It's Boring, But It Let Me Exit My Agency for 7 Figures+

Transcript

In 2026, everyone is obsessed with sexy businesses, and yet one business model stands alone to benefit most from the AI revolution, but it ain't sexy. That model is agencies. I built and sold my content agency in under two years for multiple seven figures. During that time, we worked with 87 brands, did over $150 million in directly attributable revenue, and more than 2 billion views. Here's the kicker. I never did a single outbound sales activity. Every client came to me pre-sold and ready to sign after a simple vibe check and understanding of our process. It's because I understood how to create demand gen content, content my target customer consumed on the platforms they frequented, which led to them booking calls. So in this video, I'm gonna walk you step-by-step through how I made this content on X, IG, and LinkedIn. We'll talk about why giving away the sauce wins, the three content patterns every client came from, picking your channel mix, the sales funnel that closed 87 clients from over 1,100 calls, and keeping clients past the six-week cliff. But ultimately, this is about how to position your agency to sell to a strategic. All right, let's get into it. When I was running my telehealth startup, Yuka Health, my Monday mornings were sacred, and not in a good way. Screenshots out of Meta, triple-wield numbers getting pasted in, and insights were typed by hand pretty much every single week. I threw AI at it, and wrong numbers would come back. There were no ad thumbnails, insights that sounded right, and unfortunately, they just weren't. So I rebuilt it manually anyway, and we went off this system every single time that we were trying to understand how we were gonna scale our ads even further. Runneth is the first thing that I have encountered in the wild that gets this right automatically. It puts together all of the data, all of the formatting of your ads, all of the insights together in one place, so it's centralized. It's my format, real thumbnails, and numbers I don't have to check twice. Once it's dialed in, the report literally just shows up on Monday morning. Think about how powerful that is. You save yourself so much time, and it just lands in your inbox. No one has to ask for it. It's just there. So if you own reporting at your brand, I promise you, you need to go try this tool. It's called runneth.com, and it's free. It's literally free to try. It's from Motion, which is obviously the number one creative analytics platform in the world. We love them on the show. So guys, please check it out, runneth.com. Okay, we'll get back to the show. First, let's establish a simple truth. By telling people the sauce, you will earn clients. This seems counterintuitive. Shouldn't you gatekeep so they want more? In actuality, no. Business owners don't have time to act on what you're talking about. They don't wanna hire work or do more work themselves. They don't want to add more to their team's plate. Listen closely. They want to pay for outcomes. And your job with content is to build trust that you know how to deliver the outcomes that they want. For example, I created a video about Mary Ruth's TikTok Shop strategy. In it, I went step-by-step through how they build their creator program, distribute angles to creators, and their live streaming playbook. It's very actionable. A brand owner could take it and run with that video. I attached a ManyChat automation to it, and that led to 3,000 folks actually requesting the full guide. But in practice, this booked almost 30 sales calls for my agency. It's because I demonstrated a clear understanding of how top programs work. From there, the brand owner goes to my site, sees logos of brands I work with, and is convinced I can get the job done. So the first rule of demand gen content is to not gatekeep a single thing. You literally give away everything you know, and it attracts the right folks. Now, let's get into finding and using inspiration content, because algorithms do work in patterns. So when one hook structure works, you can often recycle it using your own new content. It's the same thing that branding folks look to for inspiration in adjacent industries. The best streetwear designers take inspo from luxury clothes, luxury cars. The hottest brands in supplements, like Array, take inspo from beauty brands, and content is no different. You should study patterns and hooks and script structures so that you can take inspo from them and then adapt them to be your own. My three favorites boil down to these unique patterns. First is: this brand achieved this outsized result in this unusually short timeframe using tactic. It paints a picture for the viewer that an outsized result is possible by following the strategies I'm about to lay out. The second one was the contrarian take. Most people assume X, but brand proves Y. Again, this works to push a narrative you want your target customer to believe, which in turn helps you sell your service to them. Let's pause because I wanna clarify: this applies to any business making content. Most insurance brokers assume you need a specific policy, but this building, which survived this issue, proves you don't. You can literally adapt this to any sort of business or service offering that you have and use these content frameworks for your specific subject matter or your niche. It's important to remember you're pushing narratives around your product. So this can adapt to whatever you're doing. Third is: this is what I'd do if I ran X. This is probably the most powerful in terms of follower conversion and demonstrating competency, but it also requires the most original thought. You basically take a hot brand in your industry and say, this is how I'd build there, and then match it to whatever service you provide. So if you sell email, this is how I'd build their email strategy. If you sell TikTok Shop, say TikTok Shop. And I wanna talk about how I identified these by saving, bookmarking content in marketing that worked over time, and then I built out these patterns. So the easiest method here is, instead of doomscrolling, just save content that appears on your feed. If it made it there, it's a proven format that will work again when you adapt it to your own. Now, y'all already know we are super skeptical on this show about most AI tools promising the world. They have flashy demos, huge promises, and ultimately underdeliver. But I do have to tell you about one that has blown me away and saved my team countless hours of time, and that's Richpanel. Imagine a 24/7 customer support engine that handles all of your tickets seamlessly, escalates anything requiring human intervention, and here's the best part, upsells your customers in the process. Their onboarding process is frankly one of the craziest things I've ever seen. You input your brand, and within 15 minutes, it has full context on the latest drops, product information, and plugs into all of your apps. That's not even to mention the cost savings. They're like three times more affordable than their competitors. I couldn't recommend this enough. So if you're a brand looking to turn support into an asset, go check out richpanel.com and tell them we sent you. I wanna quickly double-tap on contrarian opinions because it's a delicate art. You absolutely have to come with receipts. If you have weak evidence for your hot take, any serious person will think you're dumb. And furthermore, you have to be ready to back it up with additional results past your initial. Successful business owners are great at digging into data and facts, so don't come unprepared or you'll look very immature. All right, so we've got our inspo process. Let's talk channel mix. This is just my experience, but I think this actually does work for almost any service provider. X is the highest-signal platform for e-com. IG is the widest-reaching and most likely to lead to cool people following you because they find you smart. LinkedIn is the best for reaching older audiences, but it has way less virality built into it. TikTok is amazing, but requires more volume and is probably the lowest signal quality of the four. I would use X for anything that requires accompanying videos and graphics, IG when you're comfortable on camera, and then repurpose everything to LinkedIn and hope it works. That's what I did. I posted on TikTok as well and only got a third of the followers my content did on IG, so now I've pivoted to YAP videos, which are doing way better over there. I haven't attempted any business YAP videos there, but I plan to in the fall. Okay, so now we're posting content, leads are coming in, what's our sales funnel? You need a few things. Number one is a detailed one-pager outlining 30-, 60-, 90-day expectations, milestones, responsibilities, and KPIs. This should be branded, hyper-simplified, and more visual than read-first. People literally don't read, and in particular today, they just throw stuff straight into their LLM for a summary, so definitely keep that in mind. Next, you need a standard contract template prefilled with your info. Also, make sure you have your W-9 and all your tax info all buttoned up to not spook anybody. The contract should always, and I mean always, be sent via DocuSign. It makes it 20 times easier to execute, and your entire job is reducing friction on getting signatures. Next is a Calendly link to qualify or disqualify leads. So out of the 87 closed clients we had, I had around 1,100 booked calls building the agency. At least 40% of those were unqualified, wasted time that I just outright canceled the call. Every industry's different, but typically, I wanted to know company revenue and site traffic as a proxy for whether someone was qualified to work with us. After you've begun acquiring clients, let's talk hiring, which is probably what I failed at the most. You simply must get out of the fulfillment process as soon as possible. As the owner, you will feel temptation to have your fingerprint on every client, but doing so actually harms your product long-term. It's a crutch you use not to build systems, processes, and train team members to actually deliver the level of work clients expect. In my opinion, aiming to make very little money early while hiring top talent is the thing that sets an agency up to scale long-term. At the end, our goal was to build pods: creative strategists, affiliate managers, and VAs attached to each pod of clients who service the accounts properly. With fulfillment dialed in, it's important to note that acquiring clients is just the tip of the spear. You actually shouldn't have a problem with client acquisition ever. Your only focus should be on keeping them for as long as possible. In my opinion, this starts pre-sale. Communicate exact milestones and expectations, but most importantly, hit them. We always introduced mini-milestones through the first six weeks of the engagement because it's naturally hard to meet a client's desired timeline. They want results immediately, which isn't realistic, but if you can just hit some sort of low-hanging-fruit goals, it gives the feeling of progress. For us, that was delivering a brief right after an onboarding call, setting up their dashboard, but whatever it is, just give a surprise and delight within the first two weeks to demonstrate you're working on their account because most importantly, it's getting to the result. If your service can't deliver an outcome within six weeks, it's going to be very challenging to keep the client going into month three. Most of them get skittish and don't view agencies as an investment. They view it as a cost. Therefore, you're always on the chopping block in favor of other shiny objects. Remember, other agency people are also making content that your customer's consuming, and if they feel sus about you, they won't hesitate to jump ship. So focus extremely hard on your internal processes to deliver a quality outcome in those first six weeks after contract signing. Now that we have content, clients, and fulfillment, let's talk about exit paths because most founders are completely delusional about what happens here. So first off, businesses are bought. They are not sold. Generally speaking, no one wants your shit, and you have to have immense downstream value potential to the acquirer where they think buying you will allow them to 4x or 5x their investment. I see this all the time with marketing agencies right now. Everyone thinks they're going to get valued on 5x to 8x EBIT even though their offering is not differentiated or strategic to an acquirer. Truthfully, most services businesses under five years will likely trade on a 1x revenue unless they're being acquired by someone highly strategic. For me, this was building a sales channel agency. Private equity groups were consolidating sales channel agencies and ultimately needed one for TikTok. There's been a rampant spending pattern from a lot of these big brands buying TikTok Shop agencies to roll into their Amazon or retail channels. This made us attractive, and the other TikTok Shop agencies acquired in the last year all followed this similar pattern. The acquirer is buying the capability, not the business, so that it can cross-sell it to its larger customer base. No big agency doesn't offer media buying or ad creative or content production, so those niches will never become as valuable as something that's a very hot and new sales channel. Instead, look at something emerging and see how you can become the best at it. For example, I see very few Whatnot agencies or microdrama agencies. That is an example of something that would be eventually valuable to a bigger company. That's the high level of how I built and sold the agency in 20 months. It all came down to organic content as a funnel, retaining clients, and positioning yourself strategically for an acquirer. If you have any more questions or want a deeper dive on any of this info, leave a comment on the video below. And as always, make sure to subscribe to Sweat Equity for more business deep dives. We'll see you all next time. how we were gonna scale our ads even further. Runneth is the first thing that I have encountered in the wild that gets this right automatically. It puts together all of the data, all of the formatting of your ads, all of the insights together in one place, so it's centralized. It's my format, real thumbnails, and numbers I don't have to check twice. Once it's dialed in, the report literally just shows up on Monday morning. Think about how powerful that is. You save yourself so much time, and it just lands in your inbox. No one has to ask for it. It's just there. So if you own reporting at your brand, I promise you, you need to go try this tool. It's called runneth.com, and it's free. It's literally free to try. It's from Motion, which is obviously the number one creative analytics platform in the world. We love them on the show. So guys, please check it out, runneth.com. Okay, we'll get back to the show. First, let's establish a simple truth. By telling people the sauce, you will earn clients. This seems counterintuitive. Shouldn't you gatekeep so they want more? In actuality, no. Business owners don't have time to act on what you're talking about. They don't wanna hire work or do more work themselves. They don't want to add more to their team's plate. Listen closely. They want to pay for outcomes. And your job with content is to build trust that you know how to deliver the outcomes that they want. For example, I created a video about Mary Ruth's TikTok shop strategy. In it, I went step-by-step of how they build their creator program, distribute angles to creators, and their live streaming playbook. It's very actionable. A brand owner could take it and run with that video. I attached a ManyChat automation to it, and that led to 3,000 folks actually requesting the full guide. But in practice, this booked almost 30 sales calls for my agency. It's because I demonstrated a clear understanding of how top programs work. From there, the brand owner goes to my site, sees logos of brands I work with, and is convinced I can get the job done. So the first rule of demand gen content is to not gatekeep a single thing. You literally give away everything you know, and it attracts the right folks. Now, let's get into finding and using inspiration content, because algorithms do work in patterns. So when one hook structure works, you can often recycle it using your own new content. It's the same thing that branding folks look to for inspiration adjacent industries. The best streetwear designers take inspo from luxury clothes, luxury cars. The hottest brands and supplements like Array, they take inspo from beauty brands, and content is no different. You should study patterns and hooks and script structures so that you can take inspo from it and then adapt it to be your own. My three favorites boil down to these unique patterns. First, is this brand achieved this outsized result in this unusually short timeframe using tactic? It paints a picture for the viewer that an outsized result is possible by following the strategies I'm about to lay out. The second one was the contrarian take. Most people assume X, but brand proves Y. Again, this works to push a narrative you want your target customer to believe, which in turn helps you sell their service to them. Let's pause because I wanna clarify, this applies to any business making content. Most insurance brokers assume you need a specific policy, but this building which survived this issue proves you don't. You can literally adapt this to any sort of business or service offering that you have and use these content frameworks for your specific subject matter or your niche. It's important to remember you're pushing narratives around your product. So like this can adapt to whatever you're doing. Third is this is what I'd do if I ran X. This is probably the most powerful in terms of follower conversion and demonstrating competency, but it also requires the most original thought. You basically take a hot brand in your industry and say, this is how I'd build there and then match it to whatever service you provide. So if you sell email, this is how I'd build their email strategy. If you sell TikTok shop, say TikTok shop. And I wanna talk about how I identified these by saving bookmarking content in marketing that worked over time and then I built out these patterns. So the easiest method here is instead of doom scrolling, just save content that appears on your feed. If it made it there, it's a proven format that will work again when you adapt it to your own. Now y'all already know we are super skeptical on this show about most AI tools promising the world. They have flashy demos, huge promises, and ultimately under deliver. But I do have to tell you about one that has blown me away and saved my team countless hours of time and that's Rich Panel. Imagine a 24 seven customer support engine that handles all of your tickets seamlessly, escalates anything requiring human intervention. And here's the best part, upsells your customers in the process. Their onboarding process is frankly one of the craziest things I've ever seen. You input your brand and within 15 minutes, it has full context on the latest drops, product information, and plugs into all of your apps. That's not even to mention the cost savings. They're like three times more affordable than their competitors. I couldn't recommend this enough. So if you're a brand looking to turn support into an asset, go check out richpanel.com and tell them we sent you. I wanna quickly double tap on contrarian opinions because it's a delicate art. You absolutely have to come with receipts. Like if you have weak evidence for your hot take, any serious person will think you're dumb. And furthermore, you have to be ready to back it up with additional results past your initial. Successful business owners are great at digging into data and facts, so don't come unprepared or you'll look very immature. All right, so we've got our intrap process. Let's talk channel mix. This is just my experience, but I think this actually does work for almost any service provider. X is the highest signal platform for e-com. IG is the widest reaching and most likely to lead to cool people following you because they find you smart. LinkedIn is the best for reaching older audiences, but it has way less virality built into it. TikTok is amazing, but requires more volume and is probably the lowest signal quality of the form. I would use X for anything that requires accompanying videos and graphics, IG when you're comfortable on camera, and then repurpose everything to LinkedIn and hope it works. That's what I did. I posted on TikTok as well and only got a third of the followers my content did on IG, so now I've kind of pivoted to YAP videos, which are doing way better over there. I haven't attempted any business YAP videos there, but I plan to in the fall. Okay, so now we're posting content, leads are coming in, what's our sales funnel? You need a few things. Number one is a detailed one-pager outlining 30, 60, 90-day expectations, milestones, responsibilities, and KPIs. This should be branded, hyper-simplified, and more visual than read first. People literally don't read, and in particular today, they just throw stuff straight into their LLM for a summary, so definitely keep that in mind. Next, you need a standard contract template pre-filled with your info. Also, make sure you have your W-9 and all your tax info all buttoned up to not spook anybody. The contract should always, and I mean always, be sent via DocuSign. It makes it 20 times easier to execute, and your entire job is reducing friction on getting signatures. Next is a Calendly link to qualify or disqualify leads. So out of the 87 close clients we had, I had around 1,100 book calls building the agency. At least 40% of those were unqualified wasted time that I just outright canceled the call. Every industry's different, but typically, I wanted to know company revenue and site traffic as a proxy if someone was qualified to work with us. After you've begun acquiring clients, let's talk hiring, which is probably what I failed at the most. You simply must get out of the fulfillment process as soon as possible. As the owner, you will feel temptation to have your fingerprint on every client, but doing so actually harms your product long-term. It's a crutch you use not to build systems, processes, and train team members to actually deliver the level of work clients expect. In my opinion, aiming to make very little money early while hiring top talent is the thing that sets an agency up to scale long-term. At the end, our goal was to build pods, creative strategists, affiliate managers, and VAs attached to each pod of clients who service the accounts properly. With fulfillment dialed in, it's important to note that acquiring clients is just the tip of the spear. You actually shouldn't have a problem with client acquisition ever. Your only focus should be on keeping them for as long as possible. In my opinion, this starts pre-sale. Communicate exact milestones and expectations, but most importantly, hit them. We always introduce mini-milestones through the first six weeks of the engagement because it's naturally hard to meet a client's desired timeline. They want results immediately, which isn't realistic, but if you can just hit some sort of low-hanging fruit goals, it gives the feeling of progress. For us, that was delivering a brief right after an onboarding call, setting up their dashboard, but whatever it is, just give a surprise and delight within the first two weeks to demonstrate you're working on their account because most importantly, it's getting to the result. If your service can't deliver an outcome within six weeks, it's going to be very challenging to get the client going into month three. Most of them get skittish and don't view agencies as an investment. They view it as a cost. Therefore, you're always on the chopping block in favor of other shiny objects. Remember, other agency people are also making content that your customer's consuming, and if they feel sus about you, they won't hesitate to jump ship. So focus extremely hard on your internal processes to deliver a quality outcome in those first six weeks after contract signing. Now that we have content, clients, and fulfillment, let's talk about exit paths because most founders are completely delusional about what happens here. So first off, businesses are bought. They are not sold. Generally speaking, no one wants your shit and you have to have immense downstream value potential to the acquirer where they think buying you will allow them to four or five X their investment. I see this all the time with marketing agencies right now. Everyone thinks they're going to get valued on five to eight X EBIT even though their offering is not differentiated or strategic to an acquirer. Truthfully, most services businesses under five years will likely trade on a one X revenue unless they're being acquired by someone highly strategic. For me, this was building a sales channel agency. Private equity groups were consolidating sales channel agencies and ultimately needed one for TikTok. There's been a rampant spending pattern from a lot of these big brands buying TikTok shop agencies to roll into their Amazon or retail channels. This made us attractive and the other TikTok shop agencies acquired in the last year all followed this similar pattern. The acquirer is buying the capability, not the business, so that it can cross sell it to its larger customer base. No big agency doesn't offer media buying or ad creative or content production, so those niches will never become as valuable as something that's very hot and new sales channel. Instead, look at something emerging and see how you can become the best at it. For example, I see very few whatnot agencies or microdrama agencies that is an example of something that would be eventually valuable to a bigger company. That's the high level of how I built and sold the agency in 20 months. It all came down to organic content as a funnel, retaining clients, and positioning yourself strategically for an acquirer. If you have any more questions or want a deeper dive on any of this info, leave a comment on the video below. And as always, make sure to subscribe to Sweat Equity for more business deep dives. We'll see you all next time.