Why I Shut Down My $500K/mo Marketing Agency

So the traditional marketing agency or AI agency model, I've come to realize, is completely broken. And this is coming from somebody who scaled my own marketing agency to $500,000 a month, had multiple months with six figures in profit, and then ultimately decided to shut it down and start a new business. And in this video, I'm going to explain exactly why I did that, what I'm going to pivot to next and what I'm doing now, and how you should think through your own business, your own marketing agency, and where to go from here. Because if you stay just running a marketing agency for the rest of your life, you'll end up being plateaued and you'll earn a good income, but not a great or exceptional one. And ultimately you'll have just wasted a lot of opportunity. So let's break down how to turn a marketing agency into a massive business that creates generational wealth for yourself and your family. Now, first and foremost, I don't think that having a marketing agency is a bad business, but I think that it is a stepping stone into something bigger if you want that something bigger, which for me personally I do. So let me break down what a marketing agency is actually good for, because there's really These are 3 main things. And once you identify these 3 things, you now need to move into the next phase, which I'll talk about in just a moment. So first thing, a marketing agency allows you to develop a skill set on somebody else's dime. You're essentially getting paid to spend somebody else's money and learn about marketing and learn about business and how things work, right? Which is great. That's awesome. This is going to become the foundation of everything else that you do. Later on in your career and in your business building journey. So don't just focus on making money when you're running your agency, focus on developing a skillset, okay? And in just a moment, I'll break down the skillsets that you really want. Next, it allows you to get connections within an industry. In a moment, I'll talk about how to pick your industry and what to really look for, as well as the industry that I'm in. And then lastly, it allows you to identify opportunities that you never would think of or come across on your own had you not been running a marketing agency. And that's exactly what happened for me. So those are the 3 reasons to have a marketing agency in the first place. And once you kind of have these things down and you've identified a huge opportunity, you're gonna pivot into another business. So let me explain something I call the Stadium Theory. All right? So the Stadium Theory basically poses a question, which is, How many stadiums— this could be the stadium slash skyscraper theory. How many stadiums and skyscrapers do you know of that are named after marketing agencies? If you need to pause the video and just think, just write down on a piece of paper, go ahead and do that. But I'd be willing to bet you won't come up with any because I don't think there's a single skyscraper or sports stadium— MLB, NHL, NBA, NFL— none. That are named after marketing agencies, right? But think about how much money you have to have to build a fricking skyscraper and put your company's name on the side of it, or to build a stadium that the Chicago Bulls play in or whatever, right? Any, pick any team. That's a whole other level of wealth, a whole other level of money. And so if you look at the businesses that are, funding these things, right? The businesses that are sponsoring these massive sporting stadiums or building skyscrapers in cities, well, if they have that much money, imagine if you just got a tiny sliver of that. That'd probably be easier than trying to, you know, hustle down Dennis to pay your $3K a month retainer on time. But it takes the same skill set. Okay, so I'll explain more on that in a moment. So the stadium theory and the skyscraper theory. Well, I actually did the research And there's no marketing agencies that have skyscrapers or stadiums named after. But you want to know what industry has a bunch of stadiums and a bunch of skyscrapers named after them? All right, so we're going to shift over here to looking at my screen for just a moment, and I'm going to zoom in and show you guys this. So this is some next level shit I'm putting you guys onto because most people don't understand this, and picking the right opportunity is like one of the most important things you can do in business. So Move my face out of the way. There. Cool. So check this out. These are the companies that are literally putting their names on the sides of major sporting stadiums. Number 1, banking and finance. 30% of all stadiums are named after banking or finance companies. So do you think there's money in that industry? Yeah, probably. Next, insurance. 10% of all stadiums are named after insurance companies. Then you have communications, food and beverage, automotive, airline, technology, retail, energy, and shipping. Okay. So if you want to pick the right industry, think about finding an industry that has so much money that they're literally just blowing it on random sponsorships, like putting their name on a stadium. All right. Well, let's look at skyscrapers. Well, which industry has the most skyscrapers? I'm going to have to move my face so you can see it. Well, spoiler alert, it's banking, finance, and insurance. Which was also the top 3 here. Okay, well, let's actually go through and let's, let's just look at some NFL and NBA stadiums and see what they're named after. Oh, first one, State Farm Arena. TD Garden, named after TD Ameritrade, which is, you guessed it, a financial services company. All right, let's keep going. Barclays. Okay, what is Barclays? Oh, they're a freaking bank. Wow, shocking. Okay, let's keep going. Spectrum. This is like a communications company. They do like internet and stuff. United Center, an airline. Rocket Mortgage, they sell financial products. American Airlines, airline. Ball Arena, I'm not too sure what they do. I think they own a bunch of like beverage companies. Little Caesars Arena, this is a pizza company, obviously. Chase Finance. Toyota, car manufacturer. Gainbridge, they sell insurance and they're a financial services company. Intuit, financial services. They help people with taxes. Crypto.com, financial services. FedEx is shipping. Kasaya Center is a software. Pfizer, I don't know actually what that is, but I would imagine it's probably, yep, financial services. Target. Smoothie King. So there's a few random ones in there. Paycom, financial services. Car manufacturer, financial services and banking. Footprint, I actually don't know what that is. What is Moda? Health insurance. I mean, you guys get the point. Okay, let's look at the NFL. Scroll up from the top. State Farm, car manufacturer. Bank. This is a financial services company. This is a bank. This is just a— the field is just named that. Financial services, bank. Oil— or no, this is AT&T— financial services, car manufacturer, oil, oil bank. Like, you guys start to get the point, right? There's obviously so much money in banking, finance, and insurance. So what if you took your same skill set as a marketing agency owner, right? I mean, just think with me for a second, and instead of running ads and helping dentists make sales, well, imagine if you were selling insurance or selling financial products. Because in reality, I mean, we talked about the skillset that you develop when you run a marketing agency, but really the main, like, when you have a very developed skillset as an agency owner, the skills that actually make that up are direct response advertising, and sales, right? So you have direct response marketing and you have sales skills. Well, these two combined, your skill set is just somebody of a rainmaker, right? Like when you have a really good marketing and sales skill set, you can essentially just go to any business, any industry, and apply those skills and just bring in customers. So like when you have those skills, if you just apply them to an industry that has way more money and again, back to Stadium Theory, instead of just running a marketing agency and charging them a retainer or a rev share or whatever. Well, what if you just built your own business that you had equity in, right? Because the richest people in the world, they're not worried about a retainer. They're worried about ownership and equity. Well, if you ran ads for an insurance company that you owned, you build up this base of renewals that pays you every single year, or you're running ads for your own financial services company and you build up a book of renewals that pay you every single year. I mean, I don't know that most people realize this, but a lot of these businesses, they exit for like software multiples. Like what I do, and I used to run ads for individual insurance agents who are probably about the worst customer that you could have as a marketing agency, 'cause they churn like crazy. But I took that same skillset and now I'm applying it and building my own wealth management firm that we own internally. And all of the assets under management, we can charge a percentage fee to manage people's money. And over time, you know, let's say we have 20, 30, $40 million of annual recurring revenue coming in. Well, that's a business that very commonly sells for 11x to 20x. You take $40 million a year, which realistically is not like with a, with a sales and marketing skill set is not ridiculous to get to at all. I mean, we're talking about like an $800 million exit. And if I just don't sell this business and I continue to reinvest, maybe I don't even exit. And I don't really see a world in which like I wouldn't end up becoming a billionaire. From a business like this just on accident. Right. And so when I first realized this, it just kind of like opened my eyes so much more than just charge a retainer or charge per lead. Right. And so what we're doing now internally is we've shifted from the retainer model. We now sell appointments and leads, and then we've started to just take some of the best appointments and the best leads internally ourselves and just build up our own financial services company. So again, Stadium Theory, what are the best industries that have easy access? Like maybe you can't go start your own bank, but you could certainly start an insurance agency and sell auto insurance or home insurance or business insurance. Or you could, you know, help people get mortgages. Like Rocket Mortgage is a multi-billion dollar company. The founder's worth $26 billion. They're on, you know, he owns the Cleveland Cavaliers. Cavaliers, who are an NBA team. His name is Dan Gilbert. You could, you could certainly sell mortgages, you could certainly sell insurance, you could certainly start a wealth management firm. Like, these things are pretty easy to get into if you know what you're doing, and if you apply a honed marketing skill set to an industry that is flush with cash, that's a winning formula. That's a lot better than just selling, I don't know, little widgets on the internet or selling PDFs for $97 a month. But like a lot of times the people selling widgets on the internet have a better marketing skill set than the people in financial services. So that is the biggest gap that I see today in the market is taking your skill set that you develop from a marketing agency, starting your own version of whatever business you're marketing for, and then just blowing it up and making a ton of money. So hopefully this presented a new light for you guys, maybe opened your mind up to some of the possibilities that you actually have access to. With your skill set. And if you want to follow along for the journey of me building my company to a billion dollars and get the lessons that I learned along the way passed down to you, hit the subscribe button and I will see you guys in the next video. Take care.