How a 23-Year-Old Klaviyo Agency Hit $500K/Month: Talent Acquisition, Pricing Strategy & the Founder QC System That Scales

Welcome to How to Build an Eight Figure ABC. My name is Jordan Ross and I'm your host. And over the course of this journey, we're going to be interviewing eight figure agency owners and going through the systems that I've seen work and we've been implemented into our clients' businesses that have helped our clients add a half a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue over the last handful of years. I myself have already hit the eight figures in annual recurring revenue and when I got there, I wasn't happy. I was stressed. I was disassified and I didn't like the people I was working with. So I clicked the restart button and went from 12 million in annual portfolio revenue back down to the mid-sem figure level to a climb back again. And on this journey, I'm going to be documenting my process on how I'm getting back to the figures and bringing you expert industry leaders who will tell you everything they did to get there as well. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode. Your level of focus is the biggest leading indicator that leads to eight figures. And today I'm bringing someone on who I believe will be hitting eight figures in a relatively short period of time because I think he's fucking insane and the best way possible. So they have Max, founder CEO of WellCopy and he tweeted something recently that caught my attention like, oh, this guy is a psycho, the best type of psycho. He has got a crazy level of focus and I just based on that one data set. I'm like, this guy's going to hit eight figures annually. So once they're bringing him on to capture the before eight figures and then when he hits eight figures, we're going to bring him on again. It's a kind of capture that that arc of his hero moment. So Max, dude, thanks for coming on, bro. How are you? Oh, yeah. Appreciate it. What a sweet, what an awesome intro. Appreciate it. Hell yeah. I've never said that about anyone that came onto this bucket. There was one other guy and it's a guy that you directly compete against. I'm with Da House. He's the only other guy I've said something I think that about and ironically you guys are in the same space. Yeah, exactly right on. Well, I appreciate that. Definitely psycho. And I think I have a lot of problems with myself and how my brain works. But yeah, hell yeah, spoke to chat. Let's dive into it. So for everyone that doesn't know you, who is Max, what's your service and what's your current size of agency right now? So email and SMS marketing agency for e-commerce brands. We work with brands, run their emails, run their text messages. And so typically we charge around like five-day a month, but we've been increasing our prices so we have like a wide range of people and also we have projects that we do. So like right now we have 130 brands that are currently working with us, majority of those are retainer. And then we have like 20 or 30 or so that we're working through like a project on. That's that. And so revenue in November, we did about like just over 500K. This fucking second for the listeners that don't know your age, how old are you? I just turned 23. Unbelievable. Jordan, your baby. Yeah, exactly. Jordan, you're my prime. No, prime in business is like 50. I know, dude, that's so crazy to think about. Like, I haven't even been like conscious for like, I've been conscious for like 13 years pretty much. And it's like, I'm like halfway to 50 and that's like when the business prime is, it's insane. Yeah. So I want to actually start with the thing that caught my attention because I've seen your, I've seen you online. We've never interacted, but you tweeted something that was like, okay, this guy gets it. And that's something that for you listening like focus on the right things because I think everyone focuses and I think most people focus on the wrong things. And I think you have you tweeted something about how you audit every fucking email every fucking day. And I've met thousands, thousands. I'm probably, I've probably met over 10,000 Asianers realistically. So I have a significant data set to know most agency owners are not hyper detail oriented, which is the average founder is a creative, they're visionary, they're not down to each shit and go through all the details, including myself. I don't want to do it. Where did you pick this habit up? How'd you learn it? And like, why are you so mendicled? Yeah, 100%. It's something that's difficult and I've had to like ease back a little bit on everything to where maybe I'm reviewing everything on a weekly rather than like daily, because then it gets to a point where you're the bottleneck and it's like it's best for the company if you like kind of have to step back a little bit. So I'm reviewing everything like on a week to week, every single email and we're doing thousands and thousands and thousands of emails a month. And so I'm going through like each email and like looking at them, leaving comments, it's just like, what can we do better? But I started it like early on when it was just like five clients and it's just like, I'm reviewing all the emails as they come through and then I'm training the team and letting them know like what I think. And that's just kind of where it started and I just never wanted to give it up because they're higher ROI generating activities. Like for me, our content's completely organic. From me posting content, the better content I post, the more clients we get, that's the highest revenue generating activity. But at the same time, I think it's very important as the founder and the owner to, you need to have a pulse on the company and the day to day and what the quality of work is and just where everything is. You need to have a pulse on it. And then also you need to always have that founder's sort of like touch because like as an agency like at my size, it's like, that is the secret sauce. You're a founder of such. Exactly. And so it's like, I need to be able to, I can't get that away, I can't get away from that. And that's something that I always need to like input on and also just like to get a sense of what we're doing, where everybody's at and where do we need trainings. There are a lot of founders who like just don't have any idea of like what their team is doing, what the work is like. And so they don't know where their weak spots are. So I know like what trainings that we need to do in certain areas. If I start seeing something come up consistently that I'm like, this is just like not right. We can be doing a lot better than I know that I need to do more trainings on this and I can get a sense of everything. So that's kind of like why I do it and I've just never given it up because I know I always do I love going through every email that we create thousands and thousands and thousands of emails. No, but I think it's my duty as the founder CEO and it's my duty to do it. And so I have to do it and I have to suck it up and do it and give my feedback and I think it served us pretty well. And for those of you not looking, I just got my new born on me because my wife is our nanny's not here today. So this is this is the mode we're in. This is slown. She's a little angel. So there's actually a few thoughts I have on that. I think at your size, I actually think it's counterintuitive. I think you have to at your size be maniacal. Otherwise you don't hit a fair. So that's actually why I brought you on. I think the market place feedback is you are the bomb. You can't scale that way. I actually disagree completely. I think the only way to hit a figure is you have to do tens of thousands until you spot the one person your agency who's like 80% at your understanding of the game because you've given them so much fucking feedback that they can now take that off your plate and then you Q a damn. And the only way to do that is tens of thousands of reps. And when you study like Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was giving like Noah Kagan talks about this. Like he was like Mark ripped me apart because I'd put a comma in the wrong place. So there's a reason Facebook is Facebook is like you can't redo the culture that you said. And if you don't say good culture, you just don't hit a figures. It's like really that simple. So I would actually say my encouragement if you're pulling back, I would say should you actually pull back is it truly actually warrant it? I'm not so sure. Yeah, there are a couple things like on top of that like secondhand consequences, like positive consequences of it is everybody knows every team member knows like we have 70 employees. And everybody knows every email that they're creating. They know that the founder is going to take a look at it. They know that Max is going to take a look at it. And so it really helps with the quality as well. They know that this is going to be the look that by somebody, not just somebody like the owner. It keeps them like honest and always like pushing. And I'm also super open about like feedback. Like I reach out to people like I noticed that they're crushing like on their emails like a designer. I'm reaching out to them and that gives them like so much life. If I out of nowhere and hitting them up, I'm like, yo, this should have been amazing loving to see your progress. Yeah, it's a two way street. It's not just the negative. It's the positive. Exactly. It adds a ton of motivation. And then also it's just like the culture of like our standard as well because I'm going through everything. And it's like stuff isn't going to slide if it's not like at the quality that we want. So it helps uphold that standard. And then also like the so the culture side of it as far as like having a high standard. That's like one side of it. And then also just like people are knowing that I'm going to take a look at it. And so they maybe give their email an extra look before they submit it. So I love everything you're saying. I'm sure you need because I've never seen someone like on a truncated figures and I'm like, oh, I'm going to get this person on the pod because I think the story of the before and after I think the clips for you to like where you're at at six million versus 12 million. I think it's actually and they you stitch the shit that you've had with Daniel too. I think it'll be really cool. So tell me like we're heading into 2026 at the time this recording just where you're mid seven fingers. Where's your head at on the tweaks that need made to hit eight because I'm more curious. This is Nora now just like I'm a observer of the game. I'm a student of the game like where do you think strategically you need to be putting your time to actually hit eight as I'm going to be rocking my little girl here and you do my son. Go ahead. Yeah. So there are lots of different ways to do it. But we've also it's been so fast like beginning of this year we were 200k. So January was like 200k and then by November we're at 500k. And so it's been very fast. And then the January before that. So let's just look at like December, December 2023. It was like 30K, December 2024, 180K, and then December 2025, 500K. So it's been very, very fast. Our problem right now is not demand generation. Like it's organic, just people like my content and it, my content just like does really well. - You're popping right now. Like you were never on my feed like three months ago. - Yeah. - I'm gonna feed all the time now. So like the algo's liking you today, I'm gonna ask. - Yeah, and it's like my Instagram just started ripping. And now I have like 100K followers on Instagram. And I just post about email marketing and e-commerce. That's like such a wide, I'm afraid I'm tapping out the market. But like there are also people who will have conversion cycles. And so they'll continue to come around. And like we have a month, month long wait list right now. Brands contract signed, invoice paid, because we cannot keep up with everything. And so that's our bottleneck is talent acquisition. We've always had good talent acquisition, but we have to accelerate it even more. We literally have to, like it's crazy the amount of onboarding is and everything. So that's our biggest bottleneck. I think where if we can really ramp things up there and be able to, 'cause I haven't even been able to turn on ads or be able to look at further acquisition stuff 'cause we can barely keep up with just my content. And so the sales is not the main thing. It's gonna be talent acquisition. And then also we're expanding more offers. And so a large part of the market doesn't want done for you services. And so we launched in October, a mentorship program, where it's like done with you, a coaching program essentially for brands. So we launched that sold out. We did like an initial cohort sold out in like 24 hours. And we're relaunching that in October or no, in two weeks January, first week in January. So expecting that to do like 100k a month or so. And then also up sales from that as well. So I think that keeping that expanding and then just maintaining churn low. And the increasing prices have been big for us in 2024. So we increased our prices from like 3.2k a month average to now we're up towards like 4.4k in new brand signings. The new brand average is like 5.8k. And that's just profit right back into your pocket, increasing prices 'cause the expenses stay the same. It's just, you go from 3500 to 4,000, that's $500 back in your pocket because our expenses stayed the same. So we've been increasing prices a ton. And so maintaining that and then the churn. So we have less than 5% month over month churn. So as long as we just stick with that, it's just a matter of time. If we continue to sign 15, 20 brands a month, then by the end of the quarter will be kind of like where we want to be as well as the done with you program doing 100k. We should be at 8 figures by like April. - Chat Bezos didn't build Amazon by being the smartest guy in the room. He built it by building systems. In his own words, good intentions don't work, mechanisms do. And that's the whole game. Most NGOs are stuck at some figures because they're running their business on poor and effective or non-existent systems. There's no repeatable way to analyze data, to root cause constraints, to build the correct strategic plans, to source higher onboard train, retain, develop, manage, talent and clients. Everything is dependent on the founder showing up every single day and willing their business to success. If you want to hit 8 figures in annual revenue, you need my 13 systems. Not 12, not a couple processes, but all 13. When you plug all of these into your business, when you identify what you don't currently have, and build all 13 of these systems so you can truly scale, you will stop firefighting and start compounding. That's the difference between running an agency job and running an agency machine. If you want to learn all about these 13 systems, you get your business to the next level. Go to link below and get my ebook on the 13 systems, so you could finally build a business that works without you and hit 8 figures. In 2024, I found out that I had four years of tax returns filed wrong because my IRS CPA didn't bother to make sure my tax was worth co-preg. The guy that I thought I was safe with, the guy that used to work for the IRS, screwed me. Because I assumed he was actually making sure that the tax is he was filing, accurate. And to my surprise, and my detriment, he didn't care to look. Not because he's incompetent, because he was too busy. He was booked with clients out the wadzu, and he's not an operator. He did not know how to actually scale a practice. And this is the issue with the financial services and accounting industry. And this is exactly why I started 8 figure finance, led by an amazing forensic account in CPA Ben Sternberg. We have been delivering exceptional service and finances in books and taxes that you can trust with your agency. And not only your agency, your life. If you're unhappy with your accountant, CPA, or bookkeeper, or if you want an external party to validate, make sure your finances and books are actually correct. But 8figurefinance.com, where we will review your finances, P&L, and books complimentary to ensure you're not getting screwed. It's funny because when for us, and I met in person for a pod. So if you guys don't know for us, Corey, man, that guy's a killer. That guy also looks like you straight out of a fucking fitness magazine. That guy's a beautiful human. So when he and I sat down, we were talking about his problems actually really similar too as yours. And so is Mark May, who you three are like, in my opinion, the three up-and-comers in this space. You're each servicing a different segment on the market, so you're actually not directly competing, because you're all at different price points. But you all have the same problem. And I'm actually curious to see from Chen Gentley between how the three of you, because now I know all three of you personally. What's the feedback you've been given on being able to hit your recruitment goals, your staffing plans? Because we actually, at 8figure agency, we rebranded where agency space is first AI consulting firm. We have the same problem. We're sold out a month at a time right now, depending on the vertical. And I have a strategy on how we're doing it based on how I historically done it. I'm more curious, what have you been told? What are you doing to make sure that your shit doesn't break? Because now that's the biggest risk your churn goes from 5 to 10, because your standards don't scale with you. And now you're firefighting. And that's your risk. Your risk isn't as contraction through churn. So what's the feedback you've been given? What's your strategy? Yeah, so the thing that's difficult is, we don't have any problem hiring designers, copyuriders, stuff like that. It's like the niche clavio email marketers, where it's like you need email marketing experience for e-commerce brands at other agencies for years. And it's difficult to get all those people, 'cause the best people have jobs elsewhere. And so you need to head on them. They're not looking at job posts. The killers and the people that we want to hire for, they have a job elsewhere, so you have to head on them, which is difficult to do at scale. So we have an internal recruiter who we brought on, and they are just reaching out to people. And so that's been our method. And then also going hard on team member referrals, which I think not enough people do. Do you have an amazing company? All of our best hires are team member referrals. And it's like we went, we went like 25 straight hires where they were just team member referrals and we didn't use anything else. And that helped a ton. So we set up a referral program where, hey, if you like work in here, which everybody does, if you like work in here, and you've worked with some other people in the past who would be a good fit here, or you think would be great, all you have to do make an intro and message them. If we end up hiring them, we'll give you $2,000. And so we just set that up as an internal incentive, then we started to get a ton of people. And so depending on the position, we give a different referral fee. So then, 'cause A players want to work with A players. And so if we ask somebody who was a great hire for us, once we had a certain amount of people in the company, then it was like, we're just always hitting them, like, who have you worked with in the past? Like go through, like your past, like Slack messages, like try to find anybody. Even if you're not tight with them, just give us their information and maybe shoot them a message, hey, are you open to new opportunities? I've been working out this other company, and it's amazing. And then we've got so many good people from that. But the internal recruiters, what we do, depends on the position. We have favorite methods for getting new people in. But even then, like, we need to scale it up even more. Like we need to like, double it. - Can we riff on this for a second? 'Cause this is actually some, so have you, I'm sure you've seen Hermosi's content on this. Like your recruitment funnel is the same as your content funnel. So psychologically, process wise, it's the same thing. Do anything. Like have you looked at that as a model, as a framework and said, okay, what content do I need to put out? And then if you, you know, $100 million leads, same concept, we need to activate our affiliates. I've seen at large range, these they have scoreboards and they have like commission brackets. It's 2000 per, but if you give us three within a quarter, you're gonna actually get the third one's a 4K. And then you could do like how he had, I know another one of your email marketers. I forgot the guy's name, who was also a client ascension guy, but he won one of her moses like a top affiliates. Man, man, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, like competition, public rankings, where gamifying it, giving bigger and bigger in sense is, 'cause you're saving costs on our career as well. How do you see that? Have you tested it? Like, or is it just the referrals and the recruiters enough for right now? 100%. So we spend a lot of time with our hiring process, 'cause I think your hiring process is a reflection of your company. And how much you care about people and like the diligence and the standards that you have. If you have a shitty hiring process, then candidates in the pipeline are gonna be like, this is a shitty company. So if you're disorganized, you don't have things that are clear. You're not clear with like, like, we have VSL's for our hiring. For every single application that we do, I'm filming some sort of VSL. It's essentially, you could call it a VSL, but it's essentially just like, here's the role it is a VSL. You're selling. You're selling come work for me. And then it's also a retention tool, right? So email marketing is primarily a long tail retention play. Unless you're doing a banding, I'm sure you're doing a bit for us is retention. I'm sure yours love that both. But if you onboard correctly, too, so this data point, I saw years ago, I thought it's fascinating. The companies that onboard really well, there's a 256% longer lifespan over tension. So like you're doing stuff too on that's a, there's a book called How to Never Lose an Employee again. And I read it. It had a lot of stats on that and it was good. Yeah. So I had never heard someone say, I built a VSL. So guys, this is actually, this is what I brought you out. I'm like, this guy's got sauce. Let's talk about the sauce. And this is great. Yes. Like even today on my Twitter, if you go to my Twitter, I did a post today on application. So I do. So in my newsletter, I grow like 50 to 60 new newsletter subscribers a day. And then also like my social media impressions, like I'm getting tens of thousands of impressions. And there's a funnel for everything on working with us and then also talent acquisition. And so in the footer of all my newsletters, it's like, Hey, if you want to work with us, work with the join the well copy rocket ship, like we're the fastest growing in the space. Like if you're interested in working with us, like apply here and then we have an application. So we have like an evergreen application where then we get a notification when somebody applies to it. And then we'll reach out to them within 24 hours speed to lead just like with sales. If there's a good applicant, we're reaching out to them instantly like bro, get it, get on a call. And then we do like a trial project and everything. But essentially like today, like we'll also do, I'll also do like a specific post once a month with a specific VSL on a specific position. So today, it was an account manager role. And so there's a simple Google form with unique sort of questions. It's fun. And then a really long description, super, super clear and also like super in depth on what the role is who we are as a company. Then there's a video, which is a VSL of me talking about the role and why you should work with us. And then I'll do that for designers. I'll do that for copywriters and then just like rotate that. And so I'm doing like a couple of those a month. I'll post that across all my socials. And then also like we have LinkedIn job posts that are always running with ads. And then I'm posting always on LinkedIn as well, just so I can stay top of mind and when somebody sees that job application, they're going to click on to my profile, see I'm active and they'll like my stuff and then eventually join in. Dude, you're locked in, bro. Everything I'm asking, you're like queuing up what I would define as like a best in class to answer. So guys, this is the case study for like how to hit eight figures max. This is the exact reason why I brought you on, bro. I'm like, I see this shit from a mile fucking away. Let's go fires me up. No one does this shit. Now we're talking about a lot of different KPIs across a lot of different verticals and departments of your business. How are you managing when you look at the different KPIs, when you look at each level, each constraint, where you're putting your time into? How are you like allocating? I'm thinking about it. So definitely a loaded question. You have to pick and choose a lot of your battles and what's important and what's not important and what you can trust in other people's hands and what you want to keep control over and have a closer look. I think that there are some things where I'll do the 108010 rule and that's like most things, most big initiatives or something that's important, like a hiring funnel. I'll do the initial 10% and describe it and then give it to somebody else to do 80% of it. So do most of it and then they give me like the final sort of like their thoughts and I'll do the final 10%. So that's like some sort of big push or some new initiative. 10, 80, 10. I do the initial 10% give it to somebody to do the 80% and then I'll do the last 10% but give them ownership over like the final result and like what we want. And so that's like with new initiatives like hiring funnels and whatnot and everything like that. As far as like allocating my time, the number one thing that's most important to us as a company is sales and marketing and that's like mine. Super power honestly is sales and marketing. That's what drives the business. That's just what I'm best at. So that's what I pay the most attention to. But honestly, like you just have to divide your company into a couple different buckets and then figure out who your direct reports are and who you can trust to give you what you need. So on the operation side, I have my director of operations and he just has like a few main things which we'll meet about and talk about in any project that I want to initiate. All do the 10, 80, 10 and give him something that we need to do and then he'll just update it on me update it for me on our weekly sink. We have HR. So we'll have a weekly sink and I'll do like all of the key initiatives that I want and get updates on everything else. We've sales. So we have my closer and my setters and then you have like marketing where I'm doing all the content. And so determining what the highest leverage things are have been just like a work in progress over time. But I've always just decided to spend most of my time with sales and context. That's what I'm best at. That's what brings us the most clients and picking choose my battles. And for me, also it's been I think that I've been good so far at adapting roles towards my team members capabilities and skills. A lot of people will try to box team members into a certain role in responsibilities and then they try to develop a person into that role. So it's like my director of operations. You need to do this responsibility. This, this, this. But what if the person that you're interested in hiring? What if that's not all the skill sets? What if he's not very good at those things? And so they try to fit people into a role rather than with your people create a role specific to that person. And then you'll just pick up the other areas. And so that's something that I think I've been good at in not forcing people into specific responsibilities that isn't like their superpower. And so a lot of my roles it might be it they do what they are good at. And I think I think that's something that has allowed me to trust people to take ownership over stuff and me not have to baby them. And so we have a lot of people who they aren't doing things exactly like how other people would do like a director of operations role or a senior designer short of role. But I created these roles based off my personal and playing to their their strengths rather than create the role and then fit somebody into it and tell them to do things a certain way. I made the mistake of trying to fit people that I trusted over into roles like so when I worked in Amazon for four years, which is where I learned everything I know about operations. My wife made me stay we were dating at the time and she's my fiance at the time, but she made me stay until I vested which I still I'm like, I missed like two years of good, good young grinding. But I would I over index on trust for years. I'm like, this person won't fuck me, but I fucked me because I hired the wrong I forced this person to fit into a role they weren't qualified for and I actually had a lot of few people go from Amazon. I brought in that work in other places. So I love that. And a quick note for you guys listening. 1080 10 one of the best lessons I got from Hampton, which if you don't know what Hampton is, it sams, pars like mastermind community. It's be doing at least three million year to get in chief of staff. We hired one. Oh my God. Chief of staff basically owns the 1080 10. So like if you have one max. That was my favorite thing I did this year. We got one. She kills it. Oh my God. I told her today I need to work with you for 20 years. How do I make that happen? Like please, I need to work with you forever. So dude, this is a dope. I'm stoked that you came on. I you're a lot for eight figures. And maybe when you hit it and lag on a little bit on the back end, like let's get you back on because I would love to I'd love to look back at when you're at six million run rate and say, okay, what were you wrong about? And then we could stitch that up because that will be a good like preimposed like from six to 10. And dude, if anyone wants to follow you, check out your your agency like where can I find you. Yeah, my Twitter is max well copy. My Instagram is well copy max those are the two places that I'm most active also LinkedIn max stirred event and my agency is well copy. And that and that's it. That's why I live. Guys, you heard your first trick them out. Guys legit brought them on because I want to do see that max. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of how to scale an agency. It would mean the world if you could like, subscribe and comment on this podcast. So more people can find it organically or share with a friend. If you're looking to scale your agency and you need help, you're looking for a true partner. Go to eightfigure agency.co/call. My business has been built on becoming fiduciaries for other companies. We are going to be your partner where I will bring in my eight figure talent to help you grow working side by side. If you need help with that, go to eightfigure agency.co/call or like share subscribe to the bot. Thank you so much. I'll catch you in the next episode.