Blueprint to your $10M marketing agency

When I was in the middle of scaling my first agency to $10M it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. 

If you had asked me, “Is everything going well?”

I would have said yes - even though we were burning through clients.

And if you had asked me, “Are your clients were happy?”

I would have answered that we were getting them great results. 

So, then why was our churn averaging 15% per month? (And costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars) 

Something wasn’t working.

I’m Nick Avaria, agency owner, and founder of Agency Acquisitions. If you want the YouTube breakdown from this week’s newsletter with the numbers behind-the-scenes where we made this happen, watch it here.

When you only optimize for client results, it leads to other problems slowly creeping in that will crush your agency. 

At the time we were getting well above benchmark results for our clients. 

If the standard was 3X ROAS we were hitting 5-10X; crushing MER, getting people revenue/leads/etc.

So why were our clients still leaving us? 

#1 Our clients didn’t understand the results 

The first challenge was that we weren’t spending enough time with our clients helping them to understand the process and what the results meant. 

We weren’t onboarding new clients properly to align their expectations about what good results even looked like. 

When clients are left confused and unsure about what they are spending their money on (even when the results look good on paper) they leave. 

And this leads to the second problem. 

#2: We didn't care about educating our clients or client service (and no one was taking responsibility)

The more clients left, the faster we were onboarding new clients, and the faster those ones left too. It became a flywheel of bleeding clients. 

When I asked our account managers why their clients were leaving they all said the same thing, “It’s not my fault.” 

They had all kind of reasons: 

• The client didn't get it

• Unrealistic expectations 

• They had a new marketing manager etc. 

Some of our worst offenders had 22% churn month over month. 

But their client reports looked good on paper, so what was the issue?

We had one outlier who only had a 2% monthly churn rate. 

What were they doing differently? 

Focusing on the client experience. 

The people with the highest churn weren't responding to clients for 3-5 business days.

I knew I needed to fix this - and I made it my mission to get all my team members down to a 2% churn rate (only losing about 1/50 clients per month across the agency or a 4-ish year LTV). 

There would be no more excuses. 

We realized we needed to spend more time making sure that our clients knew what good results looked like. 

We needed a better onboarding process, and quarterly meetings tied to explaining the results. 

And slowly but surely, the churn started to drop.

Preventing client churn became our #1 objective and metric. 

The people who couldn’t adapt left our organization. 

Everyone wants to chase more sales. 

But you can be crushing your sales, and then burning through clients on the backend faster than you can sign them. 

Why you win is more important than if you win. 

Watch the full YouTube video of how I turned around my agency and scaled to 8-figures here:

Note: I am fully booked through the end of 2025 with marketing agencies.

If you want to get on my waitlist for 2026 to help your agency scale faster and make more profit, book a time this week with our team to see if you’re a fit for working with me 1:1.

Nick Avaria