's a huge mental barrier of executing because you're like, oh, you may be a marketer and you may know, like, oh, I know I need to do xyz, write content a certain way or do it on certain channels. But there's a huge mental barrier of like, even if you come up with a system on your own to do it, there's that fear of not knowing if it will work or not. And I think that's a huge value of client ascension too, is like, you have that accountability of people like pushing you to actually execute on it. But then, yeah, as you just said, you get the tools of like, just check all of these boxes and this is the system that will work for you.

Yeah, it's basically harassing you to make sure that you do everything. So I feel like what people discount that really makes an absolutely massive difference in acquiring customers and clients is operating the sales process to it. And I know you're extremely familiar with this, obviously because you're a HubSpot consultant and like, you see the stuff going on the HubSpot And I feel like a lot of people would make two to three times more money with their current lead flow if they just operated the sales process better, which is what we see basically every single time we'll get, people come in and they don't even have a CRM and it's like, okay, well here's how to do that. You're sort of set that all up.

Yeah. And like it forces you to. That operating within that system. Like, you will never do anything consistently because there is no, there's no mechanism or system or even like mindset of consistency there. You know, so you're just, you treat every lead that comes in like this brand new opportunity and then you relearn how to sell to that person every time. And that's not how you grow a business.

Yeah, I'm sure you've, you're experiencing this now where it's, it's like boring. Like, it's like getting clients is like, it's not hard.

It's.

You do the same thing every. It's super boring. Like it is not exciting to do at all. And this is, this is what, this is what happens with people. They like, when they get some success, what'll happen is they'll like, oh, let me try this new business. It's like, no, no, no, just keep doing the boring thing. Like just, just keep going.

I mean, don't get me wrong, like, I just had a, I just got a, you know, notification in Slack for a meeting book this morning. And like, don't get me wrong, like, that excites me still. Like, that's still fun. I like that. But going into the call, like, I know at this point I've learned how to refine my sales, you know, my discovery process. I know the questions I'm going to ask them that that is kind of the boring stuff. It's like, all right, I know my goal is to close them, but I'm going to go into it asking them the same questions, looking for the same things, learning how to disqualify them. Yeah. I mean it's an iterative process which to anyone that is like a high achieving or like intelligent person, that's going to get boring to you after a while, but you have to look beyond that goal.

Yeah. Every single thing is mechanized. Every single thing. Yeah. So are you, are you hiring people right now for like.

Yeah, so I'm in a, I'm in a big, big transition period right now. Worked with, worked with Kyle at Hire UA and Client Ascension for, for one hire who Was great. But now I'm changing up my hiring plan to essentially work with this company that works exactly with businesses like mine. So HubSpot agencies to just outsource all the fulfillment. So they act like a white labeled agency and I think they're based in like est, so that works. And like they will just handle everything and my job is essentially just keep their backlog full.

Yeah.

And so that then makes the hiring process much easier because I can scale up with them on the fulfillment side. I'll focus on marketing and sales and then all I really need to do after that is just hire account managers. So that's like my next phase now. So I've got a lot of good notes on a client success manager job description from the community. And know what like the ramp up period, the onboarding period is going to look like now it's just kind of figuring out the nitty gritty of what the day to day is going to look like as far as like my specific business goes. But yeah, that's the hiring plan right now. I'll be set up with that team a week from today and then see how that goes and then yeah, get my first account manager and yeah, I'm excited for that. It's just tough right now because it's tough to bring a client into your own ecosystem. Right. Like get them into your own slack, your own whatever. So just to sort of play ball with the client, I'm now like bouncing across different tools like teams and all that stuff and just having someone to be able to have eyes on all the channels all the time is my next goal.

Yep, that's, that's exactly it. There's, there's, there's just this concept of hyper communication and transparency for keeping people as a client and it's like the, the biggest hack of all time. Basically you just like narrate everything that's happened like continuously over and over and over again. But when you have like 10 clients that's like a lot of work. So you just need to like hire that out specifically.

Yeah, yeah. And just have someone just like give me a daily breakdown of what happens and in every client chat, you know.

This is, this is, this is like a, like a really foundational, like life changing perspective with operating a company is that a lot of people, they exclusively and solely only want to focus on customer acquisition. But I, and like what we try to like tell everyone is like you need to be optimizing for keeping people. Yeah, like that's like the single most important thing because dude, you you get a really good client, you do really good work for them over the lifetime of them being they might pay you, like, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dollars, and it's like, bro, that's a lot of money. Like, you can. If you have, like, 30 of those. Like, that's a lot of people, dude. It's just.

What is it, like, 25 times more on average, expensive to. To get a new client than it is to retain a current one, you know? So it comes down to just, like, provide a good service. Don't be an idiot.

Yeah.

And chances are you'll retain that client. And if they don't come back, it's not because of you.

Yeah.

No.

All right, brother, thank you so much for coming on. I'm gonna leave all of your links in the description. Anybody wants to hit up Connor, get some HubSpot consulting from him. You can go to the description of this video. Thank you very much, brother.

I appreciate it, man.