Transcript
If your agency isn't growing as fast as you hoped, or if you're thinking about starting one but feel overwhelmed, chances are the problem isn't you, it's your agency model. I see this all the time. New and even experienced agency owners chasing hyped-up business models that sound really good on paper, but leave you stuck with too many clients and too little profit or no time to breathe. The truth is not all marketing agency models are created equal, but there is one in particular, proven in 2025, that can get you to six, multi-six, even seven figures while keeping your workload and your stress low. In this video, I'll break down the three most popular agency models right now and the hidden downsides that nobody talks about. I'll show you the sweet spot model that's built my multi-million dollar agencies over the past 10 years and how you can use it to get better clients, charge higher rates, and scale without burning out. So, let's dive in. We've got a couple different ways or a couple different buckets to put things in. The first of which is the SAS {slash} AI. Oh, that doesn't look like a very good {slash}. We'll do that again. {slash} AI agency model. What this is is where we're going to go out and we're going to charge 97 bucks or maybe all the way up to even 497 uh per month per client. And we're going to give them largely automated software as a service artificial intelligence driven marketing campaigns. We're going to use software to delegate most of it. The client's going to be responsible for many things, but the promise is that we're going to be able to give them sort of a marketing solution in a box and then it's up to them to execute on it, deliver it, and go out there and get results. The problem with this approach though, and what it fails to take into consideration, is that at $97 a month, you need a lot of clients for this to actually be profitable. I mean, let's say 100 to keep our math easy. 100 * 10 clients is $1,000. That's not great, right? Like we're not going to replace any income and certainly not going to get rich at that rate. I mean, 20 clients, two grand. 30 clients, four grand. 40 clients, four grand. Still doing the math, right? 50 clients, five grand. 50 clients. That's a lot of clients in order to make just $5,000. We could use one of these other models and we could get possibly one or two clients to make that same amount of work. And what a lot of people fail to tell you is that getting two clients, even at a higher price point, is orders of magnitude easier than getting 20, 30, 40, 50 lower paying clients. In fact, there's not really that much extra work to go after higher priced, more affluent clients, but you get a whole lot more upside by simply sticking with this um with this model. Not to mention, when you're dealing with SAS and with AI as an agency model, you're kind of having to go after absolutely everybody here. Let's do a bit of erasing. We're going to clear up some space. And when that happens, when you have to go after absolutely everybody, you become the same. You're not differentiated, which means why am I going to pick you over somebody else? So now, oh, I now just realized my face is in the way. We'll just drag me around here. You're not different. So, why are they going to pick you? And you're going to have to spend a lot of time convincing them how your agency is better than everybody else's at $97. So, that's one option and it's certainly not one that I like very much. Let's go to the complete other end of the spectrum and then we're going to find a way to meet in the middle. This end of the spectrum is to go after the big brands, the Fortune 500 companies, create a marketing agency that helps them get leads and clients and sales and customers. Maybe you're doing ad creatives, you're running Facebook ads, you're creating video campaigns, you're doing all of these things and you're going after mega high ticket contracts. These are contracts that are worth six figures, multi-six figures. Sometimes they could be even larger than that if they take place over a long period of time, but the one thing that nobody tells you about this is that they don't want they don't want you and it's nothing personal. You're an awesome person. I know that, you know that, your friends and family know that, but Fortune 500 companies, they don't know that. So, not only are you not going to be able to get a contract with them, you're not even going to be able to get in the door. You're not going to be able to reach the CMO, the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, any of the Os, the C-suites, none of them are going to answer your call, respond to your email. They're basically unreachable. Not to mention, probably the most important, you don't want them. And this is from not just personal experience, but personal the experience of many of my friends and colleagues who have been fortunate enough to work with some very, very large names. Now, granted, there are some absolutely awesome giant companies out there that are phenomenal, but there are also some that have 60-day payment terms, 90-day payment terms, which means you do a lot of work and they don't pay you for 60 or 90 days, which cash flow is going to be the lifeblood of your business. There are going to be all kinds of bureaucracies and billing issues and other red tape and things that you don't want to deal with. There's going to be way too many meetings. It's very hard to get a concrete decision. Referrals don't exactly come very easily within this world because once they find someone that they really like, they tend to guard them. So, regardless, they're kind of off um off our radar as far as places that we want to go. There's also another form of agency that's grown up s- that's grown up lately, which is this uh growth partner style agency, where the premise is is that you partner with smaller business owners and then you work for a percentage of revenue increase. You become sort of uh either taking on some equity in their business or partnering with them, taking only the upside. The problem with this is similar to the Fortune 500. Why would a business owner who has spent their entire lives working on something want to give away equity in their business, especially if you're new or just getting started or don't have just this massive track record of success behind you, which means that it is a very challenging model to go after and it also when you're charging such high prices or taking equity in someone's business, you become responsible. You you sort of have a fiduciary responsibility to act in that business's behalf. You're going to have all kinds of different uh liabilities and accountable issues. It's like as far as a relatively passive style business, it simply doesn't doesn't even come close to that. So, what do we want to do? We want to go for the sweet spot. The sweet spot for agencies, six figures, multi-six figures, seven figures. You can run these alone, you can run them with a small team of contractors or outsourcers. You can use white label service fulfillment uh centers. There's a ton of different ways to do this. This has been the bulk of basically every agency that I've built to make millions and millions of dollars. So, what is this? Local service based businesses. Local service based businesses. That is the sweet spot. These businesses, ideally they're going to be doing between we could say 1 to 10 mil per year. And we'll go into more detail down here. These are going to be things like we're going to rattle off a few super fast, but like plumbers and electricians, could be HVAC, could be funeral homes, could be dentists, chiropractors, we'll just say chiros. Could be landscapers. Basically, uh let's add some more. Personal injury lawyers. I should have just written lawyers. Personal injury lawyers. We'll say personal injury law. Accountants. Perfect. Things like this. Local service based businesses doing 1 to 10 million a year. How do you tell if they're doing 1 to 10 million a year? They'll typically have around at the 1 million mark, we'll say two to three employees. And then you can just do the math and work that up to 20 to 30 on the high end. If they're falling in this range, they're typically in there, which means that they're going to have the budget uh for marketing, which means they're going to be able to afford your services. At the same sense, they're not going to be so massive that it's going to be impossible to get a hold of them. All of these, including other niches that we could I mean, we could go on for quite some time here, but like this is where you want to focus your efforts. This is where you want to concentrate because you're going to be able to go in there, get a hold of the right person, and charge reasonable prices that are going to make it very financially viable for you while at the same sense getting them a good result. So, let's talk about pricing next. Pricing for services. First of all, before we get to pricing, we need to offer productized services. What this means is that we're not reinventing the wheel every single time we sign on a new client. So, the last thing that you want to do is let's come back up here. Do some work for a plumber and make him a website and then take on an HVAC client and start having to run Google Ads and then do Facebook Ads for a dentist and then do some kind of funnel remarketing campaign for a personal injury lawyer. Talk about an epic disaster. That is a non-sustainable business model. First of all, we have to pick one niche anyway and of all of these on the list, these are all seven-figure niches, so any of them let's move it around my face again. Any of these are more than capable of getting you to a seven-figure agency, but second of all, once we've decided on the niche, we want to offer productized services, which means a service that we can offer again and again in a very systematized, very automated way. Let's take lead gen through Google Ads for example. We could run Google Ads to a landing page that would collect name, email, and phone for a client that would then take them to a we're just going to say TY for thank you page. And we could do this again and again and again. We can copy and paste and copy and paste and do this for all of our clients in whatever niche that we're in. We're going to be able to scale up our results. We're going to get feedback from all of the different um clients that we have over which campaigns working best, which keywords, which ones to exclude, and so on and so forth. And then we're going to be able to charge a reasonable rate to continue getting them great services, but productized service, unlike SaaS and AI, which is technically a productized service as well, we're going to take this up a notch by offering I'm going to run out of space and I want to keep this all on the same page, so we'll clean that up there. We're going to offer personalized delivery. And what this means is we're going to be normal This is going to sound weird, I appreciate. Maybe even a little bit contrarian, but we're going to be normal human beings. That's right. We're going to call them. We're going to send them emails. We're going to answer their questions. We're going to talk to them like they're real actual people. We're not going to treat them like just another lead because we don't have to. I mean, at this price, at 97 bucks, you simply cannot afford to answer people's questions or give them time or help walk them through things or answer other marketing related questions that they may have. But when you start charging let's say 1,500 to 2,500, which is a nice sweet spot, you can. Because let's do the math here. 4 * 2,500 10K. So, if you can get four clients, you can make 10K a month, 120 grand a year. And of course, we could double this, not even impact our price, and now we're at 20K. And eight clients is very manageable as a one-person business. When my in my agencies, the most clients that I ever ran with just myself was like 25, 26 clients. It was probably excessive, um but the money was there, so it justified it. And then at that point, I started a uh looking for help and getting support and started building up a team of um of freelancers and outsourcers and contractors. Side note on that, if you're looking for that, you can go to agencyproplus.com, which is the uh the outsourcing white label fulfillment agency that we built there. But regardless, you do all this, and that's how you differentiate yourself, and that's how you end up in this sweet spot here where the money is made. So, hopefully you find that helpful. Hopefully, if nothing else, it's convinced you to avoid kind of playing down here on the low end of the pile and just doing SaaS and AI and all of these completely replicable, non-differentiated, low-ticket style offers. Uh hopefully also we haven't crushed your dreams of working with say a Fortune 500 company. By all means, you can, but if you want to do that, start here, make a ton of cash first, and then move on from there. So, with all that said, hope you enjoyed the video. If you're curious and interested in how we help agency owners grow to six and seven figures, I'll put a link down in the descriptions below, and otherwise, uh talk to you soon.