Today I’m going to show you exactly how I grew my agency from $10k to $200k MRR.

I recently tweeted and said that going from $0 - $10k/m was the most life-changing step for me, and that’s true.

Taking home $120k a year as my own boss gave me the financial security I always craved.

But it didn’t give me financial independence. I couldn’t get off the hamster wheel.

Going from $10k - $200k gave me the financial independence to choose what I wanted to work on and what I didn’t, and also to spend money stress-free.

If you’re at $10k/m, this article will tell you how to get to $200k/ and achieve financial independence. I’ll also tell you how to avoid the mistakes I made so it doesn’t take you 5 years, like it did for me.

Why Listen To Me?

Before starting my agency, I got a first-class degree in Entrepreneurship and then started 9 different ‘businesses’.

None of them made me more than $35k a year.

I used my learnings from those failures to grow my tenth business from $0 - $200k/m. That business now employs 19 people full-time.

I have since used the same playbook to help grow several other businesses I have invested in.

Today I’m going to share my blueprint.

Buying Back Your Time

Once you get to $10k per month, the first thing you want to do is to buy back your time.

Any non-critical business task that can be done 70% as well by someone else should be delegated.

I see so many entrepreneurs spend 4-5 hours learning how to edit something on their website using a YouTube tutorial when they could have hired a freelancer for $20 to do it on UpWork or Fiverr.

You must protect your time so you can use it to focus on the 20% of tasks that are critical to building your business.

As soon as I hit $10k MRR, I immediately knew that I needed to hire someone to free up my time to keep growing the business.

People

If your business can’t survive without you, you haven’t got a business, you’ve got a job.

Andrew Wilkinson, who runs a $600m+ holding company, has a trick to hiring that he calls ‘Hire 1 to Hire 10’. I use the same trick in my business.

The idea is that instead of hiring 10 people, hire an A player who can go and build the rest of their team without your intervention.

That’s exactly what I did at my agency. I hired an A player who could then build a team around them. That freed up my time and energy to focus on sales and building the business.

One month later I hired a salesperson to relieve me from sales.

12 months into the business I no longer worked in the business, I spent 100% of my time working ON the business.

Incentives

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” - Charlie Munger

That is possibly the most important business quote I’ve ever read.

Your #1 job as CEO is to hire the right people and incentivise them correctly.

Once I hired a team around me, I set their base wage at just above minimum wage and the rest of their pay came from commission.

I focused the commission on my most important KPIs, which for us were the number of sales calls sat, new clients and retention.

I had several hungry and super-smart individuals highly incentivised to get more clients and keep those clients.

As well as being crucial for growth, it also meant that I didn’t ever need to worry about whether they were working hard.

Today, every single full-time employee in the business has part of their pay commission-based.

Systems

Before you start to scale, you need to make sure that your systems are scalable.

One of the biggest mistakes I see with agencies, is they don’t productise their service, and they offer different packages/services to each of their clients.

That makes it a nightmare when it comes to time management and scaling.

We were militant with our systems.

We only had one service and one price. Every single client got the same number of emails, sent on the same schedule, at the same time, on the same days. Every client got their list sent to them for checking every Monday, and they had 24 hours to check it, at which point it was auto-uploaded. Every client got the same report at the same time every Friday.

No matter how much our clients asked us to change the service for them, or do things on a different day, or give them a different price/package, we refused.

The benefits of being able to batch tasks together and automate mundane tasks far outweighed the one or two clients we might have lost.

As a result, each campaign manager we hired was able to consistently manage 70 clients.

We also created SOPs so that if one of us got hit by a bus tomorrow, someone else could walk in, read the SOP, and it’d be business as usual.

Because I’d hired A players, they built the systems, SOPs and the team that we needed to be able to scale so I could continue focusing on growth.

Fuelling The Machine

Once I’d hired a few A players to take over sales and campaign management, and built out a scalable system, the next step was to fuel the machine.

You want to find one marketing channel that converts well for you and milk it until it’s dry.

Too many founders try to spread their efforts across multiple channels and end up getting nowhere. Unless you’ve got a huge pot of VC funding burning a hole in your pocket, you’re better off concentrating your efforts.

I grew my agency from $0 - $100k MRR solely with cold email, and then to $200k MRR with the addition of LinkedIn Ads.

After doing some testing, we knew that for every 100 cold emails we sent, 1 person would book a sales call. So to fill one salesperson’s calendar with 15 calls per week, all we had to do was email 1,500 prospects. With over 2 million prospects in our target market, it was simply a case of scraping more emails and hiring more salespeople.

We were closing 25% of sales calls into paying clients, so for each sales person, they were doing 60 sales demos a month and closing 15 clients. Each one added $1,000 MRR and stayed for 3 months.

To get to $200k MRR, we knew that we needed approximately 200 clients, which meant we needed to sign 67 new clients per month.

The demo booking rate from cold email has gradually decreased over time, meaning we had to send more and more emails to fill our sales calendars. From cold email alone, we were able to get to around 100 clients, which was around $100k MRR.

We chose LinkedIn as our second channel, because our testing showed that we could consistently book sales calls for around $100 per call booked. Given our 25% close rate, this meant we could acquire clients for approximately $400.

In early 2023, we doubled our sales team from three to six people and used a combonation of cold email and LinkedIn Ads to fill their calendars.

Each month we were doing around 300 sales calls as a team, closing approximately 75 into paying clients and we had over 200 clients at any one time. Our revenue climbed to more than $200k MRR.

The key here is to work out your funnel stats asap and put it into a Google Sheet. If I send XXX emails, I get XX sales calls booked and that results in X MRR. My average client stays for XX months, and my net profit margin is XX which means each client I close is worth XXX to me. Once you have nailed that, you can reverse-engineer your numbers to figure out what input you need to achieve your desired output.

Using AI

With so many team members we had hundreds, if not thousands of manual tasks being done every day.

As we expanded the team, we bought in an AI expert to help us automate a bunch of our everyday tasks, streamline our client onboarding process, and auto-draft replies to client emails.

This paid for itself in time saved in the first two months.

The time and money we save every month gives us more budget to spend on keeping our team happy and outbidding competitors on ad platforms, which in turn drives more business.

Not Getting Sidetracked

If you take a look at the Stripe screenshot above, you might have noticed that it took me 5 years to go from $10k - $200k MRR.

That wasn’t because that’s how long it takes.

It’s because I have shiny object syndrome and I got sidetracked starting ‘billion dollar’ businesses on the side.

From 2018 to 2021, I started three separate SaaS business. I spend over $40k and over 1,000 hours on each one. Each one fizzled out when I got bored because traction was slow.

What I failed to realise, is that success in business is compounding. And compounding consistent effort over a sustained period of time.

In late 2022, I decided to double down on the agency and within 12 months we doubled revenue from $100k - $200k.

Spreading yourself too thin almost always results in none of your projects really growing.

If you start a new business on the side and expect it to be successful, you’re essentially saying that you working part-time is going to beat the one hundred other entrepreneurs who are out there starting the same business at the same time working 60 hours a week.

The lesson I have come to learn is that unless you’re Elon, you can only be the CEO of one business at a time.

Pick the business that has the most traction and go all in on it.

If you really must go start another business, hire a CEO to run the first business and incentivise them well.

Summary

• Hire A players and incentivise them well

• Build a productised service and have SOPs for everything

• Nail your funnel numbers and reverse-engineer your goals

• Find one profitable marketing channel to fuel the machine with

• Stay focused and don’t get shiny object syndrome

Sneak Peak

In 2023, our sales team did over 3,000 sales demos and closed 27% of them into paying clients.

We spent thousands of dollars and countless hours training our team to become incredible salespeople.

Next time I’m going to share with you the secrets behind becoming world-class at sales.

To make sure you don’t miss it, make sure you have added [email protected] as a contact in your email client :-)

Thanks again for reading!

If you enjoyed this email and want to hear more from me, you can follow me on Twitter.

Lee