How To Make $100 Mil As An Agency Owner

Is going to be the path to $100 million as an agency owner, because it is actually very achievable. And I don't think that a lot of agency owners or people who talk about agencies really understand that. But you can get a very, very substantial, very big net worth doing this. And who am I? I am Matthew Larson and I consult with about 450 agencies on a monthly basis. You can see some of my clients here, you can see some of my clients. If I just scroll through here, you can see that 144 smaller agencies are paying me in here. I'm writing a book about agencies. I've sold three agencies myself. Here are my clients and my reviews, all agencies, all that kind of stuff. So I do know what I'm talking about. And this is a very achievable result if you're going to dedicate probably 10 years to it. But 10 years for a hundred million dollars is not that much. And you have to kind of do it in a very specific way. So I'm gonna lay out nine steps that if you followed, and this will take many years to be honest, but if you followed these nine steps, this would be achievable for you. So let's do it with sticky notes. And the first one here is going to be learning how to do marketing. This is assuming that you've, you know, just starting or not know anything. If you are a veteran at this point, you can kind of skip that step. But this is going to be realistically two to five years. And not a lot of people talk about that fact where it's just takes a long time in order to learn how to do all of this stuff. Because there's a lot of things you have to know. You do have to be a jack of all trades. You have to specialize and be the best in one or two, but you still have to know how everything else goes. And the best way to do this, in my view is to get a job. If you're really starting, instead of starting your own agency, try to get a job at an agency. I know if you didn't go to university and you don't have experience, that can be tough. But at least try to get a job at an agency. Or even better yet, the businesses that your agency that you want to create will serve. So if you wanted to have an agency that did like home services, maybe get a job doing marketing for home services as an in house employee, that kind of stuff. But what do you, whatever you have to do, you have to learn how to do marketing and that's going to take two to five years. The second one is to save up 100k and that is basically to be able to afford to front up some cost and do some hiring and all of that kind of stuff. And if you can't save up 100k, you probably need to go back and you know, you probably haven't graduated from step one yet. So with 100k, they say the first 100k is the hardest. You can decide if that's true or not. But with that 100k, you have some money in the bank in case you need it. You can afford, you know, to hire several 4, 5, 6k a month employees without, you know, dying. And it's just a very necessary step to this process. If you don't have money in the bank, you're not really going to be able to execute the rest. The next step in the process is to find a niche where the service is 100% totally repeatable every single time. And you would probably argue that four of those words are redundant, but I like to have them in there just to really convey how important that concept is. So we need to find a niche where the service is 100% totally repeatable every single time. And what I mean by that is there's certain niches that aren't really niches at all. Like E commerce is not really a niche. There's very little to do with, you know, one store to another outside the fact that they're using Shopify. Really, there's very little in startups as a niche that is one to do with each other outside the fact that they're in the startup phase. Like those in the context of we're trying to get 100 million are not going to be suitable niches. What I'm talking about here is something like commercial cleaners or something like we'll just go with commercial cleaners because it's an example I've been using in videos quite a bit lately. So a commercial cleaner, if you are a marketing agency for these, it's going to be the exact same thing every time, whether the client is in New York or Atlanta or Vegas or Los Angeles or Dallas or Houston or Seattle or Portland or Miami. Right. The marketing to get clients on their part is always going to be the same. So we need to have this repeatable niche here so that if we find ads that work for commercial cleaners, we find a cold email script, because it's B2B, you can do that. We find DM scripts a way to export the list. We find a website that works, we find a sales process that works, we find a content strategy that works, we find all these email flows and all these newsletters that work, they're gonna work the exact same 100% effective as in Atlanta as they would in New York. And this is a very important part because if we're going to do this, we need to find a niche where it's repeatable because that's the only way that you can kind of guarantee results every single time. Where on an E commerce store. You can't guarantee that ad creative you made is gonna work. You can't guarantee that newsletter is going to drive more sales. You can guarantee that this is going to work because it's the same business every single time. What's going to work in one spot will work in the other spot. So it's very important that we find this repeatable niche. The next thing, step four is to basically perfect and systemize, systematize the service, service, service in that repeatable niche. So what is what I said before, now that we've picked one where it's the same every time, we have to probably spend 1 to 3, maybe even more years finding a system that works every single time. Building the SOPs, building the assets, building the AI tools, building X, Y and Z, training the employees, getting that system going to where we can get the perfect result every single time as well as do that at scale. Because there's one, it's big difference between doing it for five clients and doing it for a hundred, for example. And that's just a fact of life. And that was a big surprise for me when I had my last agency where it sounds obvious, but doing 200 landing pages a month is a lot harder than doing five landing pages per month. But it's something that you only really learn once you're doing it. The next thing is to, once you have the niche, once you have the system, you want to basically dig deeper into your clients, businesses and develop operations and hiring systems for them. You're really doing it for yourself down the line in a further step, but you're doing it for them. So in this case, the commercial cleaning, now you've protected the lead generation system, the product that you're delivering. But now in order for them to scale, take advantage of the leads, you need to have the systems for, you know, their salespeople you need to have hiring systems for. Okay, you need, they need employees to actually do the cleaning, client communication systems, all that kind of stuff. And this is how you can Increase your fees as an agency. They're going to be able to take better advantage of your leads because they have all the systems and you're going to get better results and you're just going to be basically learning what they do and turning it into systems. Because that's what you should be good at as an agency. Because a lot of these businesses, like really a commercial cleaning business, you know, they're probably good at cleaning, they're probably good at networking, they're probably good at doing X, Y and Z. But it's the systems and the sophistication that really gets these local businesses more than anything else. So to recap, we need to learn how to do marketing, save 100k. We need to find this niche perfect and systemize the service that we're delivering, which is Legion. And then we need to learn everything we can about the business, both to make our Legion system better, but also to develop a hiring and operation system for them. I'm going to drag it down to here next. The next thing we want to do number six is build or buy whatever you need to do, own the lead generation assets. So what do I mean by this? If I was to search, you know, New York Commercial Cleaners, New York City, what we want to do is we want to have, you know, different sites in every area. We want to have different newsletters for each city. We want to rank in Google, all of that kind of stuff, so that we own the assets. So if I was, didn't even have a commercial cleaning company, but I had newyorkcommercialcleaningcompany.com that would show up in Google, I would do the SEO and all of that kind of stuff and I would have the systems for this. And again, the systems for this would be the same as, you know, every other city. So it'd be easy and streamlined. But now if, let's just say that this was my company here or where I was ranking and I got leads here, I could transfer those leads to my clients, I could sell those leads, whatever, I would own the leads. And that is what I mean by build, buy and own the lead generation assets. You want to rank in Google, you want to have local newsletters, you want to have local content sites, Whatever you need is like that is what you want to be doing that and it's going to be very important for later. It's going to be part of many different things. What you can do with this is you can go to, you'll have a phone number on your site, whatever like this clean site here, that will actually be your phone number and if someone calls it, you redirect it to your clients. So basically you're kind of like you have a little leverage on them because okay, if you don't pay, if you don't go with us here, like we're gonna basically do that and just transfer all of this stuff we've done to you for your competitor. And it's a cruel world out there, but that is the world. So where'd my camera go here? The next step is and this building up the lead generation assets is probably going to take a couple years still. So let's just arbitrarily put three years to learn and save up the hundred K, another probably two years to find and systemize the all these processes, another one year to build up the lead generation assets. So we're at six years already and now what we want to do is we want to start acquiring businesses in your niche that you have here. Because think of it, you know what to do. You have the money because your agency is very profitable, because you have all these systems, you're getting all of these great results. You know you're going to get the same result every time. You have the lead generation system because you've dug into your clients businesses, you have the hiring and operation systems that you need to actually run the business. You have the lead generation assets all over in each of the cities you're doing it. For example, let's get my camera back here. And now you start acquiring businesses in your niche. You have the cash, you have the experience, you have the business plan to show potential banks or if you're in the states like SBA loans, you start acquiring businesses in your niche around the 300k per year EBITDA range. And that would be like a million dollar businesses in a lot of cases. If you have the cash flow, if you have the plan, if you can prove that you have the experience, you might only need to put up down 100k if you're using an SBA loan and then you can just buy a million dollar per year businesses that are functional, probably not very optimized so to speak. And then you can basically transfer all your lead generation assets to them. You can get rid of the client in that city, you can install your lead gen system and your operations and hiring system and you can Basically turn this 300k EBITDA into probably 1 to 2 miles rather quickly within a year or two, once you have started to acquire businesses, hire a COO to manage it. All from one dashboard, central location type thing, kind of, you know, preferably someone in this case who has a lot of experience in commercial cleaning. And then over the course of a few years, bundle up 10 to 20 of these businesses at 1 to 2 million per year EBITDA each. You know, now you have a, let's just say 20 million EBITDA business to sell to private equity firm, plus your profitable functional agency that serves all the clients, plus all of those assets. It's not going to be difficult. If all of this stuff I'm saying was true, and I'm not saying any of this is quick or easy, but if you did all of these steps and that was all true, 20 million EBITDA will definitely get you $100 million. Exit at a business of this size with this level of systemization and all of that kind of stuff, or you don't sell it or you keep it. And now you just have $20 million per year that you run it for five years and you have 100 million and keep it, whatever. But this is the path to a hundred million dollars a year. As an agency owner, you see it happen not often. I'm not gonna lie, or I'm not gonna lie to you and say that it's harder to make an agency to 100 million than a tech company or something like that. But this is the path that you actually can get there. And if you're willing to commit probably 10 years of your life for 100 million to do this and you have some focus and you want to do it, maybe it's a good idea for you. And maybe you could just follow these 11 steps. I said nine at the beginning and just kind of make it work. But I hope this was enlightening to you and I'll see you in the next one.