How to Scale an 8 Figure Agency 🚀

Need help getting out of your operation? Go here: 8figureagency.co

Most agency founders who sell don't get their full exit, and some walk away with a fraction of the headline number. In this episode, Jordan Ross breaks down the biggest lessons from 8 Figure Exit Live. The event brought together about 100 agency owners, roughly a third of whom have already sold, plus speakers John Bond, who built and sold a billion-dollar ad agency, and M&A advisor John Augenblick.

You'll learn why agency M&A is a "combat sport," how buyers structure earnouts, what you should really expect to take home after fees and taxes, and an alternative to selling: gradually selling equity to your team. Jordan also shares John Bond's talent strategies for keeping A-players for the long haul.

In this episode:

(00:00) Why almost every agency founder gets burned in an exit

(01:54) What happens at $2M+ EBITDA: PE firms, holding companies, roll-ups, and professional M&A teams

(02:30) How earnouts are structured against the seller, and the founder who sold for $4M but received $1M

(03:45) Why suing after a bad earnout rarely makes sense

(04:17) How to vet a buyer: call the agencies they've already acquired

(04:40) Selling for $20M and keeping $10M: fees, taxes, and cash at close

(05:10) The legacy alternative: selling 4% of your agency to your team every year at about half the multiple

(07:15) John Bond's first rule: don't chase small opportunities

(07:50) Recruiting talent from outside your city to build loyalty and culture

(08:41) Small equity grants (1–3%) to retain your leadership team

Key takeaways for agency owners:

Treat the cash at close as your real exit number. The earnout is upside, not a guarantee.

Before you sign, ask the buyer's past acquisitions what percentage of their earnout they actually received.

Selling equity to your team gives up some of the multiple but keeps cash flow and your best people.

Small equity stakes for non-COO executives can align incentives far better than salary alone.

Mentioned in this episode: John Bond, John Augenblick, Matt Paulson, 8 Figure Exit Live

Next event: 8 Figure Exit Live returns in March or April 2027. Email [email protected] to get on the list.

Get out of agency ops. Go here: 8figureagency.co

"It costs my clients more to churn — so they never do."

A client of mine said that to me this week, and he might have the best agency offer I've ever seen. He's an investment

banker who built a lead generation agency that finds off-market deals for private equity firms — proprietary deal flow the

PE firm's competitors never see.

The model: a seven-figure subscription business, plus a 2% success fee when a deal closes. And here's why his clients never

leave — the retainer is a rounding error against the capital PE firms deploy, but missing one deal costs them millions. When

churning costs your client more than staying, retention stops being something you fight for.

In this episode, I break down how the whole thing works — and what it teaches every agency owner about offer design.

My lead magnet giveaway went viral — 600 comments across LinkedIn and X. It booked zero calls. So I brought Tim Keen (agency

founder with an exit, and one of the best funnel minds in the game) onto the show to rip my lead generation funnel apart

live — and he showed up having already rebuilt it the night before.

If you run a marketing, paid ads, or SEO agency and your landing pages get opt-ins but your calendar stays empty, this

episode is the teardown you should be doing on your own funnel.

You'll learn:

- The "two beers" test: why confused visitors bounce, and how to walk eyes from headline to booked call with nothing

blocking the maze

- Why your lead magnet headline should lead with proof, not cleverness ("40+ prompts powering 300+ agencies" beats anything

clever)

- The thank-you page most agencies waste — and how Tim turns it into the page that actually books the call (video +

personalized offer + survey, in that order)

- Why asking for registration right after the email opt-in kills conversions, and what to ask for instead

- Pre-filled calendars, qualifying forms, and the friction fixes that stop qualified leads from abandoning at the booking

screen

- Moving off GoHighLevel: what's worth replacing, what isn't, and the custom stack Tim built (spec-as-contract builds,

Convex, ClickHouse, full attribution)

- Build vs. buy, straight talk: why building your own software probably won't make you more money — and when it will

📅 Book a call: If you want systems and funnels like this built inside your agency — and a business that works without you —

book a call: https://www.8figureagency.co/schedule (Booking from the podcast and running a 7-figure agency? You'll talk to

me personally.)

🔗 Connect with Tim Keen: Tim builds custom funnels, marketing systems, and software for agencies and B2B businesses. He's

launching everything soon — for now, find him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-keen

Chapters

00:00 — If you're not doubling booked calls every quarter, something's wrong

01:12 — Who is Tim Keen

06:21 — Don't let AI write your copy — write it once, build the skill from the delta

08:54 — The two-beers rule of funnel design

10:09 — Viral giveaway, zero booked calls: diagnosing why

11:44 — The registration form that makes brains bounce

13:43 — The thank-you page that actually books the call

16:47 — Qualifying forms, pre-filled calendars, removing booking friction

19:16 — Life after GoHighLevel

21:36 — Building won't make you money (and when it will)

22:00 — My agency went AI-native this week: 40 people to 2

24:01 — Tim's software factory: spec-as-contract, Convex, ClickHouse

28:22 — What Tim's offering and how to reach him

30:40 — Book a call — 7-figure agencies talk to Jordan directly

How My Agency Went From 40 Employees to 3 (AI Updates for Agency Owners, Q3 2026)

AI won't do your strategy — but it will eat every hour of admin, reporting, and manual work in your agency if you let

it. In this solo episode, Jordan Ross (founder of 8 Figure Agency, the first AI consulting and development firm built

for agencies) shares what's actually working in marketing agency automation right now — including the inside story of

quietly converting an agency in his own portfolio from 40+ employees across the world down to a 3-person AI-native

team.

You'll learn:

- Why systems you build today compound forever — and why the SOP-and-training playbook that ran agencies from

2019–2024 is dead

- The exact build process Jordan runs with his engineer: scoping documents, hyperscoped sprints, "golden cases," and

the QA loop that turns AI output into a self-sustaining service

- Vibe coders vs. 10x engineers — what non-technical founders get wrong about building with AI, and why product

management is quietly becoming the highest-income skill an agency owner can develop

- The AI SDR that made Jordan rethink his roadmap — and the build-vs-buy question every agency owner should be asking

before writing another line of code

- The real result: automating admin, reporting, split testing, and data insights saved one ad-agency client 40 hours a

week in a single month

Chapters

00:00 — There's never been a better time to own an agency

01:56 — The hidden portfolio agency: 40+ employees to 3

03:55 — Doing work vs. building systems (why most founders are stuck on low leverage)

06:04 — Golden cases: how to QA an AI system until it runs without you

08:16 — Why I'm exiting my portfolio (again) — stress, kids, and lifestyle maxing

10:18 — Vibe coders vs. 10x engineers, and the product-manager skill founders need

12:12 — The AI SDR that shattered my brain: build it or buy it?

14:26 — Automating agency admin: the 40-hours-a-week result

Links & Resources

🔗 Work with us to systematize and AI-enable your agency: https://www.8figureagency.co

📅 Book a call with the 8F team: https://www.8figureagency.co/schedule

Want an AI content engine that publishes at a pace your domain can actually carry? Go to https://www.8figureagency.co/get-aiagency-ops for a free AI consultation.

Any agency can do SEO. Any agency can also torch its domain in six weeks doing it wrong.

A few weeks back I had someone on this show who was publishing 20 AI-written blog posts a day. Cameron LiButti — founder of BidView Marketing, 13 people, ~70 clients, close to 200 locations across medical, legal, professional services, and large home services — told me exactly what would happen. Google de-indexed the site inside six weeks.

So I brought Cam on to answer the question I actually have as a founder learning this myself: how do you use AI for SEO aggressively without setting off Google's alarm bells?

We get concrete fast. Cam explains crawl budget — how much compute Google decides your site is worth, and why a site crawled every three to six weeks publishing 20 posts a day is a flare in the sky. He covers the audience question most agencies skip: his medical practices serving 65+ patients get under 5% of leads from AI search, while his tax attorney client gets 40–50%. Same firm, same tactics, completely different priority.

Then the part you can build on this week. Google's non-commodity content standard, and the two-part article structure that satisfies it: the first half answers the questions traditional SEO and AI both want answered, the second half is a real client situation — the problem, what you did, the outcome. That's the point of view Google can't get from a commodity blog.

Cam gives the exact ramp: start at three posts a week, submit each one in Search Console, and check whether it's still indexed two weeks later — not 48 hours later. Still indexed at week three? Go to four. Then five. You earn 14 a week; you don't switch it on. And if pages drop out of the index, that's your signal to stop and diagnose before you scale the problem.

We close on off-site: niche directories like G2 and Clutch, local citations off a Google Business Profile, press releases as safe volume, newsjacking for the links that actually move, and the two sources AI models cite most — YouTube and Reddit.

If you're an agency owner planning to point AI at your own SEO this quarter, listen before you publish anything.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — He got de-indexed. Cam saw it coming.

00:57 — Engineer to SEO: BidView Marketing, 13 people, ~70 clients, ~200 locations

02:51 — The card catalog framework: Dewey decimal → PageRank → organizing data for AI

05:37 — Crawl budget explained, and why 20 posts a day on a low-authority site is a red flag

07:48 — Where are your clients? 5% of leads from AI vs. 40–50%, same tactics

08:24 — Site foundations that still matter, plus why brand became an SEO input

10:49 — Non-commodity content: Google's term, and what it demands from you

11:18 — The two-part article: the how-to, then the client case with a point of view

13:38 — How often can you publish? Jordan's real numbers pressure-tested

14:37 — The ramp: 3 a week, index checks in Search Console, the two-week rule, earning 14

17:15 — Off-site: directories, local citations, press releases, and newsjacking

19:40 — YouTube and Reddit: the citation sources AI models pull from

20:18 — Where to find Cameron

LINKS

Cameron LiButti — bidviewmarketing.com

Cameron on LinkedIn — search "Cameron LiButti"

Google Search Console — for the index checks discussed at 14:37

CTA

Want an AI content engine that publishes at a pace your domain can actually carry? Go to 8figureagency.co for a free AI consultation.

Venture capital is pouring into the agency world because of AI — and Jordan sits down with one of the founders at the front of that curve. Jason Hu (UChicago '22, ex-AI researcher, a16z-backed) built Nexad, an AI-native platform for marketing agencies that wraps every major model and 1,000+ integrations into one command center. They cover the three archetypes of AI adoption in agencies, a live demo of creative generation, account health audits, and bulk campaign operations, how Nexad auto-routes between models like Claude, GPT, and Kimi K3 based on daily benchmark evals — and why Jason believes agencies will thrive, not die, in the AI era.

Key Takeaways

The three AI-adoption archetypes: (1) the unfamiliar — heard the buzzwords, only ever used ChatGPT as a chat; (2) the majority — using point solutions (creative gen, one-off agents) but not chaining them into agentic workspaces; (3) the frontier — operators running 20+ agents simultaneously. Each has different pain points; the platform meets all three where they are.

The "impossible to keep up" problem: New models ship weekly. Nexad positions as a wrapper and router — an internal eval system runs each new model against ~30 representative agency tasks (health checks, complex campaign ops, long-running tasks) and auto-selects the best cost/performance option daily.

Real routing example: Within an hour of Kimi K3's launch, their evals found performance comparable to Claude Opus 4.8 at roughly half the cost — so mid-tier traffic was rerouted automatically. Users pick a tier (Light / Pro / Max), not a model.

The agent = a marketing employee's loop: ingest inputs (client comms, ad platform data from Meta/Google/TikTok/GA4, competitor intel), process (analysis, creative generation), output (campaign changes, uploads, client-ready reports). The demo covered competitor creative teardowns, a shareable account health audit, and bulk-uploading 100 creatives to Meta.

Guardrails for sensitive actions: budget or creative changes trigger explicit review-and-approve prompts and batch action review — a contrast Jason draws with running raw agents that can "go rogue" in the backend.

Client context is the killer feature: the platform reads Slack, Gmail, meeting transcripts, and Drive to build persistent client context ("no logos in creatives") that agents apply automatically — over 50% of agency hours go to client communication, and this attacks that directly.

Chat first, automate second: typical adoption path is playing in the chat interface, then converting proven outputs into scheduled automations (e.g., daily health check → Slack report) in about 10 seconds.

The closing thesis: AI commoditizes the execution layer of agency work. What remains — and becomes the whole game — is creativity, client trust, and proprietary market insight. Agencies thrive in the AI era; they don't disappear.

Resources & Links

Nexad: nex.ad

Jason Hu on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/qitian-hu

Work with Jordan: 8figureagency.co

Turn your operations AI Native: https://www.8figureagency.co/get-aiagency-ops

Get the free playbook how to build a claude code SEO Machine:

https://t.co/NgZUewr4ii

Jordan Ross (8 Figure Agency) delivers a short, urgent solo episode for established agency owners. Two true stories from this week — a 16-year agency veteran stuck in "agency prison," and a retired SaaS founder who taught himself agentic SEO in 8 weeks — reveal how the barrier to entry for agency services is collapsing from skill to time. If you're doing $3M or less, have been in business 5+ years, and have 8+ employees, this one's for you.

Key Takeaways

The incumbent's trap ("agency prison"): A prospect 16 years into her agency, doing ~$1M with thin margins, loathes the business she built. She manages the biggest accounts herself, her team is slow to adopt AI, and she has neither the time nor the discretionary profit to fix it.

The new entrant's playbook: A twice-exited SaaS founder picked up Claude with zero SEO experience and, in 8 weeks, learned SEO and GEO (ranking on Google, ChatGPT, Claude, and Reddit), then built a mostly-agentic SEM agency around it — blogs, backlinks, on-page/off-page, subreddits, all systematized.

The math that should scare you: With that system, one person can run 20–30 client accounts with one or two calls a month. Hire one more person and they can dominate an entire funnel — and if they pick your niche, they're taking your TAM.

The playing field has shifted: The barrier to entering the agency space used to be skill. Now it's time — a few hundred hours of learning plus an AI stack. Expect these entrants to look like 20-somethings with time to burn, not exited founders.

What's left as the moat: When the service itself commoditizes, the differentiators are strategy, the person, and above all the brand.

Jordan breaks down three shifts reshaping AI operations for marketing and ad agencies — and the expensive mistake agency owners are making right now. Why paying a consultant to build your "company brain" is the wrong move (and what to do instead), the affiliate-model agency software wave that monetizes your token and ad spend, and the orchestration shift that turns agencies into McKinsey-style consulting firms where one strategist manages $2M+ in client revenue.

Timestamps

00:05 — Who this is for + 8 Figure Agency's track record (1,000+ agencies served since 2019)

01:30 — The $2M EBITDA founder who spent two months on a "brain product" and has nothing to show

02:19 — Update 1: What a context window actually is, and why hallucinations happen

04:27 — The 2027 prediction: funded brain products from serious Silicon Valley founders (all still in beta)

07:00 — What to do instead: GitHub, organized folders, skills — stay portable, don't overcommit

08:26 — Update 2: The affiliate-model agency platforms coming for a cut of your token and ad spend (full interview drops next episode)

10:12 — Update 3: Loops, human-in-the-loop QA, and the December 2025 agency already running creative autonomously

11:54 — The new economics: pay a killer strategist $300K to manage triple the revenue

12:40 — Why 8FA is going boutique mode

13:52 — Work with Jordan + 8 Figure Exit Live

Key takeaways

Don't pay anyone to build your company brain in 2026. Host client context in organized GitHub folders and skills, stay portable, and migrate when a dominant brain product emerges.

If you're still manually running reports, writing briefs, and checking PM tools — start there. Efficiency first, then capacity.

The next software wave makes money on your token spend and ad spend, not the license. Understand the model before you commit your operations to it.

Loops are already running agency delivery. When production automates, you get hired for taste and strategy — so start building skills and agents now, then learn to orchestrate them.

Matt Putra runs Eightx, a fractional CFO firm for consumer goods companies. He is not a marketer. He is not technical. And in about 60 days, using Claude, he took his site from roughly 3,000 impressions a day to 76,000 — indexing 20 blog articles a day and beating "old school" SEO agencies who don't even know it's happening.

In this episode, Matt screen-shares the exact marketing hub he built and walks Jordan through the whole stack: the DataForSEO audit loop, the 40+ MCP data connections, the parallel-agent writing pipeline, the Pinecone vector database of three years of client calls that clones his voice, and the PR/backlink play he's running next. If you own a marketing agency and you're not doing this yet, consider this your wake-up call.

The uncomfortable takeaway for agency owners: a CFO with no marketing background is out-executing full SEO agencies — because he's willing to spend the tokens and do the volume no agency will.

What You'll Learn

Why AEO/GEO (answer/generative engine optimization) is a wide-open gold mine right now, and why most SEO agencies are still playing the old game

The exact starting point: rebuild the site with Claude, hand Claude a DataForSEO key ($200/mo), and knock out the audit list

How to run competitor audits and 45-day SEO sprints that finish in 9 days

The technical-SEO checklist Claude gave him: llms.txt, llms-full.txt, robots.txt, and schema (FAQ, datasets, breadcrumbs) as "formatting for AIs"

How to index 20 articles a day without getting flagged as thin/templated content

The content pipeline: 40+ MCPs into free data sources (SEC EDGAR, census.gov, World Bank, OECD, national stats) for genuinely valuable posts

Dynamic workflows / parallel agents — up to 50 agents writing and reviewing at once (~5–6M tokens per 10 articles)

The voice engine: a Pinecone vector DB of 3 years of Fireflies call transcripts (~10–12M words), with oversized chunks for richer retrieval, so Claude "interviews" his own past words for every article

Why PR/backlinks (Forbes, WSJ) are the next authority moat for GEO — and how he's using HARO/Connectively to start

The real economics: ~$400/mo in tokens (Claude Max 20x) against $6–8K CFO retainers

Chapters / Timestamps

— Intro: who is Matt Putra and what is Eightx

— The "marketing hub" and why visibility is the whole game now

— Two months in: crushing competitors in the LLMs and GEO

— Tour of the hub (PR, blog, news signals, trends, Reddit, newsletter, socials)

— The #1 ROI channel: the native blog

— How a non-technical founder learned SEO from scratch (a Hampton tip + Claude)

— DataForSEO for $200/mo, and a 45-day sprint finished in 9 days

— The results: April to July, ~3K to 76K impressions/day

— Capturing the traffic: RB2B, Apollo, and the NoLeadLost widget

— Technical SEO: llms.txt, robots.txt, and schema for AIs

— Indexing 20 articles a day (and why it takes ~30 days to start)

— Getting Claude to write content Google actually indexes

— The writing pipeline and 40+ MCP data sources

— Show-and-tell: Claude Code in VS Code

— The cost: Claude Max 20x, ~$400/mo in tokens

— Building skills and reviewing the early (bad) drafts

— Dynamic workflows: up to 50 agents in parallel

— CFO retainer economics that justify the spend

— The voice engine: a vector DB of 3 years of client calls

— Chunking theory and RAG, explained simply

— Channel #3: PR and GEO via Connectively (HARO)

— The next play: backlinks and a Forbes/WSJ authority moat

— Where to find Matt + wrap

Tools & Resources Mentioned

Claude Code (in VS Code) — the primary build environment for the whole system

Claude Max 20x — the subscription tier covering ~$400/mo of token usage

DataForSEO — pay-per-call SEO data ($200/mo) handed to Claude via API

Pinecone — vector database storing 3 years of call transcripts for voice/RAG

Fireflies — call recording/transcription source for the voice database

Netlify — site hosting (migrated off WordPress)

Connectively (formerly Featured / HARO) — PR question sourcing for backlinks

Apollo / RB2B — visitor identification and enrichment

NoLeadLost.com — the ~$99 site widget Jordan recommends for booking calls

MCP data sources — SEC EDGAR (10-Ks/8-Ks), census.gov, World Bank, OECD, national statistics offices

Concepts worth Googling: AEO, GEO, schema markup, chunking, RAG, dynamic workflows

Connect with Matt Putra

Firm: Eightx — fractional CFO for consumer goods companies

Blog (called a "gold mine" in the episode, with a chatbot trained on all his content): eightx.co/blog

Want help building this or something like it for your agency?

Go to 8figureagency.co to book a call

Get the Fable 5 Set up guide: https://value.8figureagency.co/fable

Most of the agencies you're competing with are already AI-forward. In this solo episode I give you a straight update on where AI actually stands for marketing agencies in summer 2026: what's changed in the last quarter, what's now table stakes, and the new economics it opens up.

The headline shift: you no longer need 125 clients and a bloated team to profit $1.5M a year. With skills, cron jobs, and a lean two-person setup, 40 clients can do it, and your life gets better, not worse. I think we're about to see a wave of lifestyle entrepreneurship unlike anything before it.

In this episode:

Why 50–60% of agencies are already AI-forward, and the real cost of falling behind

Harnesses and loops: agents now running 12–30 hours straight with no human intervention

AI strategist agents that set benchmarks and pace campaigns (the SEO-for-law-firms example)

What a "skill" actually is, and why it went mainstream in Q1 2026

Cron jobs and content briefing: running repeatable client work on a schedule

The new math: $1.5M profit on 40 clients vs. the old $7.5M / 125-client grind

My own story: from a $13M holding company to three lean companies, plus making Lead Whisperer fully autonomous

The domain-expertise goldmine: how a $2M ad agency built 99%-margin software for its own clients

Fractional COO + fractional AIO: how I can help

Takeaways:

Skills and cron jobs are the floor now, not the ceiling. Turn keyword research, briefing, and on-page into files an agent runs on a schedule.

The lifestyle agency is real. One $300K strategist plus one AI-pilled associate can run 40 accounts.

Old way to $1.5M profit: ~$7.5M revenue, ~125 clients, a big team. New way: 40 clients and a lean stack.

Your domain expertise is the edge. The problems only you can see in your niche become high-margin products.

The window is now. AI improves on quarterly cycles, so early movers compound.

Links:

Work with me (fractional COO + fractional AIO): 8figureagency.co

Book a call (I keep very little availability, usually booked ~2 weeks out)

Off-market lead syndication: lead-whisperer.com

Reach me directly: [email protected] (my Hermes agent reads it first, then I do)