From <35k in profit in 2024 to half a million in profit in 2025

Austin LeClear, cofounder of Grow My Ads, posted this about me on LinkedIn last week that I want to share with you.

My ego appreciated the nice things he said, but that’s not why I’m sharing it.

His story is the most honest version of a problem I see in almost every agency that comes to me.

A year ago, Austin was ready to shut down his agency.

They were doing over a million dollars a year in revenue. On paper, that sounds great. In reality, they were breaking even. A six-figure monthly burn rate, twelve-hour days, personal money on the line, and the constant, grinding anxiety of knowing that if one or two things went sideways, the whole thing could collapse. After everything he'd built, he was genuinely ready to walk away and go back to consulting.

The instinct he had - the same instinct almost every agency owner in that position has - was to sell harder. Sell faster. Close more deals. That was the only lever he could see. Revenue was the problem, so more revenue must be the solution.

He was wrong. His words, not mine. "I was stupid. I was wrong."

The problem was 15% monthly churn. They were churning clients so fast that no amount of new business could outrun it. Every deal they closed was just replacing the one that walked out the door the month before. They were on a treadmill sprinting at full speed and going absolutely nowhere, and the harder they ran, the more exhausted they got.

So they stopped trying to outsell the problem and started fixing the disease.

They made retention their religion. His words again - they stopped talking about sales in their meetings entirely and only talked about retention. They built a proper onboarding system that caught issues before they turned into cancellations. They raised prices and went upmarket. They got ruthless about costs. They built a team that could execute when everything around them was changing.

Churn went from 15% to 5%.

And then the math does what the math always does when you fix retention:

• 50% year-over-year growth

• 29% profit margins

• Their first $100K profit month

They went from under 35k in profit in 2024 to half a million in profit in 2025, and are on track for over a million dollars in profit in 2026.

I'm sharing this because Austin's story is not unusual. It's probably the most common version of being stuck that I encounter.

Austin was kind enough to post his numbers publicly, and I've included the dashboard screenshot below so you can see what the trajectory actually looks like when retention flips from a liability to a compounding asset. Operating profit went from single digits to over 30%.

Unburdened comp dropped from the 70s into the 50s and 48s. SG&A got cut nearly in half. This is what an agency looks like when the fundamentals are right.

Nick

P.S.

I'm running a live workshop on the 12th March (1:30pm ET, 10:30AM PT) on how I 2x'ed my agency's profits without cutting costs, without offshoring, and without closing a single new deal.

You’ll learn/get:

• How we increased team’s capacity even when they say they’re “max’d out”

• How we found agency bottlenecks and figured out what’s going wrong

• How we chose clients to upsell, fire & grow to maxmize profit

• How we operated based on data and not on gut feels

Which meant:

• Increased take home profit

• Stopped working 12 hour days

• Improved agency sale potential

• You’re also going to get

• Full Recording

• Q&A Session

Register here →