I was on a call a few days ago with an agency that’s been around for 30 years, & in passing, one of the executives made this comment: “you know, you’re always your worst client.”
That one line perfectly sums up the problem we solve.
It’s all too common in the agency space, and it always happens to THE BEST agencies. They spend so much time obsessing over client results and performance that they neglect their own agency.
And here’s the kicker: because those agencies get such good results for clients, they have the EASIEST services to sell. Which makes our job & theirs easier.
So no, we don’t have a tear-jerking story of how we started, or a grandiose mission to end world hunger (as beautiful as that is). We’re here to solve a problem that’s all too common for good agencies: getting them clients consistently, without them having to spend all their time doing it.
But to explain why this matters so much to me, I’ve gotta go back to 2019.
I love the agency business model. There is truly no other business on the planet as cool as an agency. One with so much potential, so much proof of concept & one that is literally ALWAYS in demand. A client gives you money, and in return, you go out and return to them more money.
When I started, I had 0 idea what I was doing. I just wanted to help local businesses get customers & traffic. I grew slowly through in-person meetings, and relatively quickly COVID shut all of that down.
We had some traction, just driving around Nashville and trying to get belly to belly with prospects, but it was hard & took forever. Although it was scary at the time, COVID did us a big favor by forcing us to learn how to do business virtually.
We began doing cold outreach to realtors on social media, and the calendar started to fill. More sales calls than I could even handle. We ended up enrolling 107 clients all through outbound (cold email & social outreach) and scaled that agency to $2M a year. I thought I had discovered fire, but what I realize now is I was just figuring out the lesson that so many incredible B2B founders already had: IT WORKS, IF YOU DO THE WORK.
Outbound quickly became a LOT to manage, so I naturally leaned into ads. At the time, we were basically spending a nickel to get more than a dollar on Meta, and as we started to focus on other areas of the agency, like client success & retention, we wanted channels in place that would be more hands-off for us.
Outbound became the childhood friend that we knew all our lives, and stopped talking to after we went to college.
And without realizing it, I’d become my own worst client.
So all these years later, after launching multiple agencies of my own & advising many, many more, I’ve learned that outbound is the most predictable, cost-effective & scalable method there is to get clients. But the problem is this: it takes a lot of work.
As agency owners, even if we’re making millions of dollars per year, we still wear a LOT of hats. Not just lead generation, but sales, client success, operations, finance, hiring, you name it. And because of that, outbound tends to take the backseat.
I’ve read hundreds of business & leadership books, and almost all of them have a central theme: there’s one activity in your business that makes you the most money, and the more time you spend on it, the more money you make.
But what they neglect to say is this: there are still other activities that need to get done. And as much as it hurts our ego to say it, as founders we’re not the best person to do every single thing.
This is why I love what we do so much. Our clients make THE MOST money by focusing on their clients’ results. But if that’s ALL they focus on, their pipeline stops getting fed. So we come in and handle ALL of the legwork of building an outbound division & they get to focus on what they’re best at, and we get to focus on what we’re best at.
And literally, everyone wins: you win, your clients win & so do we.
The best agencies shouldn’t be their own worst client. This is why AgencyLeads exists & why we love what we do.
So with that said, if you’re an agency doing between $1M & $10M per year, and you feel like you’re your own worst client, we’ll build you a fully done-for-you outbound division — so you can bring in more clients while continuing to focus on what you’re best at.
And of course — if we don’t perform, you don’t pay.
If that’s you, schedule a demo.