In this YouTube video, agency owner Joshua Nelson addresses whether the marketing agency model remains viable in 2025. He asserts that agencies are still profitable—he runs a $7 million‑per‑year agency—but emphasizes that success is hard and requires systematic approaches. The core arguments include: the growing, universal demand for digital marketing; the pitfalls of à‑la‑carte service offerings that prevent scaling; the necessity of a clear niche and differentiated positioning; a revenue‑based growth blueprint that outlines specific objectives and operational focus for each monthly recurring revenue (MRR) tier (0‑10K, 10‑30K, 30‑50K, 50‑83K); a concrete case study of Town Plumbing that demonstrates how a focused niche client can generate measurable results and social proof; a pricing guideline of recurring fees above $1,000 per month; and strategic priorities that shift from client acquisition to system building to hiring as revenue grows. The video concludes with calls to action for a free agency acceleration session and a free course on building a million‑dollar agency. The overall message is that running an agency in 2025 is worthwhile if owners adopt a disciplined, niche‑focused, productized model and follow the outlined growth stages.
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Lots of agency owners I talk with are asking me if I still think a marketing agency is a good business model in 2025. And I get it. With all the changes we're seeing right now with social media and AI, looking at other shiny objects and questioning your own business can be tempting. But here's the truth. I still run a marketing agency myself that's generating about $7 million per year. And basically every month I'm helping other agencies we work with hit 7 figures. So is the agency model dead? It's definitely not. But that doesn't mean it's easy. It's actually really hard. When you're building a marketing agency from scratch, you've got challenges coming at you from all angles, from landing clients to delivering results, to retain the clients that you have, the team building, the systems, and the problems. If it was easy, everyone would have a 7-figure agency. I've heard Chris Rodriguez say this a number of times. He says, if it was easy, we'd all have 6-pack abs and we'd all be driving Lamborghinis. The solution is be grateful that it's hard, right? If it was easy, there wouldn't be a massive opportunity to run an agency in 2025 and beyond. Be grateful that it's hard. It's all over mastering this craft. Understanding your clients, understanding the opportunities, understanding how to implement, testing and figuring out what really works. And believe me, if you do, the results will be incredible. Every business needs digital marketing. This means that the market is growing. And even though competition might be rising, the demand far outweighs that. You know, even 5 to 10 years ago, not many businesses were aware of the power of digital marketing. Right? They used to just do Yellow Pages and wrap their trucks and do word of mouth advertising. We're in a decade where the entire world The world knows internet marketing, digital marketing, AI is where it's at. And today every single business owner is focused on how do I leverage these online marketing channels? How do I find someone that can actually plug them in to get the results that I'm after? Our experience shows the same trend. Many of the agencies we work with have been able to scale their agency to millions of dollars per year in a relatively short period of time. And that's mainly to the fact that the business market is just growing. Plus obviously we've got some great strategies that we share on how to shortcut the process and how to do it world-class level. No, marketing agencies aren't dead. But then why are so many agencies in this space failing? Here's the reason. Most agencies are struggling because they don't have a systemized product offering. If I go back to how I ran my agency and how most agencies run their agencies is à la carte. We can do digital marketing, website, SEO, pay-per-click, social media, email marketing, videos, funnels, AI, AI marketing, AI follow-up, SaaS, right? There's so many different things. We don't systematize it. So if your service offering looks a little bit different from one client to the next, you'll never be able to systematize it. You'll never be able to scale it. More importantly, you'll never be able to really dial it in so that you can provide predictable next-level results for the clients you serve. When you don't have a systemized product, the other thing is that you're not clear on who you serve and the problems that you solve, right? I know I probably sound like a broken record if you've watched any of my other videos, but having a clear niche, becoming the best agency for that one particular client profile is the best way to grow your agency right now and into the future. And so the other issue I see with agencies that are struggling in today's market is there's no differentiation from one marketing agency to the next, right? As marketing agencies, we're all competing with dozens of other agencies. And there was a while, 5, 10, 15 years ago where it was enough to say, hey, you know what? If I wanna stand out in the marketplace, I need to say that I focus on a vertical, right? I focus on plumbing companies. And now I look different than all the other agencies. And when I talk to plumbing companies, they're like, okay, that's for me. That's somebody that specializes in my industry. Well, now there's dozens and dozens of competitors in just about any vertical you can imagine. from plumbing to roofing to AC to chiropractors and everything in between— you've got to understand your client has choices of people that specialize in the industry just like you. And most of your clients have tried other solutions that didn't work. They hired the other company, they hired the other specialist, they didn't get the outcome that they were after. And so if you try to do the same thing that the previous provider did without explaining what you're going to do different or without innovating the offer, they're not going to be interested. It's going to be very hard to get clients' attention. How do we succeed? How do we make sure that you've got an agency that can How do you make sure you tap into the, the market growth opportunity that exists? Number 1 is we have to nail the model, right? And the model is very simple. We're going to focus on one particular niche, whatever it is. We're going to have one very specific problem that we solve. And that problem is usually not getting enough deal flow, not closing enough deals, not converting opportunities, really coming in and helping to be their growth partner within the industry, charging a monthly recurring fee and making sure that fee is greater than $1,000 per month. Nail the model. From there, we have to know exactly what they need to focus on. I see a lot of mistakes that agencies make is trying to focus on the wrong stuff. And what I mean by that is if you're an agency owner between $20,000 and $30,000 a month of recurring revenue, you shouldn't be worried about backend systems and how smoothly everything is running and really optimizing every little piece of the equation. At that stage, you need to be focused on getting more clients, serving those clients one-to-one, retaining them at the highest level possible. But if you're an agency doing $50,000 or more per month, it makes a lot of sense to focus on the systems, to focus on hiring A-players so that you can scale to the next level. Here's the, the blueprint that I I recommend 0 to 10K, focus on getting clients and experience. Get a couple clients within the niche, prove that you can actually deliver a tangible result. And that doesn't mean get the client rank, it doesn't mean get them leads, it means hypothetical niche, hypothetical offer actually implemented, generating tangible measurable results, creating a case study client that you can say, bam, this client I crushed it for, and that you can parlay into others. Example of that in my case, our first client was, was Town Plumbing, plumbing company in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And we met with them, we got the— unfortunately we I actually got a check from them, went to work, set up the website, got it ranked, and got great results. And we're able to show, like, here's Town Plumbing, here's where they rank, here's how many leads they're getting, here's how much their revenue has grown, here's how many trucks they've added. And if you'd like, go ahead and talk to Wes Alcon from Town Plumbing. He'll share what a great job we did. I hope you understand that once you've got that case study, you've got confidence that you know what you're doing, and you've got social proof behind you, and you've got a case study which makes you so much more relevant to all of the future clients. That you're focused on. So in that startup phase between $0 and $10K, it's about getting the client, getting the results, and getting the case study. Between $10,000 and $30,000 in monthly recurring, it's about creating one solid client acquisition system, retaining your clients, and delivering results, right? It's about, okay, what's the one mechanism— not all of them— but that we can use to consistently get appointments, to consistently get sales, and then dialing in what you deliver, dialing in the SOPs so that you're keeping those clients that are sticking around and really knocking it out of the park for those clients that you get. From $30,000 to $50,000, it becomes more about building systems, And then also hiring. $30,000 to $50,000, we're in the scale stage in the agency. We've got to go get people that we can plug in to do the work so that we're not physically involved in the operation side of the equation. Between $50,000 and $83,000 in monthly recurring revenue, it's about removing yourself from the business. It's about, okay, now we're in that higher level scale stage within the business and we're saying, okay, I'm still doing account management. I've got to put account managers in place. I'm still on the phone doing sales calls. I need to put salespeople in place so that I can elevate to being a leader within the business so that we can focus then on, on going to multiple 7 figures so that we can focus then on creating more freedom for you as the owner within the business. So is running an agency worth it in 2025? Absolutely. But only if you're gonna go about it the right way. So if you want to examine where you are in your agency right now and give you a custom plan that could take you to the next level, click the first link in the description and book a free agency acceleration session with us. We'll see where you want to go, what's holding you back, and how to overcome it, and how we might be able to help you get there even faster. So click the first link below and book your call. And if you want to complete free course on the exact strategies you can use to build a million-dollar-a-year agency, click here, watch this video where we give away all of our best strategies.
