How do you fulfill your agency clients? Assuming you get around 70 inbound leads a week and only choose to work with one, aren't you leaving a lot of money on the table by not scaling your agency services more?
I don't actually receive anywhere near 70 inbound leads a week — more like one qualified, interested party per business day, so roughly 20-30 a month. But to the real question: yes, I am leaving some money on the table, but it's a time allocation issue. The real question isn't 'aren't you leaving money on the table,' it's whether the money I'd make scaling agency services is more than what I'd make spending that same time and energy on content instead. Agencies are great, but there's a gap in money-per-unit-time between running an agency and producing an info product. I do enjoy service implementation and fulfillment, but it's a lot more delicate and fragile as a revenue stream — every new project is a fresh opportunity to screw something up, and you have to maintain quality on every retainer. Content, by contrast, is something I can consistently produce and that just exists afterward, compounding without needing ongoing maintenance the way agency service quality does.
My personal brand now drives the vast majority of new conversations, opportunities, and clients for my agency; I couldn't run the agency at its current level without it. Initially, I did everything outbound—door-to-door—then moved to less intense but scalable outreach like cold calling, cold emailing, and cold DMs. Three to four months into my YouTube channel, I was making $40k–$50k a month from cold outbound with my agency. I started the YouTube channel to scale my agency, and shortly after, I landed a $20k deal without a single sales call, realizing I could use my subscriber base as a main lever for client acquisition. Many people try to skip the outreach step, thinking they can just start a YouTube channel and get clients from it. However, building a successful YouTube funnel is very difficult and risky; it often takes years of consistent content with no return. Moreover, if you lack outreach, sales, and marketing skills, you can't reliably turn strangers into paying customers. If your YouTube channel disappears or platform changes, you're left without a fallback. Therefore, I recommend not skipping the outreach step: first build a business using traditional outreach, marketing, and sales skills. Content is important, but the internet is full of people who only talk without doing. In my own agency, I no longer manage most projects myself; I have a consultant/account manager (Cody) and a backend/team manager (Geo) handling projects, while I act in an advisory capacity, especially for large enterprise deals like Mr. Beast that require many meetings. In short, you should spend your time and energy building skills that turn total strangers into paying customers. Once you've validated that ability—maybe earning $10k–$30k a month with your agency—you can then invest in more scalable outreach methods like your brand, Twitter, or YouTube channel.
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
If your goal is to scale to seven‑ or eight‑figure monthly revenue, first consider what you're selling. Moving into enterprise with large, intimately scoped contracts often means custom software development and would require scaling the team far beyond nine people, bringing a whole different set of problems I don't enjoy. Instead, I recommend what every lean agency does at the million‑dollar‑a‑month mark: productize the hell out of your offer—think Fat Joe level productization where fulfillment cost is near zero and you charge based on outcomes like placements or deliverables. For example, an old client of mine productized SEO to the point where you just order a $7,755 campaign on their platform with zero fulfillment cost. For your specific model—$10K up front and $35K over six months (about $4‑$6K monthly plus upsells)—you could increase the monthly retainer to $5‑$8K and average $60‑$70K per client. Also, consider niching down: sell outcomes, not the systems, and use automation just to deliver those outcomes (e.g., a cold‑email agency enabled by automation). As an unofficial note, Lewin’s white‑label GHL approach is a massive revenue ad with little effort, but I prefer to focus on creating high‑quality content rather than pushing software on everyone.
It depends on what you’re delivering. If your retainer work is low‑time, like 30 minutes of website maintenance per month, you could have many clients. To scale beyond ten, focus on retainer deliverables that have little internal production cost—e.g., monthly reports, Loom video breakdowns, or limited Slack availability a few hours a day. This creates leverage and arbitrage between the time you put in and the perceived value, keeping you profitable.