How Collin Built a $100k/mo Google Ads Marketing Agency (Client Ascension Student Interview)

What's up everybody? I got top G Colin over here. He runs a Google Ads agency. Colin, could you, could you just introduce yourself to everybody and tell them, tell them a little bit about your business?

Yeah. So my name is Colin Schmelbeck. I run a Google Ads agency majorly for e commerce stores and right now I'm repositioning myself more so on the trading side and consulting actually in house brands. And that's what Colian Session has helped me do over the last four, four or five months now.

Sweet. And so how, how, how is the agency and like you got the coaching program now like how's that going in terms of like, is it growing? Well and I don't know, give us like a rundown of like how the business is doing.

Yeah, overall agency's been pretty steady around the 50k a month mark. And then when I joined Client Ascension with one on one support, Daniel in my first ever six figure month with launching my consulting offer. So that was pretty sick. And he was one made me want to do it probably in March of 2022, but I was lazy and didn't do it until like August did it. All the stuff hit it right away.

Nice. I remember, yeah, I remember being in a conversation with you and you were, and you were telling me this always happens with agencies and that you're, you're, when you do really, really good work for your clients and like you start making a ton of money, they always pull this, it's always, we're going to take this in house. Yeah, always. I remember you were telling me like how do I make that stop? And I go, you sell the enablement of allowing them to take it in house. Right. So it's like, hey, so you're gonna go hire somebody? You want to replicate my results? I can sell you a consulting program and teach the person that you're gonna go hire now they're like oh, okay, cool. Yeah. And then even then like that person might not get results as equivalent as you could and then they become a client again. But the whole point is you keep them in the ecosys them because if they're gonna go pay, you know what I mean? They're probably under the impression that oh, I'll just like turn all of the ads you had back on and like it's, it actually doesn't work like that. It's not that simple. No.

And I would say three or four clients that left in early or mid-2022 can't have come back already within three, four months. Like once a Quarter ends. They gotta look at everything. Bring yourself down like, like, hey, why not go back and pay them more money but make more money.

And you, you've hired some people in the past couple months, right?

Yep, yeah, full one times like specialist working for me now but. And I'm slowly hiring for consulting and that's like the next major frontier. But we'll get there when I, when I get there.

Yeah, it's, I mean you probably see it inside, inside ours we have I think 21 people working for us.

Yeah, that's a level. I'll get there. Just not, not there yet.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy. It's, it. There's so much I think bro, we've got to have like 200 zaps set up or something like that using like 20,000 zap credits a month or something. It's so absurd, just like, and it seems super complex but like I understand all of it in my head, you know what I mean? And such is also like what you have to do inside of your company. You got to simplify a lot of stuff. And like I've, I've said this a lot but it's like you, you like you were hanging around, like I know you for a long time, you hung around like 20 to 30k. And then it's like when you.

Yeah, yeah, I would say pretty much all of 2021. I was kind of stuck around the 30k month mark. And then when I left my agency job, which I was with Google Ads Agency about a year and a half, Solutions, eight great, great team. Then once I left there and listened to a lot of people also on Twitter saying just gotta leave, that was really what helps. And then kind of stay consistent. Has been the main catalyst for a lot of stuff.

Yeah. And it's such an intangible thing but like I can say like, all right, cool. So Colin came in, he was at 50k a month. So Colin went from 50k a month to 100k a month in client essentially. But that's not even like the whole story because what actually is the story is that before you were working like 12 hour days every single day. It's like you systematize some stuff. It's like all right, now it goes from 12 and maybe you sit around like, like functional actual service delivery. Like how many hours a week or something like that are you at now?

Probably around three to four a day. And that kind of goes up and down. Like if I bring a new client on, goes up if I kind of relax and have my employee do most of the stuff. It goes down a lot, but definitely a lot more time just thinking about the business and setting up new systems for consistency. Consulting has been my main focus over the last couple months.

Hey, so if you're watching this, you're probably like a marketing agency or a B2B business and you see, all right, cool. Collins at 100k a month, but he started at 50k a month. How do you get to 50k a month? Because you probably have an offer and you can't figure out how to consistently get calls booked or consistently close clients. And you're wondering like, does a consistent system even exist? Like can you just have a predictable system to get calls booked and, and, and close clients? And I want to let you know that yes, that does actually exist. And we've used it to take three separate of our own companies to seven figures and used it to take over 200 clients and make them $20 million of ARR and counting now.

Right.

So it does, it does exist and it's the same thing every time for every single person. We've done it so many times. We do it for every single business and it never stops working ever. So I want to leave a link in the description client ascension.com there's gonna be a video behind there and it's gonna explain exactly what we're doing without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on ads to acquire customers or without needing to hire some outside lead generation agency.

Right.

We're gonna show you exactly what we do. So the link is down there. Clientessential.com and let's get back to the video now.

Yes, because yeah, it's you, you need like to put people in your team and guys want to protect their margins so hard. Which, which is like totally reasonable because like a lot of the times it's like your business is like literally how you eat. Like you're not running like a VC backed company. It's like that's how you pay for your survival. So like a lot of what happens is if you hear like, oh, I'm gonna go hire this person, they're gonna make around like three grand a month or something like that. You're like a lot of people, they, they put that like absolute number in their head, oh, I'm gonna lose $3,000 a month.

Yeah, I guess I think I was there too. But working a large agency before and like talking to you and other agency owners themselves, like, I know like that was the next step of replacing myself, which I Haven't done that completely yet, which I don't think I ever will just because I don't want to go the agency route. But definitely like I pay my, my one guy 5k a month and he makes me a lot more than that. But I also respect him in his time and I know that if I pay him 5k I should be able to make 15, 20k of just thinking when I go and think about what new office can I do, how can I enhance my current clients, stuff like that.

It's. That precisely is why you do it. Thinking. Yeah. Because you can actually sit down and think. Right? You, you only have so much mental capacity every day and if it's, if, if it's, if it's spent on fulfillment, it's, you can't, you can't think.

And now being a dad, like before that, before being a dad I could, you know, work 12 hour days. I don't really care, like go out to dinner with my wife and then come back to work. But now like seven, eight o' clock at night, I'm dead. So I don't have that capacity anymore. Which has been a learning process. But then it's been good.

Yeah. And, and, and you get like super good results for your clients. So like what actually happens is this is just, this is how every agency works. It's every agency owner.

This is how it works.

It's, you start doing it and you get like okay results. And then like at a certain point you're so good at it for two reasons. One, you've just developed more competence and two, you learn what very specific kind of business you're good at delivering results for. Right. So we can sit here and you can be like, yeah, I work with E commerce brands, but there's probably a very specific type of E commerce brand. Maybe they have a certain LTV or a certain average order value or it's like in specific niches that are like just in some sweet spot and you just know that. So when one comes along you can with extremely high conviction sell them and you're able to give them asymmetric returns. Like extremely, extremely good results which obviously you have done.

I've seen the work you've done.

And.

Yeah, I think that's also like hanging around with people in client ascension. Like that was also something I noticed. Work in meetings with people that have done way more than I have done and they always talk the same like what you just said, like I need to not niche down in a certain aspect which I still niche down to like A certain brand or something like that or collection. But like definitely noticing, hey, like my best clients last year, two years, what were they doing and how can I replicate those results for future clients? So yes, that's like, that was a big thing I learned over the last probably six months.

And then what happens when you identify who that is? You start to, you can, you're not even selling.

You're just telling them like, hey, I know what I can do. Because you can show their results. We know like they brand owners and anyone can know like if you're lying or not.

Which it comes across in like the conviction with which you say the words. But like what happens is you, you can charge them a lot of money because you can make them a lot of money. So it ultimately turns into someone saying like, hey, I want to have, I want to have a hundred clients down to like, no, I just want like 10 clients who pay like 10,000amonth plus a little bit of a profit. Profit.

Yeah, that was, that was my kind of main thing right before I joined Client central was I was wanted. I wanted like 30, 50 clients, but definitely like I was at a bottleneck with. I think I had three employees at the time. And I just could not get anymore. Could not. Like, I, I was in a stuck spot. And then when we talked about how to reposition myself and keep some of the higher done for you stuff and just free my time in consulting, that was like, it took a couple months to re. Learn what I'm doing. Kind of confident in that area. But that has definitely been way better going that way than just being the huge agency game, which I'm not. Like, that's just not my. Where my heart is in it. So that's been nice.

Yeah. And then what happens is you start to branch off into other scalable mechanisms. So it's like, all right, say you get 20 calls booked for your, for your agency. What's going to happen is you like inherently want at your level. You'd like, want to work with one or two. Yeah. And then 10 will just be completely poor, have zero money, and then eight will be like, well, can you just show me how to do this consulting program? And then it's like, all right, so you, you, you do live calls for it. You'll help them. You go like in their ads manager tutorial videos. Right. So it just makes functional sense. Like it's what everyone, everyone always ends up doing. It's just that straight line of progression, like along the path to 100k a month. You charge each Individual client incrementally more and more and more and more. And then you just start selling a consulting done with you type thing to the people who don't fit that high ticket model. Yeah, and then that's like, that's, that's what everyone does. It makes them. It's so funny as you watch people grow their business, it's like they all go through that same exact path. It's like, yeah, that's everyone does it.

I mean it makes sense like thinking about it. And I think the one thing I would say to anyone who wants to join client session is first do it. But also try to shorten the time of thinking to action as little as possible. That's been the main thing I've been struggling on this year, has been just getting stuff done as fast as possible and like the idea to execution. I think if you do that like in 2023, it'll be the best thing you can do.

Yeah, sometimes a lot of people look for hacks and I'll go on a spiel about hacks versus fundamentals. So for instance, I'll take the retweet thing. I remember telling you to do the retweet thing and then you start doing it. You're like, yo, this works crazy well. I'm like, yeah, but like, it only works well because like you've got your landing page up, you got your sales processes in check. Like, you like, you can onboard clients, like, and like deliver them good results, you know. So like the whole system is built out, but it's like, yeah, there's like tricks to get a bunch more traffic, but like, if you can't close your leads in the first place and there's no point of doing like, you need to fix that. And I see this a lot. Maybe dudes send like 200 cold emails. Like, bro, this isn't working. I'm like, one, you've sent 200 emails. Like two, like you don't have a video on your page and like, you don't have like results on your page. And then like, and then you got this response and then like you said something and then you didn't respond to them for like eight days. Why like send another message. What are you doing? You know what I mean? It's, it's always like you, the whole thing, you can't just like pump traffic and not have the whole, the whole thing optimized. Then this is where people really screw up. Yeah.

And honestly I was like, not a victim of that. But like when I was, I think I joined Client session, what I was around the 40, 50k a month and the agency side and I still have a CRM or did a lot of that foundational stuff that, like when I went through the course and the training of that, like, that was the first thing, like CRM, like offer stuff. Looking at how to position yourself on Twitter, YouTube, all kind of stuff. And I, like, I didn't do any of that yet and definitely helped. Like once you. I think it's point D mission returns. Like, you need to be set up foundationally, but you also just need to go do stuff and get clients and position yourself first. But I think it's like a. Once you do one, you got to do the other. So hopefully you do, you know, if you set yourself, you set yourself up foundationally. Also make sure you do the work for getting those clients and staying keeping clients too.

I feel like what you do is you just show up to my calls and then like, you pick up something from it. You're like, oh, I'm gonna go do that. And then like, they'll just like show up like a couple calls later. Like, so I did that and that works.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's my, my one call of the week. I always go is to the. The Wednesday Mastermind call. That's all I care about.

Yeah, that, that one's fun. It's, it's, it's. It's a really wide array of people in there. So there's like, yeah, there's like dudes at 5k, 10k a month who like just join and then you got. It's, it's just like an elapsing of time as well, where it's like all.

Of the new people typically are.

They're around like 5 to 30. And then like, as time goes on, like the business, their business just grows.

And like now they're like, oh yeah.

I'm like 80k a month. I'm at 100k a month. Then we got people who were at 200k a month in there. It's like super, super cool to like aggregate all of those people. And like, it's just, it's just really smart stuff that gets said in there. And like, just raw, like hacks first. I love it. Like, slack is the best.

Yeah, it's not even like, it's not like a training thing. It's more so just listening to conversation and seeing, oh, if someone, someone's doing 200k a month, they're just doing this a little bit better than you at A longer time. Like you just pick on that small stuff. Like, hey, it's not a big mental shift or a big to do shift. It's more so change something up, watch it, and just be very consistent over a long period of time. So like, I love those conversations.

Yeah. And just optimizing every piece of it and doing that. It's, it's always time. Like, it really, it really just is. It's just time. You just need to keep doing it. Yeah, but so what's, what's, what's your goal? What are you trying to take the business to? Did you want to get to like 250k, 500k a month?

Yeah, I would say 20, 23. Would love to hit the 2 million mark. Didn't hit that last year, so I'd love to hit that. And pretty much I want to have like 78 of that coming from consulting only. And not so much done for you and keep done for you as like a hey, I love that client, love that brand. I would love to work on it. Seems like a cool challenge and definitely do it. I know what I need to do. Just gotta sit down and do the work.

Yep. Yeah. Rip the YouTube videos and Twitter content. Yeah. 100%. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's very doable, my friend. Let's make some money.

I'd love to.

Love to everybody. I'm gonna put links to all of Colin's stuff inside the description. He's a G. You should go follow him on Twitter, subscribe to his YouTube channel, and if you want to pay him to do your Google Ads, he'll make you millions of dollars. So you should do that literally.

I think there was 15 or 16 clients now in the last year and a half that I have, so want to link below?

Dope. Sounds good, brother.

Thanks for coming on.

Appreciate you. Yeah, thank you.

And thank you for client session. It's awesome.