Ad Agency

When Chase Chappell was still a high school student in Fort Worth, Texas, he founded a small digital marketing company. Chappell had created a business model that flew in the face of digital marketing convention, and which began producing huge returns for his clients almost immediately. Within a few months of hiring Chappell, his first customer, a luxury pool contractor, booked enough work to fill his calendar for the next two years. The pool builder was thrilled—he’d never had so much business. But though he’d wanted to increase his revenue, he wasn’t interested in becoming a larger company—or in the headaches…

In January 2018, Nick Eubanks acquired two agencies six days apart. His agency, From The Future (FTF, formerly I’m From The Future), was a side project that grew to a $1M company. After three years of guiding FTF in his spare time, Nick left his executive role at a growing eCommerce company to become the CEO of FTF. That was just three months before the double acquisition. What could go wrong? (Everything. Everything could go wrong.) But before we address what went wrong (and how he fixed it), let’s take a moment to understand why the acquisitions happened in the first place….

By specializing in helping companies lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), GrowthRabbit doubled its revenue in 12 months. Chintan Maisuria, founder and CEO, has been successful because he followed a deliberate plan for identifying and cultivating his agency’s focus. “I was playing it safe,” he explained. “I don’t want it to be another traditional agency that sells everything and everyone. I wanted to hack the growth marketing side.” He explored the industry as a freelance professional for seven years, investigating in depth the digital marketing needs of various clients, from international companies to small business incubators. That helped him zero in…

When a digital marketing agency jumps from 20 to 160+ clients, that’s a growth worth celebrating. KlientBoost founder and CEO Johnathan Dane was psyched, but his fixation on retention made him wary of becoming complacent. When the agency reached about 100 clients, there was a virtual revolving door of incoming and outgoing clients. Johnathan knew that if it kept up, growth would stagnate—if not decline. The problem was that conversations with staff about putting systems in place didn’t result in action. There were few training materials, so best practices weren’t being followed. There wasn’t any activity monitoring to catch problems…