What The Top 1% Of Agencies ALL Have In Common

I've worked with over 550 agencies in the past 12 months and I have more insight as to what works and what doesn't than perhaps anyone else. And every agency that works with me, one on one, has to do at least 500k per year in revenue. So in this sample size of 550 agencies, I think that is an even bigger indicator of what it takes to succeed. So today I am going to go over the three main things that most of the successful agencies that I work with have in common. The top 1%, so to speak. But before we get started, let's just set some parameters. There's a lot of, you know, very specific things that agencies do in very specific situations. But the things that I'm going to go over in this video are all universal and could apply to any agency or really any business whatsoever. They're the high level ideas, the strategies, the concepts, and the realities. Some of the agencies do these intentionally, while others seem to do them more intuitively without much conscious thought. So let's go to point number one. Right away. All of these agencies have at least three core competent people. One of them does lead generation, one of them handles sales, and one of them handles fulfillment. You can think of this as the CMO and the CRO and the coo. And then one of them usually also doubles as the CEO. And when I was, you know, thinking about this, I don't really want to give people who are watching this the chance to cope. So right here, like right now, before we get started, almost none of these agencies have three co founders. That is not a requirement. And I specifically want to bring this up because a lot of people will try to find any excuse as to why they can't succeed. You know, oh my God, I don't have co founders. This video or all of these concepts are not for me. It's not really the case whatsoever. The majority of these top 1% agencies have a single founder, and as they grew, they hired different A players, so to speak, to take care of different areas of their business that they either did not want to do anymore or were not any good at. The key takeaway, in my view, is you're never really gonna get past the 1 to 3 million dollars per year mark as an agency. And that 1 to 3 million range depends on the service and the niche. Without some very good help, you cannot do it all on your own, which is what so many people try to do. The top 1% of agencies have a real management team, just like the top 1% in any business. And if you want to get to that level, you're going to have to start building that out. I really want to try to be as neutral and fair as possible. It is true that most agencies do not even get to the million dollar to $3 million per year mark. I think 4% of businesses do over a million dollars a year according to government statistics. So if that's not the case, you can't hire these competent a players. It's not like a 200k or 300k or even 500k per your agency can shell out two 250k plus salaries with bonuses and all that kind of stuff. The math just doesn't work right. That's not in the cards for most people as they're not big enough yet. And for those people we need to get patient and we need to work really hard and basically do all of those roles at the same time to get to that mark. But there is a sizable percentage of agencies who could afford to do this. But they're either too greedy to share equity, too greedy to pay a high salary, or just too fearful or have too large of an ego to give someone else control. And I remember this completely because that was me in the first maybe five and a half years of my business career. So I know how it is. I can relate. But it is not the place or group you want to be in if you actually want to succeed and build a big business. So the first piece of the puzzle is having a real team. It's not exactly surprising, is it? But let's go to the next one. The next lesson is the top agencies are continuously building and that is something that I would say 90 to 95% or more of agencies don't do. Most agencies kind of just get to a certain level. We'll just assign that to the 500k to 1 million a year revenue range. And they either kind of just get lost in fulfillment or for whatever reason don't really keep building and don't really keep growing. That is a lot different than what we're talking about here. The top 1% of agencies are always building and specifically they're building assets, they're acquiring digital real estate in search results and all that kind of stuff. They're building and testing new funnels, they're creating more ip, more systems, more internal tools, more AI processes, more automations and so on. A good test for you to do if you're wanting to see if you're in this category, you don't know it's what did you do this week that ensures the next month or the next year, or even the next week we'll be better off than this one. In my opinion. If that answer is not immediately obvious, then the answer is nothing and you're not building. So for me, this week I made three internal AI tools that can basically repurpose my YouTube videos into newsletters, content, short form scripts and all of that kind of stuff. I did something where I can basically I built a SOP and a template for a certain niche that I fulfill in pay per lead, where anyone, whether it's the 500amonth VA can just copy and paste and keep going through it and set it up. And then I built a AI, or not an AI, but a scraper that basically follows 10 to 15 YouTube channels, looks for outliers and scrapes those video ideas and titles. Like those are three examples of things that I did this week, or I guess that was last week because I'm filming this on a Monday. That ensures this week and next month and the rest of the year in 2026 are going to be better than they are right now. So what are some ways that you can make it better in your idea? And I think this is just a list I came up with, so take it with a grain of salt. But anything that decreases how long something takes, something that decreases how much something costs, anything that increases the amount of traffic or attention you get, anything that increases the effectiveness of your lead nurture process, anything that increases the effectiveness of your sales process, anything that increases the effectiveness of your employees, anything that increases how bought in your employees are, or anything that increases the consistency or accuracy of client results are all things where it's worth building around. And I think you could really do that. I could easily make that list 20 or 30 things. But most agencies are stuck on the agency treadmill or the agency hamster wheel, so to speak. They're actually usually quite working, like quite usually working very hard. And I'm not taking that away from them. And they're doing a lot, but they're not really going anywhere. It'd be like running on a treadmill at 10 miles an hour. You're running really quite fast and you are doing it usually for a long time, but at the end of the day you're still in the same spot. You haven't really gone anywhere. And this point is inherently tied to point number one, because unless you can afford or partner with people who have a brain and are a players and can kind of offload some of that thinking and building to them, you're going to have no time to work on the business because you're going to be spending all of your time in the business. And, and now that I'm really saying them out loud and I'm thinking about they're so interconnected that they really could be point 1A and point 1B and instead of two separate points, but they're very, very important for, you know, what you're going to be doing in your business. So if those two points are kind of connected, what is the final point and what is it relevant or related as well? I don't think so. I think the final point is completely separate. But by doing the final point, the first two points become a much easier overall. And the final point is that all of these most successful agencies have a specific niche. In my opinion, the number one reason people fail is because they don't have a niche. And I would say that upwards of 80% of agencies and services businesses think they have a niche, but they actually don't. And this is the root cause of a tremendous amount of problems. And a lot of people have these problems kind of as an effect, but they don't know that this is the cause. And as such, they can't really put their finger on, you know, why their business is not really succeeding. What do I mean by that? So let's talk about this specifically with examples because I think that's just much easier. A lot of people, including me in the past, are E commerce agencies. Because E commerce is a niche, right? No, I would actually not say E commerce is a niche whatsoever. And let's ask ourselves a question. What do E commerce stores have in common with each other other than the fact that they are built on Shopify or Woocommerce or Magento or whatever they're using? And let's really think about that deep for a second because if we really get into it, the answer is quite honestly, nothing. A store selling furniture has nothing in common with a store selling supplements or a store selling makeup. There is nothing that we can learn from one client or any lessons that we can take that can automatically be applied to another client, even if they're selling the same products a lot of the time. Like you can have two stores selling collagen, which is a type of supplement, but due to branding, Target Market claimed unique benefits. These strategies and assets and messaging and overall design can become very different very quickly. And there are tons of examples besides E commerce that people go into, but they're really not a niche. B2B. One of the dumbest ones in my opinion. Startups even dumber because they don't even have product market fit. SaaS, same problem as E commerce, local businesses, core sellers, you name it. Even agencies, which are my niche to a large degree, you know, aren't really a niche, but less so than the above. Contrary to popular belief, you do not choose a niche for your marketing or sales part of the business. Although those two things certainly benefit. The real reason you choose a niche is, is for service delivery and client fulfillment. And what do I mean by that? What are some examples? So let's go into a specific niche here. Let's take roofing for example. If you have a roofing client in Los Angeles and you work really hard and you do everything right, you're building funnels, you're making ad creatives, you're nurturing with email flows, you're setting appointments, all of that kind of stuff, and it's working really well for your client. Very like very much so you could just take that exact system and do it in Miami, do it in New York, do it in Las Vegas, do it in San Francisco, do it in Dallas, do it in, you know, God knows who, every city across the country. And it would succeed because it is an absolutely identical system. It'd be the same ads, it would be the same funnels, it would be the same emails, the same appointment setting system. All you really gotta do is change the details for the assets, the logos, the name, all that kind of stuff and the location for the ads and it would very much work. That is a niche that is powerful. That is not the same thing as E commerce or startups or SaaS or many of these other niches that aren't really niches at all. If you have a roofing system for a roofing client and it works great in one city, there's a 90% chance, maybe even a 99% chance that it works in another city that allows you to work on and optimize the exact same thing. And all of the benefits and learnings you get from one client, you can automatically implement and incorporate and all of your other clients get the benefits too. Then all of your hiring, all of your training, all of your SOPs and all of your systems, all of your internal tools and your AI workflows and all of your just time, energy, attention, focus is building one thing that applies to every client over and over again. You can get a better result with higher margins, less churn, and just have a greater quality of life. And when you tie this back to the first two points you can kind of see how it makes them a lot easier. It's a lot easier to build a team and continually build your business when it's focused around one thing and basically a repeatable result when it's all over the place. So of all of the clients that I work with, the top 1% have all of those things in common. They have a team they're always building, and they're doing it in a niche. I've not really seen a top 1% agency over the past year who didn't have all of these three things. The actionable step here, in my opinion, is to compare and see which of those things that you have. And I'd say most people have zero, which is fine. But even so, now you know what you need to do, and you can act accordingly.