How to built a $20,000,000 ARR Agency… 🧵

Whop Risk Scores. Coming soon.

Red tape makes your best people quit and kills your margins. Too many agency owners add in a billion different processes the SECOND they cross $100K/month, thinking it’s what “real” companies do… These are the 4 worst offenders: 1. The Trust Tax (Manager QA on every piece of copy and creative) You hire a strategist, then you make a manager check their work before it ships because you think you're protecting quality. But all you're doing is telling your strategist you don't trust them to do the job you hired them for. So they stop pushing their own ideas. Why care when someone above you is going to "review" it anyway? 2. The Assembly Line (Too many hands on one project) Four years ago, if we needed a landing page, I told one guy, build it. Done. Then we got "sophisticated." Now it's a Figma file, customer research, one guy builds the mockup, someone approves the mockup, then a different person builds the actual page. A giant assembly of people to ship one page. A one-day task takes a week, costs you 4 salaries instead of 1, and every handoff is a new place for it to break. 3. The Branding Tax (Caring more about how it looks than what it sells) The biggest brands I've worked with are the slowest teams I've ever touched. They care too much about the branding and not about the sales. The campaign that should be live this week sits in review because someone thinks the button is off-brand. Growing agencies copy this the second they start feeling important, and it's the same disease. You're babysitting how it looks instead of whether it moves money. 4. The Clock Trap (Tracking hours instead of output) The minute you measure how long people sit "at work," you've told them time is the job. The guy doing 42 focused hours outproduces the one grinding 60. But now everyone optimizes for looking busy. Status meetings, time logs, green Slack dots. Your best people start resenting that they're graded on the clock instead of the result. The pattern is always the same. You add the layer to feel like a real company. The layer is the reason you stop moving like one. The fix is a team good enough to trust without it. If your team is a dog, none of this works, and you'll get cooked trying. Build the team first, then get out of its way.

Scaling has nothing to do with being "tough". The first time a client puts in notice and your best person quits in the same afternoon, it wrecks you. Then a payment bounces on top of it. Up until then, the biggest problem you ever had was a girlfriend leaving. So you do the only thing you know how to do. You focus on the problem, but you never once look at the stress itself. The guys who actually scale can look at the stress and ask if it's serving them. Being stressed doesn't get you to the solution. It just makes you suffer way more on the way there. Once you see that's true every single time, stress stops being this thing that happens to you and it becomes just another item on your to-do list. Why would you stress if stressing only takes you further from your goal? Get it off your chest early, or it runs you. That has more to do with scaling than toughness ever will.

Yesterday, a company ranked #1 in its space pitched a brand owner directly. Told him straight up, we're the best at this, let's work together. The owner didn't say yes right away because he followed me, so he came to me. "Let me ask Eddie what he thinks about these guys”. That deal became mine. Not because I'm better at the service (they're ranked higher than I am at it), but he trusted me enough to ask me first. People don't buy from who's best. They buy from those they trust. The business owner is buying from you, not the business. You can be the best at the actual work. Doesn't matter. They buy the guy they trust.

Give me your exact product at your exact price, and I'll outsell you 10 to 1. Take one supplement that cleans your gut. One person sells it as gut health Someone else sells it as feel better Someone else sells it as bloat less I sell it as a parasite cleanse Same bottle, same ingredients. Mine sells 10x more. Most people find a product they like, buy the inventory, and then sit there trying to figure out how to sell it. The angle is the business. The product is just whatever you attach to it.

Our invoice product will be improved massively over the coming weeks

Traits of 8 and 9-figure agency owners: > Can sniff BS through a Zoom call > Never ask for permission to start > Execute before motivation runs out > Spend $200K/year on education without flinching > Spend $7-8K on a dinner for 10 people & call it an investment > Cut friends, businesses, and investments every year without guilt > Unafraid to walk away from deals if the opportunity cost is too high > Slightly delusional about what their business is worth > Never hit a roadblock they don't try to overcome > A million dollars isn't a lot of money to them > Not shy about being vulnerable during sales > Don't measure ROI on relationships > Low tolerance for slow execution

No one is cheering for you.

“Selling courses is so easy anyone can do it.” “It's not a real business.” “Anyone with a course is a guru.” I run the marketing and ads for some of the biggest coaching programs in the world. Try doing $5M a month selling info products online without losing every dollar you've ever saved. It takes being able to: - Run ads profitably - Make content consistently - Market well enough to know where the next sale is coming from - Think strategically about every dollar - Provide value people will pay for again Alex Hormozi's entire business right now is selling courses. The only difference is he gives more free value before the paid offer, so people call him a consultant instead of a course seller. He still sells courses. He’s just very good at it. Unless you've done millions a year in course sales, consistently, profitably, without leaving a trail of shit reviews behind you, you don't get to yap about course sellers online.

We've scaled 200 agencies past $250K/mo. Every single one had 1 of these 3 things holding them back. Offer Lead Gen Delivery We just put exactly how we fixed all three into 3 free letters. 106 pages. RT Comment LETTERS & I'll DM them to you. (Must be following)

Within 5 years of quitting my job to go all in on BAD I grew it from 0 to $20M. It's still one of the best paths to your first 7 figures and every excuse you have for not starting is cope. Here's why: 1. "I need a loan to start" I literally started with nothing but a tiny one bedroom apartment driving a Nissan Altima. You don't need loans, money, or any fancy resources. All you need is time. 2. "I have no experience" And that’s fine because you’ll develop that experience by doing an INSANE amount of reps anyway. When I started, my sales system was doing 10,000 cold calls. My delivery SOPs were me doing fulfillment solo. My media buying team was me running every ad myself. Those reps were the research phase for building the systems that got BAD to $20M. Do the reps and the experience will come. 3. "The market's too saturated" That’s what losers tell themselves. The best marketing companies fail 90% of their campaigns because nobody bothers being like, “Huh, I wonder what went wrong here?” then fixing it. That’s how low the bar is. Do, learn, adjust, redo, and you’re already ahead of 90% of the competition. 4. "I don't know who to sell to" Good. You're not supposed to know yet. Specialize within two to three verticals first, find where you're getting the most success, then super-specialize into that ONE area. Don't box yourself into one vertical right out the gate. 5. "It's too risky" Starting an agency is the closest equivalent of a lottery ticket in business. And the best lottery ticket has a capped downside and an uncapped upside. The only downside for me was going back to my old job. For you it’s capped at exactly where you are right now reading this post. The upside is financial FREEDOM for the rest of your life.

99% of business owners are too lazy to do their own content creation and sales, but people base their perception of your brand on whatever you post on social media. Sales converts those people into actual profit. Look at any profitable company and you’ll see BOTH generate the most revenue. With Scoville I can make $1M /yr more just by doing food trucks at big events like the FIFA Fan Festival and Halal Festival. Instead my brain is moving towards standalone drive-thrus like McDonald's, TacoBell, etc, because I can’t compete with them on brand if I split our attention between the two. That’s how much I have to think about brand, and it's the most important thing you'll ever manage in your company. You CANNOT afford to be lazy.

Relentlessness without non-negotiable boundaries is a guaranteed path to a miserable life. If I have to ruin my health, I don't want a part of it. If I have to harm other people, I don’t want a part of it. If I have to sacrifice close friendships, I don’t want a part of it. If I have to jeopardize my morals or ethics, I don't want a part of it. Short term is different. Sometimes it's required. But never long term.