Case Study: How he hit 130k/mo with his HubSpot agency

All right, what's up everybody? I got Dan here. He's in Client Ascension and now Olympia, and he hit $130K in a single month. Is that right, Dan?

Yep, that's right.

Just quick disclaimer here is this video is going to be a case study of like how we did it, how he grew the business from really small to $130K a month. But that is not a promise that you will get those results if you work with me. You have a very small probability of ever hitting a number like that working with me or even not working with me at all. It's improbable you will ever get these kinds of results. Dan, walk us through what is your business? What do you sell? Who do you sell it to?

We're HubSpot agency revenue operations. We basically clean up people's HubSpots and then make sure that their revenue engine is working so they're not missing on follow-ups. There's not target accounts that they're just not doing activity on, and then we help them win that revenue back.

Sounds good. When you first joined Client Ascension, what were you selling? How much were you making a month?

I joined back in, I think it was August of 2024. I was bouncing between like $10,000 and $20,000 per month as a, a solo consultant, and I was really just picking up any type of HubSpot project that I could at the time. A lot of rebuilds and random admins. Work, basically.

How are you getting those people?

It was mostly through Upwork and then also through client referrals at that point.

So you joined Client Ascension at around like $10-20K a month, and then you got up to around like $50K a month before joining Olympia. There's probably a lot of people who are in a similar situation to you. Like, maybe they make like a fairly good amount of money and there's no reliable system of getting clients. You were using Upwork. It's erratic. There's no predictability behind it. You don't control it. What was the first thing you did when you joined Client Ascension to get from $10K a month to $50K a month? What would you implement there?

For me, I come from the technical side, so any anything sales or marketing was new to me. And so I really went into the modules that you made around offer building and creation and positioning, and then also how that flows into the sales process, all the videos that you all provided around that. And so really just refining my offering, refining the sales process, was enough to bring me from that level up to the $40,000 or $50,000, even without nailing down the cold email side of things or ad side of things.

So when you did start getting into producing more leads, just lead gen, would you first implement with that?

So first I just worked on using the existing channel Upwork and just refining my positioning when applying for jobs and when I went through the selling process. And that alone bumped me up quite considerably revenue-wise. And then we started layering more YouTube organic in there, a lot of how-to videos and repositioning what we were already doing on YouTube, but looping it in so that we were actually driving leads rather than just having viewers of the video.

How many views are you getting on YouTube videos right now?

It's probably like 15,000 per month off of both of our channels. So we have two channels running right now.

That's dope. How many leads are coming, like qualified people are coming through that a month? Yeah, so we probably get 10 to 15 per month now. It's like 1 qualified lead for every 1,000 views effectively. And your deal sizes are pretty large, right?

That's been a big lever as well. Just understanding the value that we're providing and being able to bring that back to an ROI pushed our deal values up and helped grow revenue a lot.

How big is your deal value normally?

Well, average, we're probably around $45K to $50K right now. And then we have some that are in the lower 6 figures as well.

That's like on a yearly basis normally.

Yeah, normally it's over a period of like a year, year and a half for the projects, for the bigger ones.

What is the posting frequency you have on YouTube?

Oh, that one's a little erratic. Sometimes we'll post like 4 or 5 times a week and then sometimes it'll go 2 or 3 weeks without a post.

Why do you think you haven't been able to do that consistently? What's the bottleneck?

I feel like the, my involvement in the whole operations side, I know we talked about this a lot. Slowly but surely I'm removing myself as the bottleneck in certain areas. It hurts consistency.

Sure. Dude, I made a Claude skill that takes things I teach inside of my call recordings and structures them into GammaDoc YouTube videos. It does a really good job of writing out how I want it written. So then I just import it into Gamma AI and it formats it really nice. It's helped me a lot.

That reminds me, like, some of the stuff you've shared in Olympia around, like, content creation and using current assets and transcripts and stuff has been a big unlock for us.

Yeah, dude, I've consistently been able to get 2 YouTube videos out per week since, like, the past 7 months. What's your growth been like in the past 3, 4, 5, 6 months?

So the growth has been pretty much exponential. It feels like we're at the beginning of, like, a really large growth curve just because everything's coming together now, from our positioning to our pricing to the sales process. Overall, we've just been ramping. Like, we went from that $40K to $50K up to the $130K, and from our pipeline, it looks like that's that's going to be consistent over the next few months as well. So we have a mix of retainer and fixed price projects. So it looks like continue to grow, hopefully hit $200,000, $300,000 here in a few months.

What's like the most profitable channel for you right now for client acquisition? Like, what's kind of like the driver?

So obviously YouTube organic is still in there, but for us it's been the partner motions with the HubSpot reps and with other tools that we work with. There's another coach in Olympia that helps out with partnerships, and so that's been a huge driver for us. It's kind of like sales process overall when you're working with partners, and so we've really been able to nail that in terms of the value we can provide to the partner reps and then bringing us opportunities. That's just been better and better because we've been able to go upmarket with that motion.

Sometimes a business can grow very steadily and very profitably with just a moderate amount of ad spend. There are a lot of people who will be like, yeah, I just hit $1 million a month and it's like they spent $700,000 in ads and it's like, what's the point? So I think you're a good example of stable and profitable growth. And like the process is really just simple. It's like you have some lead gen channel. Yeah, your YouTube is going well and then you're doing outreach for partnerships and you just run this consistently. You gradually increase your availability of call slots, more closers, and then you gradually increase your availability of service, more clients. You just incrementally put these up steadily over time. And I think it's really interesting that there's a lot of people who might see me say like, oh yeah, we had $1.4 million in a month, but it's like it took us like 6 years to do that. That's like a really, really long time to get up there. I think there's a lot of people who they don't recognize that. That what you actually should be doing is slow and steady if that's all you can do. I'm not saying like if you were running an ad campaign and you were getting a 13x ROAS, yeah, obviously don't be an idiot, like turbo scale. But like, you're better off understanding that 10 to 15 to 20% monthly growth rate is completely insane. You don't need to go from $50K a month, $150K, $250K, $400K month over month. Just doesn't work like that in reality for most people. It's just not a realistic expectation. Is that how you've kind of been thinking of it?

Yeah, and I don't know if that's a limitation too that I put on myself. I've always come in with a instead of like, I'm gonna do this until I win, like figure it out no matter how long that takes. And so for us, it has been that slower, steadier growth as we nailed the fundamentals more and more. Obviously, we're still trying out things with ads and trying to crack that channel for our specific offer and positioning as well. That's definitely something we're trying to do. But I mean, Andre also says all the time, just stick with it. So simple of advice, but it's really true. Like, if you're in the game, you're playing, you can still win, you can still grow. It's really about the like timing. With the coaches in Olympia saying that stuff too, as you guys know, there's months and periods where it's just you're questioning whether it's worth it in a lot of ways and maybe looking for outs. And so the timing of that type of advice from Andre and from other coaches, it's like, okay, I'm going to stick in this and I'm keep going. And eventually we've been able to reach a point that it felt like a pipe dream being around the coaches, being around other people who are younger than myself and like doing it way bigger. It just changes the perspective to where, you know, I'm just going to keep going and figuring this stuff out.

What I want to ask is about specific bottlenecks you hit and then how you kind of solved them along the way with obviously our help as well. Maybe just like over the past 3, 4, 5 months, if there's anything like you've kind of like come to realize, how do we help you figure this out?

Two main things. One is from an operations side of things, continuing to standardize and formalize how we're doing capacity planning, how we're delivering and assigning, building incentives for our team to deliver at the quality expected and continue to drive those referral channels and stuff like that. That was the first big unlock for us because it allowed me to get my mind into the sales and marketing side even more and focus more time around that. And then the other thing is just a mindset, just understanding like how we were not pricing ourselves correctly for the value that we provided helped us win some really big deals against much larger competitors in the HubSpot ecosystem. Without that mindset change, I would have never been able to work that deal. We would not have won. We would have came in way under what we should have been, and it would have hurt the sales process. We're underpricing ourselves, and that makes the prospect doubt us as well. So I think the mindset shift was the other big unlock. Even without increasing the lead volume too much, we were able to just grow revenue really fast because of that.

It seems like your main bottleneck, it seems to be operations and fulfillment. That's normally what it tends to be with service businesses because it's easier to sell services than it is coaching. Bottom line with a coaching business or an info business is getting the client. If you figure out the sales process, generally you don't need that many leads to make a profuse amount of money. The value of each one is so high. It's just about figuring out like, how do I even structure this offer? And then how do I even close these people at all? Which is unique to a service business, which I find interesting.

Our main niche that we service is the professional services industry and high ticket, and we're talking about like 6, 7-figure deals usually. And so for us, when we're working with clients. It really is those smaller levers that just make such a big difference. And so now we just have evolved into the clients we've worked with. Our deal size is getting bigger, and the levers that we pull have a much bigger impact.

Walk me through the team. What are the departments of this business? Like, who's in charge of what? How is this all structured?

Yeah, so it's super lean right now. So we have myself on the sales and marketing side as the only person. We have a delivery team, 3 total full-time employees, and then 3 contractors that we use depending on like what the projects need. And then we just outsource some of the like video editing and production, cold email as well, although that hasn't been a successful channel for us so far.

You're doing partnership outreach as well, and you're doing stuff like that. It's like, well, probably shifting a lot of your cold email volume towards the thing that already works is probably a good idea. And perhaps also running some low-budget ad campaigns that also try to generate partnerships as well. Also, the problem that poses is that YouTube already works for you. Why would you not just make it so that you post 2 YouTube videos a week and hit that 100% capacity? Get it to that. That was kind of an unlock I had maybe in the past, like, year or so, where it's like, dude, stop making things so complicated. Like, just do what works. We do very well with challenges in multiple day workshops and we do very well with YouTube. So what do we do? We do a bunch of YouTube, we do a bunch of workshops. That's what we do. We're just good at that. And then over on the list side, we're good at a VSL funnel. So that's what we do. We do VSL funnels. That's what we do. And we just keep doing that. It's kind of like an unlock for YouTube that you should implement where it's like, dude, if YouTube's working for you, just double the amount of shit you're doing on YouTube. I've normally found that the max that YouTube will do is 2 videos a week. Anything beyond that is kind of just like overkill.

That makes a lot of sense. I always wonder, like, because I hear all the stuff about the cold email and the ads and using that to scale, and obviously that'll still be a channel that we experiment with, but how much should I focus and double down on the things that are working and like, have I tapped that out?

Well, all the funnels play into each other. People watching your YouTube videos will get served your ads, and people reaching your website somewhere will also get served your ads. And then people getting served your ads will get recommended to you on YouTube, and they start watching your YouTube. And like, that's what happens. It just continuously goes like that over and over and over again.

When we talk to prospects on the phone, they mention that. It's like, oh, I saw your YouTube video and then clicked here, and then I heard this from a referral, and it all just plays together.

So yeah, exactly. If you were talking to someone who's maybe in your position, $10K, $20K a month or whatnot, and they want to reach $130 grand a month like you did, what are some like core lessons you think that they've got to understand?

Yeah, I think being part of a group that has people one or two steps ahead of you is like the biggest unlock because there's so much goes on subconsciously when you're just in those groups hearing people talk about what they're doing, the next few steps ahead, that you can never consciously while running a business absorb and apply all those lessons. And so I think just being in the right peer group is like the biggest unlock you can do because there's just so much to learn going from that $10K to $20K level and up. You just do it all consciously. So you have to be around the people who are doing it so you can just absorb those lessons.

Yeah. Thanks for coming on, Dan. Anybody wants to connect with Dan, I'm going to leave links to all of his stuff in the description. And if you obviously want help scaling your business, I'll leave links to AI-assisted agencies. So Client Ascension and then also Olympia. If you're already above $30K a month and you want to learn how to scale from there. Dan, thanks for coming on, bro. Appreciate you.

Thanks, Daniel.