How To ACTUALLY Get Rich From Building An Agency

Have you ever heard the claim that agencies just don't scale? And what if the truth was actually quite the opposite? And I know it often feels true because agencies have these razor thin margins, they have overwhelming team management, and the lifetime value for a lot of them is typically not very exciting. And as someone who works with over 550 agencies every month, I hear this all the time from my client, that managing the agency feels like a prison or an endless uphill battle. But what if I told you that there is a real path to earn over a hundred million dollars with an agency? And that is what I'm going to do. In today's video, I'm going to review 12 actionable steps to transform your agency from where it is now to a hundred million dollar opportunity. And it's my goal to prove that it's not only possible, but it's very achievable for those who are going to dedicate their time to it. So what are these steps that are required? The first one is to get a job and, or start an agency. And this is one that is very, very important because this is where it's all going to get started. I started my agency at the same time as several of my peers and friends. And we were all 16 years old, we were all in high school, we were getting into the make money online space. There was a few YouTubers back then, but not too many. And I started on my own. And they almost all went to the job route, the internship in the summers, you know, getting on as a underage person with someone they know. And I found that they made so much more progress, so much faster than me because they already stuck themselves into a model that's already working and they could kind of emulate the founder, emulate how it goes, learn the systems and processes behind it. Where I was just starting an agency on my own and basically didn't know how to do anything. Getting a job, in my opinion, if you have to choose between the two right at the beginning, will accelerate the learning process quite a bit and will get you more money in the beginning. So this obviously comes with a caveat that if you get a job at a terrible agency, like you're going to learn bad habits. But if you can get one that's average or even very good, it's going to accelerate your learning process so much more. You really have to decide carefully which one you choose. And I know that some people watching this just can't get a job in the agency field. They don't have a degree. There's no one who's going to hire them in their country or whatever. So they have no choice but to go the agency route. But if you have the opportunity, I highly recommend getting a job for even a year, maybe two. And it's very, very important to view the initial few years as a learning stage other than getting money. Like, regardless what you see on Twitter or YouTube and all the success stories, you know, 99.99% of people don't hit it big right away, and it's just not going to be in the cards for a lot of people. So after you get this job or start the agency, what do you do next? Typically, what you're going to do is struggle for about five years. And that's the honest truth of it. I know that I'm successful now, and a lot of people would probably label me that way, but I struggled mightily for about the first five years. I never really hit it big until I was 21, which sounds early for a lot of people, but I put in my dues and I started at 16. I just got an early start. The first year I was in business, I did $11,000 in revenue. And that is revenue, not profit. Coincidentally, it was a lot of profit because I was more of a freelancer or solopreneur than an actual agency owner. But it wasn't until the fifth year that I was in business that I made 500,000 in one year. And that was obviously great. But a lot of people just think they're going to quit their job or just start an agency right out of university or right out of high school and just make a million dollars a year. There might be one in a million agency owners that do that and brag about it online, but it's not really how it works most of the time. And having this unrealistic expectation is actually going to ruin your life. You're not going to want to work hard. You're not going to. You're going to give up very easily, and it's just not possible. So I want you, if you do nothing from this video besides this, to reset your expectations as to I'm going to struggle for five years. If it goes better than that, great. If not, then it is what it is. There is so much that you need to know that you don't know, and you need to learn. Not only do you need to learn how to acquire customers, you need to learn how to do fulfillment, you need to learn how to build a team, you need to learn how to train. You need to learn how to Plan and stay organized. And it's important to understand that this takes a long time. And one of a great phrase that I heard, I think from Warren Buffett is that you can't have a baby in a month by getting nine different women pregnant. This kind of stuff just takes time and you really need to have the right expectations in there. During the five year struggle. You need to develop the skills, the experience, see what you're naturally good at. So you can pick a good intro offer and recurring service. And these are the two most important things if you want to hit it big with your agency. Because having more than a recurring offer or recurring service and an intro offer is going to lead to too many different problems. You see a lot of these agencies that have 20 different services. Not a good idea. When you have that many different services, you have low margins because you have to hire so many different roles. It's a bitch to manage. You typically don't get enough reps at any one thing to actually get good at it. And it's very difficult to do advertising and get clients as the everything agency. You need to be known for something specific. So the number one change that I see with my 550 agency clients, where there's a clear before and after of them making a lot of money versus being average, is focusing on this one intro offer and then doing the recurring service as basically an upsell. So a great intro offer is usually one time low risk, low commitment, one of those grand slam offers you hear about, and the purpose of this is to get the customer. It's to get your foot in your door, whatever you have to do. Then once you get your foot in the door and you get a great result, you can upsell them to a recurring service and that's going to pay your bills, that's going to get you the high monthly retainers, the high LTV and that kind of stuff. These two things work together and they cover each other's weaknesses. The weakness of an intro offer is it typically is a one time service that's lower cost, so it doesn't really build any recurring revenue. And without recurring revenue, we're not going to have a very good agency. The weakness of the recurring service is that it's difficult to sell. Typically it's high commitment. People don't really trust you. So the benefit of the intro offer is it's easy to sell and get the client. The weakness is it's one time. Typically the weakness of the recurring service is hard to sell, but the benefit is obviously it's recurring it builds mrr. So each of these cover each other's weakness and you don't really want to have one without the other. And then once you have these two offers, we need to choose someone to sell to. And that means choosing a repeatable niche. So what I basically mean by a repeatable niche is something where you're going to basically sell the exact same service to every single client in that niche. And this is the one thing, in my opinion, that either limits or guarantees the potential to get rich and do what I'm going to say in this video. Things like E commerce, things like startups, in my view are not really a niche. If you have two E commerce stores with different products, there's really nothing that they have in common other than they run ads and are built with Shopify. It's not like you can get a winning website and a winning ad creative for someone who sells socks and then use that same thing for someone who sells home furniture. These things are not really a repeatable niche in my opinion. And same with startups. You see a lot of people basically say they service startups, that's their niche. And that's terrible as well because startups are like there's no learning or repeatable knowledge between each of them. And it's even worse than E commerce because they probably don't even have product market fit or a sales team or any customers yet. Probably the worst niche you could possibly do. So people get very inconsistent results when they don't have a repeatable niche because you can't, like, you can't just guarantee that you're going to get results every single time. In a lot of cases, a 50%, you know, success rate is a very good rate. But when you have this repeatable niche, you can get repeatable results. So a repeatable niche might be plumbers or roofers or accountants or something like that, gyms where everything is going to be the exact same. So you have your system, you have your ads that work, you have your content that works. You basically have the whole system there and then you slap on a new name in a new city and there you go, you can just basically duplicate it and you know it works. That is how you get repeatable results. And you need to choose a repeatable niche. And once you have this niche, what do we do with it? We do a repeatable system. So systems are the thing that we're going to determine our success and failure in everything we do, life, business, all of that kind of stuff, and our ability to get rich with an agency determines solely on how good our systems can become. We need to have a repeatable system for the website or the paid ads, for the content, for the cold email, for the partnerships, all of that kind of stuff. Because we have this repeatable niche and it's all going to be the same. So if I go commercial cleaning, I make a commercial cleaning agency. My first client is in New York City, for example. I find paid ads that get clients or book meetings. I find a content strategy. Maybe it's they film themselves cleaning and they speed it up to like 100x and you see those videos on shorts all the time, people cutting grass and doing all that kind of stuff. Maybe they do that. Maybe they cold email building managers and you know, resident managers and office managers and that kind of stuff and that's like their cold email recipient. Maybe they build partnerships with other businesses that, you know, maybe they have a partnership with an H VAC company and a plumbing company and that kind of stuff and they refer business back and forth. Maybe you have a landing page that has a VSL on the thank you page and a book, a call link and that's your funnel, whatever it is. Because we have a repeatable niche, we can put all of our time and effort developing that system and everything will be the same in it. You just copy and paste it, change the company name, change the location and you're almost guaranteed to get good results. And then when we have this system, what do we do next? We become the go to in our niche. When you are able to get consistent results with this repeatable system, you will naturally become the most sought after agency in your niche. It's inevitable. And as much as I preach about Legion, you need to have all of your paid ads, all of your content, all of your cold emails, all of your partnerships. Many of the best agencies are booked 247 to capacity with referrals and they have a wait list. It's just if you're that good, that's what happens. There is a great verse in the Bible and it says something along the lines of, do you see a man who's skilled in his work, he will stand before kings, he will not stand before ordinary men. And it's the same thing here. If you're that good, you're going to rise to the top, you're going to get people to find out about you, you're going to be booked. So that is very, very important because we do that with a repeatable system and with proper branding and proper referrals. Like in this case, I am commercial cleaning gods.com or something, you'll never have to look for clients again. Your systems, your hiring, your training, your operations, your optimizations, everything will get better and better over time. Because you have, let's say, 50 clients in this niche. If you find something that works better for one, I have a better way of doing operations or I have a better way of hiring and training for the commercial cleaning agency in New York that's going to also be implemented to the commercial cleaning agency in Vegas, in Los Angeles, in, in Albuquerque, in Dallas, in Miami. You get the picture. And these results will compound over and over, over time, as you learn more. And after you have become this most sought after agency in your niche, then what do we do? We learn operations from our clients. So if we've branded ourselves as the go to agency and have the results to back it up, we will then take it a step further. We'll observe our clients, learn operations, and start optimizing that too. Because we'll probably have a client pool of fifty to a hundred of the best clients in our niche we can look for. What do they all do in common? Maybe we say, we interview them and say we need to get this information for your operations to better support you. And then what do you do? Give us 10 things that you do and then you take all of that data and say what do, what are the things that they have in common? Of all of the successful commercial cleaning agencies, what do they have in common? And then we turn that into our own operations system. We will build systems, we'll build tech, we'll build processes, we'll build training, onboarding all around what we've learned in terms of operations from our clients. And just like we did in previous years, instead of having to basically do a commercial agency from scratch, we are now learning operations while getting paid, just like we did previous years ago when we basically got a job to learn marketing instead of trying to figure it out on our own. And then the thing is here, you know, what is the point of learning these operations? Because we are a marketing agency and the point is so that we learn and know everything that we need to know so that we can buy these businesses with small business loans. And basically we know how to do marketing and now we know how to do operations in our niche. And now these two things are going to be 90% the same for every business in the market. If we chose commercial cleanings like the example we're running with in this video, there's not really going to be much difference between commercial cleaning in New York versus Miami versus Fargo, South Dakota or North Dakota versus Los Angeles versus San Diego versus Vegas versus everything. They're going to be at least 90% the same. There might be some local regulations and minimum wage things, but it's going to be the same in every market. Now we can buy these businesses in our niche and often for as little as 10% down in the United States. So if you have a business that's doing 300k per year and they sell it to you for a million dollars a year, a lot of the time you only need to have 100,000 down on that, at least in the United States. And it's a little bit more complicated than that. But that's the simple version. You already prove that you know what to do when you apply for this loan. You have the business plan, you have the results. I am the best business in this niche and I developed all these system. It's going to be very easy when you do it to get these loans. In my opinion. You already have the plan that's proven to work. There's almost no risk. You can basically pay for the loans with the cash flow from the agency and you can start building your empire. And once you have these business, what do we do? We apply our full system to each of them. We've spent years developing the system that we know works every single time. We basically will be buying very under optimized businesses and apply it because if they were optimized, they'd be doing millions a year, not 300,000. And we're going to get very, very large results very quick. We can skip the creation of the business, we can skip the licensing, we can skip the establishing and building the reputation part. And now we have tremendous upside because we can take our system to an underperforming business and basically instantly 2x3x5x10 exit right away. It's very, very good to do this kind of stuff under optimized business, buy, improve huge cash flow, use cash flow to the get the next business. And what do we do with all these businesses once they're performing? We roll up 10 to 20 of them in our niche. We repeat this process over and over and buy businesses that are under optimized. We'll buy them in different cities, places, probably not countries to be honest, but different cities and places. For sure. We will create a little empire of these businesses and because we have multiple, that's going to give us a more revenue and it's going to give us a Greater Combined valuation. 20 businesses will always have a better valuation than one or two. And we're going to manage all of this with the tech and the systems in one central location. So we have our operations system, maybe we have a dashboard. And I'm currently in Los Angeles right now. Maybe I manage these all from my desk where I am here in Los Angeles. We have our tech that we made, we have our systems, we have visibility into everything. And it's kind of like having a bunch of different franchises or locations. Maybe not franchises, but different locations, but it's all one company. And then once we have 10 to 20 in our business, businesses in our niche, our goal is to apply the system to get one to $2 million EBITDA in each. So if we get them all to 1 to $2 million EBITDA, that's probably going to be between 10 and 40 million in EBITDA depending on if we have 10 or 20 different ones. The businesses and holding companies of that size can get multiples between five and 15 times. They're all going to be managed from a central location, like I said, which makes it a very, very attractive thing to do. And all of our optimizations will apply to all of them. We already have the system, we already have the marketing, the optimizations, the operations, everything is going to benefit from it. Whether they come in and we paid 300k for them or a million or whatever, it's going to be a very good thing. And once we have achieved all this, we can probably guess what we would do next, and that is to sell to private equity for $100 million. So something like this would be a wet dream for private equity. Private equity is currently making tons of money rolling up companies like this, especially in trades, and this would be very desirable for them. And we've now taken years to learn all of this stuff. And we can reap the rewards either by selling the business and keeping the cash flow or exiting for a ton of cash. And it's up to us. So if we do this, we go through steps one to 11. We probably dedicate five, maybe 10 years to this. What happens next? We have made a lot of money and gotten rich with a marketing agency. Congratulations. So this is the 12 step process to doing so. And it's a lot different than what the average agency does where they're just trying to scrape by and make ad creatives for X, Y and Z E commerce brand. But if you have the skills, you have the drive and you just like the agency model, this is really possible for you. So that is going to be the end of this 12 step plan and if you liked my video comment, subscribe and I will see you in the next one.