How I Grew My Ecommerce Agency From 0 - $900k Per Month In 11 Months

The most popular video on my YouTube channel is one going over how I went from 0 to 900k per month in 11 months and at the time of recording, the video has about 230,000 views. You can check that out if you want to. The interesting thing is that I made the slideshow for that video in about 25 minutes as a presentation for a last minute webinar I was doing for my friend's agency community and I put almost no thought or effort into it at all. And it clearly worked for me as the video replay on YouTube has made me millions of dollars. But it left out a lot of the stuff that might be good to know or to replicate in your business. So for for context, I was doing a landing page in CRO Agency for E Commerce stores and this was right around the perfect time when iOS14 came out and completely tanked everyone's ad performance and they needed a way to get their CPA back down. Basically, CRO was the answer. So that combined with the fact that there was very little competition at the time, surely helped me. But I did many things that, at the risk of bragging, were very brilliant. I've seen many people try to copy all of the offers, setups and funnels for my landing page and SEO agency since then, but none of them have made it as big as me because I don't have the backend things that I'm about to show you here, the stuff that's not publicly visible. So today I'm going to go over what I think are the top five things that led to such a great success. So let's get started. But before we get started, I want to say that a lot of people are probably skeptical that a business, or any business, let alone an agency, could grow that fast. But after seeing the things I'm about to show you, you might think that the results should have been better. Instead of 900k a month, 1 million, 2 million, 5 million a month, then I did miss a few opportunities, I'm not gonna lie. So I'm gonna go over these five things one @ a time, as simply as I can, and give you examples and most importantly, action steps for how to do it yourself. So let's get started. What is the first one? The first thing that I did that led to a tremendous amount of growth was partnerships and in specifically, white label and referral partnerships. These were almost all with other marketing agencies in E Commerce, but in a couple of cases they were things like, you know, landing pages and CRO SaaS tools or SaaS platforms and some affiliate marketplaces as well, but mostly with all other agencies. So when making partnerships I think all you need to do is ask yourself one simple question that will get you 80% of the way there. And it's who sells to the same customers as me, but it's not selling a competing service. I think it really is that simple for me. I was doing landing pages and CRO for E commerce stores. E commerce stores needed a lot of different services like Facebook ads, Google Ads, SEO, email marketing, influencer marketing, UGC and so on. And it wasn't around that time. But nowadays TikTok shop would be a great example there too. So I had referral partnerships with all types. I had basically three go to options at different price points for every service. So you know, I would have a US based SEO company, I would have a Eastern Europe based SEO company or a Philippines based SEO company. So I always had something for different price points. They would refer clients to me and I would refer clients to them. I was sending thousands of cold emails per day to all types of E commerce agencies trying to forge these partnerships. And in general I think that every good partnership pitch has a few things and most people only do one of these. So the first is obviously a referral fee or incentive. Everybody has this, but it's not really special or anything because anyone is going to give a referral fee. The second thing that's very important or how this will help their LTV or cac, basically how it'll make their LTV higher or reduce their CAC and then three, a special offer for their referrals that essentially eliminates all risk. So most people get this wrong and they only focus on the referral fee. But I'm going to show you what I did for each because only focusing on the referral fee is just stupid. Anyone will give them a referral fee that doesn't make you special. I made it a habit to pay everyone's referral fee within an hour of closing. Too many people either forget to pay or make it so tedious that it leaves a bad taste in the referrer's mouth and basically causes them not to refer long term. And that wasn't me at all. I always made sure they got paid as fast as possible. So it was kind of like a dopamine inducing feedback loop. At the time I was receiving about 40 referrals per week, like so 40 booked calls and I would close over 50% of them. So I'm going to talk about how this helped their LTV and the special Offer I gave to referrals in a minute when I talk about the white label partnerships, but it was the same offer for both. So this referral partnership strategy was very strong for me. I got those 40 booked calls at my peak and all of that kind of stuff. About 20 new clients per week. But the white label version of this was even better for me. So what I did was I listed out all of the different services that E Commerce stores needed earlier, all of the potential partnerships. But of course, if you know anything about E Commerce, one stood out far above the rest and that was Facebook ads. I have run my own E Commerce stores before. So obviously Facebook ads are most of the most like basically the most important thing. Most brands are getting 90% or more of their customers from Meta and that is why the landing pages and CRO services are so valuable, because they're part of the process of making meta ads work. So I had a great offer for Facebook ad agencies. Basically it was this. Pay me $5,000 per month and I will make you unlimited landing pages for your clients. The maximum was two at a time. So in effect unlimited means four to eight per month. Still tremendous value. I told them that this is going to improve your LTV because your ads are actually going to convert and clients will churn less. If you are basically running ads to a landing page that has almost no chance. It doesn't matter if you have the best click through rate and the cheapest cost per click of ads in the entire world. It's just not going to work and people are going to churn. And then for my special offer for them, what I did was I said I will do a free above the fold mockup and offer plan for all of your clients while basically pretending I work for you, which is what white label is. So how well did that work? Well, at the peak, and this was only for about a month or two, but at the very peak I had 77 different paid ad agencies. Most of those were Facebook, some were TikTok, some were YouTube, some were Google, but most were Facebook. All paying me $5,000 per month for this white label service. And if you do the math on that, it's about 385k per month in recurring revenue with very, very low churn. So kind of locked in. This was much easier for me to get than the equivalent 385k per month. I would have to get in like from clients. It was much easier to get it from partners than clients and I would say five to ten times easier just because they get so many, you know, they're just. I don't know how to describe it. E commerce stores get so much outreach and it's so competitive versus e commerce agencies get far less. So the response rate was much better and they're much more likely to stick with me. But whatever. I also probably got between a hundred to 200k per month from the referral partnerships. But most of that was one time revenue from landing page builds and had a pretty hefty referral fee. But that is the first thing I did much differently than everyone else that led to great success. But what are some of the other things? The next thing has to do with something that is true in every industry, but it's especially true and difficult in e commerce which is getting people to respond to and book calls from cold email. I view e commerce as the single most difficult industry to book meetings from cold email. That's for a few reasons. The first is that they just receive so many cold emails. For context, I have a Shopify store that hasn't done a sale in three years and the domain isn't even active anymore or there isn't any website for it. And I still personally receive about 30 cold emails per week to that email address. Pitching cold services or pitching e commerce services. So I can't even imagine how many cold emails legit e commerce founders receive. The second reason it's difficult is it's just so easy to find e commerce founder emails in comparison to other industries. Just go on any data tool, say technologies, use Shopify and you have a perfectly accurate list. Number three is there are just so many stores that need so many services so there's huge demand and the supply reflects that. These things in comparison to other industries make it very tough to do cold email successfully in E commerce. However, during this time period I was booking sometimes as many a hundred calls per week from cold email. And I attribute this to one and let's say one and a half things. So anytime someone responded anything to any cold email, my appointment setting team would get the notification and call them and text them right away. We had all of their phone numbers from where like when we enriched the list and we had a customer, you know, I think they call it a script in Google sheets and if they basically responded it would go to the Google sheet and you know, Flash and they would give them a call. So that in my opinion is the number one difference maker in cold email. You have to call them right away. You can't rely, especially in e commerce of them just kind of going back and forth. It's almost like 2, 3, 4, 5 times the result for the same effort. But how is that possible? 24, seven, like that's. That was the question. Cause I wasn't always successful with the cold emails in E commerce and it wasn't until I started doing this that I got the result. So this is what I would consider when I said one and a half things. This is the extra half part I said earlier. So to make this possible, at any given time I had three appointment setters in Mexico and South America, three in South Africa and Eastern Europe, and three in Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines. So that no matter what, There was always three people online working in eight hour shifts, basically 24, seven. And they were available to call anyone who replies at any time of day, even the middle of the night. So I was sending huge volume of cold emails during this period. So I had three people at a minimum, both to handle the amount of volume as well as for redundancy purposes. Because we all know how reliable some BAs, especially appointment setters are. So if there was a reply, there was a notification in Slack and the Google Sheet and there was an instant call and text. So text message basically sent with the first name so that it would say, you know, maybe Matthew Larson instead of likely spam or just an unknown number and then they would double call, which gets through a lot of the weaker do not disturb features on most phones. So I truly feel that this was the main difference for me and the main difference between people who have mild cold email success and those who have a ton of success. You absolutely have to call. And that's especially true in E commerce. So that is two of the five things and there are three left. So what's the next one? The next one perhaps made all the difference in terms of how rapidly I was able to grow. This is one thing that I'm very proud of. And applying this concept is one of the first things I do or engineer in any every new business I am a part of. And I've completed this objective in both lead generation academy as well as the pay per lead agency I'm a partner of as well. And it truly is some of my finest work. So this concept is all about driving customer acquisition costs down to zero or even negative in some cases. Negative meaning you actually get paid to acquire customers. And if you could only choose two metrics for context and to go back a bit, you'd probably choose to improve your cac, which is customer acquisition cost and your ltv, which is lifetime value. I actually heard Alex Hormozi say or talk about this, and I've always believed it. It's from a book called getting everything you can out of all you've got by Jay Abraham. And it's you want your customer acquisition cost to go to zero and your LTV to go to infinite. Of course, that is how you really, really scale a business. And unfortunately for me in this e commerce agency, my LTV was not that great. It's, you know, 16 to 25k depending on the time period. So I focused on my customer acquisition cost and I really did a great job of this. So there are multiple components to what I did. I have one component that I'm going to talk about in the next point and go specifically in depth on that, but I'm going to talk about it very generally here as well. So I ran a ton of ads and did a ton of outreach to grow the business. I did some content too, but didn't get a lot of traffic or new attention. It was mostly to nurture the people who learned about me from ads and outreach. So with all of the ads and the outreach, there's a ton of costs involved. Ad spend, outreach, infrastructure like inboxes and accounts, as well as just general appointment setting and closing costs and any SaaS and any payment processing fees. Those were by far the biggest expenses in my business. So in general, depending on the time. But my intro offer had about a $3,300 value at 80% gross margins and that meant I had about $2,640 of margin to acquire customers and then either repeat business or upsells to CRO. And that's where all of the profit was. I went back basically to find all of these numbers to get you the exact costs. I actually spent more time I'm trying to find these numbers than I did actually outlining this video and the customer acquisition cost through the book. A call funnel was 1988. The CAC through cold email was $680. The CAC through outbound setters, which is basically cold VMs, was $575. And these are inclusive of all costs, with the outreach costs mostly being like commission for appointment setters and commission for closers, but just to differentiate there. So I even went so far in preparations to wait out these numbers to accommodate for volume. And I found that my overall blended CAC between paid ads, outbound setting and cold email was on average, when you take into account the difference of what I got, like how many clients I got for each was $1,077 on a 3,300 average order value. And that's not bad at all. That is a $2,640 in margin per client. And I could have been very happy with this. It's profitable after all. But I wanted to go to zero. So here is what I did simply as possible. So going back, remember how I said that I had referral partnerships that booked me a ton of meetings? The inverse and opposite were true. Like I said, I had partners. I referred to them and they referred to me. I, I talked earlier about how they referred to me. But let's talk about the other way. I referred huge numbers of people and I always got a referral fee. I made sure of that. And I made a lot of friends and allies in this process. I do not ask for a referral fee in general when I just refer one or two people to whoever needs it, but when I actually make it as part of my set system, I always make sure I get a referral fee because then it's allows me to, you know, have more cashflow to acquire more customers to get even more referrals to them. So when you explain that to them, when you're not just being greedy, everybody's kind of game and they give you a much better fee, let's just say, than if you were just kind of acting greedy. So what I'm going to go over here was heavily concentrated in the onboarding process, but it was also ongoing 24 7, 365. So in the client onboarding document and on the onboarding call, there was a form for intros and other stuff they needed. So for some, for kind of an example here, do you need a Facebook ads agency? Do you need a Google Ads agency? Do you need a TikTok ads agency? Do you need an influencer marketing agency? Do you need an SEO agency? Do you need an email marketing agency? Do you need an accountant? Do you need a bookkeeper? Do you need a lawyer? Do you need a broker or an agent to help you get into retail? Do you need a tracking or attribution software or setup? Do you need an agency ad account? Do you need AB testing tools for e commerce? Tons of different options, right? And think about it, I had all of this in my onboarding process, getting tons and tons of new clients per week. And they would just say yes or no. These are not made up things or services. These are stuff that these clients actually need and are in most cases already buying. So I negotiated with all of my referral partners to give me 100% of the revenue of the first month retainer did nothing after that and that gave me huge cash flows. So for example, an E commerce agency I'd work at charge typically 5k per month to their clients. And instead of the standard recurring 10% commission for life, which would be basically 500 per month, I got it all up front. That would be a 5k referral fee and they would keep the rest. So I add between 10 and 50, 10 and 15 rather referral options in my onboarding process. And sometimes people would request referrals to five or even 10 different things or services at a time. So basically with an average payout from the other agencies of about 3,500 per month. So some people charge a thousand, some people charge 5,000, some people charge 10,000, but it basically evened out to about $3,500 per month. So that would be my commission. So I had that $3,500 potential commission and a thousand dollars in 77 CAC. I basically just needed one successful referral to completely eliminate the CAC for over three other customers. And hopefully that makes sense. Made sense when I'm talking here, but. So not everyone really converts there, but some clients actually convert for multiple referrals. And I remember several times where I got over 15k in referral commissions from just one client. So this process was so successful that it completely eliminated my customer acquisition costs. And all I had to do was increase the volume of my outreach and increase my ad spend and the budget and worries around acquiring customers and how much it cost did no really longer apply applied to me. This was the number one thing that allowed me to scale so quickly. And if I actually had a good LTV and a lower monthly churn rate, I probably would have gone from 0 to 5 million per month instead of 0 to 900k. But fulfillment is a story for a different time. So that is the biggest reason that allowed me to scale. But I also alluded to something else that is related and I'll talk about that now. So it was a specific type of funnel where I had a zero dollar or free customer acquisition costs even without that process that I just went over. And that was my low ticket product and my low ticket funnel. Not a lot of agencies do a low ticket funnel and that's usually because the offers just aren't that good or it just doesn't really make that much sense. But my low ticket offer eventually settled on being a hundred landing page templates for $97. And for the lore here, I actually started with three for 17. And then I just added more and more and more and more. At one point, I actually tried a thousand landing page templates for $97. But I found it didn't really perform any differently than just a hundred. So instead of that, we tried to focus on making those 100 better. So essentially what I was doing was making a sale for $97 minus the fees. Then I was running ads for these templates to E commerce stores. If I was able to get someone to buy these templates for $97 or less, I was breaking even. And then I could just relax, you know, ad spends taken care of and try to upsell them over time and should know I was only doing this through ads. This cold email didn't play a part of this. This went well for me for about seven months, in addition to all my other efforts, including eventually a book, a call funnel, and lead magnet funnels. But I'm in no way trying to claim that this worked permanently. And the costs per purchase of the templates continually increased over time until the point where it was basically no longer worth it. I was no longer breaking even, and I eventually shut it down. The key metric here, in my opinion, is 2.1% of customers who bought these templates eventually upsold into a done for you landing page package, which was that $3,300 price point. And this meant for a certain point of view, when you basically multiply 3,300 by 2.1%, these customers were worth $69.30 more on top of the 97 to me. And then they were worth even more if they upsold to a recurring CRO package. So if you do that math, you know, 2.1% of $3,369.30 plus the 97. Oh my God, what is this? 97, 70, 166 maybe, who knows? But I couldn't in theory pay 166 or whatever that math actually works out to if I'm wrong and still be break even. But I eventually shut it down at about $110 customer acquisition cost. Regardless, throughout this process before I turned it off, it was so powerful me because I could advertise so heavily without the risk, even more so than in the previous point because it's kind of like selling an E commerce product where cash flow is instant. The referral fees from the same or from the previous point still applied to me here, which was in this kind of process, I was profiting from both the referral fees as well as what I'm Going to talk about soon. At the peak of this funnel, which really lasted for a couple of weeks, I was spending 7k per day on this ad funnel and getting between 60 and 100 purchasers who would eventually convert to the landing page clients at a 2.1% rate. This was a lot of profit for me with those referral fees because it was like having two systems stacked on top of each other to reduce CAC to zero. It was just very, very strong for the time that it lasted. And in addition to that, the templates are built on webflow, which is a somewhat uncommon platform to build this stuff on. But in my opinion it is the best. And most people who bought did not have webflow and a lot of them use my affiliate link. Webflow doesn't have the greatest affiliate program out there, but thousands of people were buying these stacked up to a tremendous amount of recurring revenue over time. And I poured all of that cash flow back into ads and outreach. So that is basically it for that. The first four things that I did to get from 0 to 900k per month in this video all had to do with acquisition. And that makes sense. 0 to 900k per month takes a lot of acquisition to do, especially when you take into account I had somewhat of a high churn rate. But one might ask, and trust me, I this is what I was thinking about the whole time is how is someone supposed to hire, train and fulfill that volume of work so fast? And that's what my final point is about. My final point, which is all about fulfillment, is number one, get a very good COO. I paid mine about £50,000 because he was from the UK per month and he basically saved my life. But the other part of the point is our approach was more like a factory or assembly line approach to making landing Pages and do CRM. This was the only way for us to do 200 plus new landing page clients per month, satisfy 75 or more partners, as well as 45 recurring sitewide CRO clients. I tried everything in the early days and leaving people up to their own projects and doing landing pages in CRO however they wanted would fail very, very quickly. So here is how it worked for the landing page team. I had three what I would call elite templates for each kind of landing page. And there are three different types of landing pages in E commerce. There's sales pages, there are advertorials and there are listicles. These templates were, let's say, hyper optimized and they kept getting better and better over time for Incorporating new learnings from a B tests for each client. And although there were templates, once you actually put people's colors, logos, pictures and overall branding on each page, you had never, and people weren't, you would never be able to tell that there were templates unless you were specifically looking for them. I had about 60 people in Pakistan and India to help me do this, and they would use pre made AI copywriting tools, so prompts, club projects, examples, and so on that I had made and perfected myself from when I actually used to do the clients and services myself. So with this message or with this method, they were able to take assets from the onboarding form, develop an offer using the AI version of mat, then make the desired page type with all of the assets filled in and all of the copy within 50 or within 24 hours. And when they did, they would pass it off to one of my basically team of 15 in America, in Canada, where they would act as something like the editors at a newspaper and they would fix it all up and make it perfect. And it was their job to take it from the 80 or 90% that the team in Pakistan would do to 95% or 98% and ensure it looked good, was functional, and there were no mistakes. And then after they reviewed it, I had another team of five in the Philippines that would essentially act as a QA team. They would go through a checklist and make sure it was actually perfect. Then the account manager would present it to the client. We get yay or nay, and then kind of launch. So with that method, we're able to get the first draft to the client usually within 48 to 72 business hours, which is a great time to value, which in my view is one of the top three most important metrics for client satisfaction. After they got the first draft, there was normally one to two days of changes and revisions asked for by the client, and then we'd go live, in most cases in less than seven business days. So with this method we were able to scale almost infinitely, but it definitely led to a lot of problems with quality and consistency along the way. But we kind of ironed those out over time as we got the process more dialed and dialed with this method. To give you an idea of client results, about 55% of our landing pages beat the original or whatever they were using before in an a B test, which in my opinion is actually very good. Most of the clients were very, very smart and they already had a good system. That's why they're big E commerce stores. So they had a good landing page or product page that was optimized and it made it hard to beat. So I think 55% is actually quite good. There were of course pros and cons to the system, like everything in life, but it easily handled over 200 clients per month with most of them being happy. I made a point, some hard lessons, trust me, to try to avoid or discourage the people who I could tell were very, very focused on branding from buying during the sales process. And I tried to get my closers and sales team to not do that as well, but they often kind of slipped through. There's just some people like, oh, we need it to be exactly like this. And those people were never happy, especially with our templated process and we tried to get them to not bug. So these five things are really what allowed me to scale from 0 to 900k per month so quickly. There was a lot of stuff in between, but I think these are all great things and general concepts that can be applied by anyone. If you want me to help you build your business, book a call with me at Lead Generation Academy and I will see if you qualify. Thank you for.