How I scaled an agency $1.8M/yr to $11.5M/yr

Following up on Monday's email about the May 7th workshop, I wanted to tell you about an agency I ran.

We scaled it from $1.8M to $11.5M in 42 months on 5 to 10 leads a month. The whole way.

Normally when I tell people that, the first question back is "okay, so what was the lead gen strategy?" - and that's exactly why I'm writing this. There wasn't one. Lead volume was roughly flat the entire time.

What changed was everything that happened after the lead came in, and everything that happened to the clients already in the door.

3 levers. Let me walk you through them:

Lever 1: Sales process, before anything else

When I came in, the agency was at $150K/month. I'd just come out of a company with 30 salespeople, so I already knew how to structure a discovery call, how to write a proposal that didn't get ghosted, and how to close at high rate on low volume. That was the first thing I rebuilt.

Too many agencies are running sales processes that got built ad hoc by the founder in year one and never updated. They're leaking deals at every single stage and they can't see it, because they've never measured close rates by stage.

The lesson I took from that first year, and I still believe it: a good sales process on 5 leads a month will outrun a bad one on 50.

Lever 2: M&A, for the step changes

Over those 42 months, we acquired three agencies into the business. One of those deals brought in $200K MRR in a single transaction - roughly a year of organic growth, done in one move.

Our rule was narrow: we only bought agencies running at sub-10% margins. Reason being, if you can take a 7% profit agency and lift it to 20% using the same operational playbook you're already running internally, you effectively pay the seller back with their own money. The multiple collapses in your favor.

This isn't a secret, by the way - every halfway-serious buyer does this. But most agency owners never consider being on the buy side because they assume M&A is for someone else, or for later, or for when they're "bigger." None of that's true.

The lesson: buy an agency at 7%, improve it to 20%, the deal pays for itself. Full stop.

Lever 3: Client retention

This is the one I'd argue matters most. It's also the one that connects directly to what we're covering on May 7th.

On 5 to 10 leads a month, you cannot afford to lose clients. A single churned account on that lead volume costs more than a new one coming in - and I mean that literally, once you run the lifetime value math. So we stopped treating retention as a service-team problem and started treating it as the growth engine. Because on that lead volume, that's exactly what it was.

The lesson here is one I'd want any agency owner to sit with for a minute: when your pipeline is small, keeping clients is your fastest path to compounding revenue. Every month a client stays, the revenue compounds. Every month they leave, you reset to zero on that account and pay CAC all over again.

By month 42, we were at $11.5M. Still on the same 5 to 10 leads a month.

This is why when an agency owner asks me "how do I scale?" and their first instinct is to double the ad spend or hire a new BDR, I push back. The unlock is almost never more leads. It's almost always one of those three levers - or some combination - and nine times out of ten it's retention plus sales process, because those are the two you can move in a matter of weeks.

Which is most of what we're covering on May 7th. Team capacity, which clients to upsell and which to fire, and how to run the whole operation off data instead of instinct. Same operational spine that took that agency from $1.8M to $11.5M.

30 seats.

$197 $97 Early Bird Price.

Thursday May 7th at 2:30pm ET.

Grab a seat here:

https://www.agencyacquisitions.io/90min-workshop-may-7-2026/

Nick

P.S.

How to give an agency owner a cortisol spike in 5 seconds or less:

"Hey, do you have a minute to talk?"