From Agency Exit to Building Companies on the Back of an Audience
Key Takeaways
- Max's number one tip for agency operators is to read Built to Sell: one service, one price point, delivered to every client with the same checklist.
- His agency was offering 17 services at $20-25k in MRR, which made it nearly impossible to price, bill, hire, or forecast.
- He ranked all 17 services in two columns, highest ROI for clients and highest margin for the agency. Google Ads topped both, Facebook Ads came second, and everything else got cut that afternoon.
- A newsletter with ads is a billboard business. Once the weekly send sold out months ahead, the fix was more inventory, so he launched a daily.
- Unsold ad slots promote his own products instead of affiliate offers, which is how he launches businesses on the back of the audience.
- Newsletter production runs on a coloring book template, so a writer can produce an issue for 100,000 readers in 30 to 60 minutes.
Kuba Grajcar hosted this episode. His guest, Marketing Max (Max Bidna), sold his New York ad agency in October 2021 and now runs Growth Daily, a marketing newsletter read by over 50,000 CEOs, founders and marketers every day. They cover the book that reshaped his agency, the exercise that cut 17 services to two, a flopped course, and how a newsletter became a portfolio of businesses.
His number one tip for agency owners is a book
Kuba asks every guest for their number one tip for agency operators. Max didn’t hesitate.
“My number one, if I had to choose one, is to read the book Built to Sell, which is the book that changed my life… I would not have been able to exit my agency for what I did. I would have not been able to reach seven figures in revenue as fast as I did.”
He calls the book his Bible. The model: one service, one price point, the same checklist for every client. Already a one-service agency? Max says read it anyway.
17 services, $25k in MRR, and a two-column ranking exercise
Hell’s Creative started when a client at the investment bank where Max worked asked him to run her Facebook ads. He turned $2,000 in ad spend into $20,000 in revenue in two weeks, quit Wall Street, and said yes to whatever his startup clients asked for next. Eighteen months in, he and his co-founder were working 80-hour weeks at $20,000 to $25,000 in MRR, paying themselves about $4,000 a month. An audit found 17 different services.
“It made it nearly impossible to know what to charge. It made it nearly impossible to bill. It made it impossible to know who to hire next… It made it impossible to grow because we didn’t know what product or service to market. We went to the market with a terrible message.”
The fix took 30 to 45 minutes in a co-working conference room.
“So we numbered one to 17: what’s the most impactful, highest ROI for our clients. And then we numbered one to 17: what is the most profitable for us, what can we charge the most for but work on the least amount of hours for.”
Google Ads came out first in both columns, Facebook Ads second. That afternoon Max emailed every client a “why we’re quitting full service” letter, modeled on Don Draper’s tobacco letter from Mad Men, and refunded their last month. The business skyrocketed almost immediately, he says. Three years later it was at seven figures with 15 full-time employees, and he sold it in October 2021.
A flopped course led to a newsletter, and a newsletter is a billboard business
After the exit, Max launched a marketing course to 10,000 Twitter and 50,000 TikTok followers and sold about 20 copies. A friend told him to start a newsletter instead. Growth Hacks Weekly hit roughly 10,000 subscribers in three months, and at 15,000 to 20,000 readers its three weekly ad spots were booked four to six months out.
“I realized this business of running ads in a newsletter is a billboard business. The more billboards you have, the more money you make. You need more inventory, because I was booked up six months in advance, so I decided I’m going to launch a daily newsletter.”
Growth Daily launched in early January 2023. Eighteen months later, Max says more than 100,000 people read his three newsletters daily, and the products sold or promoted through them do close to seven figures a year, with ads a big chunk of that.
Unsold ad slots become a launchpad for his own businesses
This is the mechanism behind the episode title. Unless you’re the Super Bowl, Max says, you can’t sell every slot at full price, and most newsletters fill the gap with affiliate deals.
“I have a strict no affiliate deal policy. So I take my unsold ad inventory. We have about eight ad slots to sell every single day. We’re not big enough, I don’t have the sales team to go sell eight ad spots a day. So our unsold inventory is used to promote our other businesses.”
One of those businesses is The Newsletter Team, where more than half the clients are agency owners growing their own lists. His standard advice has been Facebook ads to the signup page. The math for an agency spending $5,000 a month on list growth:
“If you can close one new client from those new subscribers every single month… let’s say your agency charges $3,000 a month and the average client’s going to stay with you for six months… You spend five grand and you get one new client, a $3,000 a month retainer client for six months. That’s a very good ROI.”
Newsletters, like agencies, run on a coloring book
Kuba’s last question was operations: how do you ship two newsletters a day? Max says content is the easy part. Each issue takes 30 to 60 minutes with the right template.
“You just need to create a coloring book so that either you or the writer just hops in and colors within the lines. We need to find four headlines of industry news, then we need to find three TikToks or tweets or blog articles or podcasts that’s related to our niche… and then we need to write one tip of the day. That’s easy.”
Once the process and checklist exist, Max says, an agency can run the same way with very little stress.
The full conversation is on YouTube: watch the episode.