AI for Marketing Agencies: How to Profit $1.5M With 40 Clients

Welcome to How to Scale an 8 Figure Agency . My name is Jordan Ross and I'm your host. And over the course of this journey, we're going to be interviewing 8 Figure Agency owners and going through the systems that I've seen work and we've 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 8 figures in annual recurring revenue and when I got there, I wasn't happy. I was stressed, I was dissatisfied, 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-7 figure level to a climb back again. And on this journey, I'm going to be documenting my process and 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. More than 50 or 60% of the marketing agencies, advertising agencies, SEO agencies that you're competing against are AI forward or they're working towards being AI forward. They're building skills, they have their MCP connections, they are working on constraints, they're just stacking. And you're either part of this camp or not and you're falling behind. So I wanted to give you guys an update as what I see as someone that has to be at the helm of this. Like I don't have a choice because we are competing in this space for delivery. And I wanted to chat on the state of AI for marketing agencies and just some insights that I've had. So if you're a listener of the pod, you're coming back here. What up? Thank you for coming and let's get going. So first and foremost, if you're new to the pod and you don't know me, I've been running eight figure agencies since 2019. In 2024, we had service over a thousand agencies as an operations management consulting firm. In 2025 Q1, we started in engineering AI development division. We were fully rebranded as the world's first AI development and consulting firm in 2025. And ultimately, what ended up happening is the market tech has gone crazy, crazy. This shit's nuts. And I think if you're not staying on top of this, it's part of the reason why I'm chatting into this. I want to actually tell you what I'm seeing right now. So here's my POV. If you have not started yet for AI development or just going AI forward, the first thing I would say is just as a business owner operator, you need to find the time. Now, you actually don't have to be the one studying it. It's actually insanely time consuming. I think I'm going on four months or I'm between three to four months of every week I do training with one of the engineers who teaches me. I'm building. I'm up every night. I'm watching YouTube every single night. I'm consuming so much because I have to be. Well, last year I didn't have to be technical. This year, you know, you could use a terminal, a cloud code, and you could build. So what I'm trying to learn every week is what is being updated. So let's start with that. Agents are now leveraging things called harness and loops. And I'm going to give you my non-technical perspective. And this is very relevant. Loops are closed. They might be open or closed. Who knows if it's by my account. Sorry. But these loops are ways for agents to code for an ongoing basis and develop. So these loops are primarily for development agents, but like we are as marketing engineers, we care about business processes and agents running business processes. These agents are operating now 12 to 15 to 30 hours consistently with no human intervention. So it's actually pretty crazy. So this is a new thing. Like this did not, you did not see videos about this online. This has been happening this year, but like you didn't see a lot of conversations around it. So like Q2 really came relevant. So we actually had someone on the podcast, Dave Sifry, who actually showed me one of his loops. And what that is, is you build an agent that will try to go do a task and then that agent will go do it and they will pass off to another agent and then it will give it a handoff notes. Here's what I built. That agent will then try to take the task and do the next thing and it will deploy it. And then from that deployment, it will see, did we accomplish the task? What can we do better? So in Dave Siffrey's example, if you didn't listen to that podcast, go check it out. Dave shared how he does an end of day report. And at the end of every day, his agents will review like, what's my goal? Did I hit it? How could I get better? And from how could I get better notes? It leaves notes. So the next time an agent logs in its context, it's like, here's what was built. Here's what I did. Here's what I need to do better. It will do the next thing the next day. And when you consider where this is going, like this is how you have autonomous AI companies, right? Like you have an estate objective. I want to go from a million dollars in EBITDA to $5 million in EBITDA. All right. Agent swarm, go do it. And every day you figure out what you have to do. Go get more leads, go close more deals, go optimize conversion rate, go increase LTV, go optimize whatever. Like every day there's a constraint. And if an agent is looking at it, it's just going to say, how can I optimize it? What? It will go into the LLM catalog and figure out what's available publicly to figure out what do I need to do? So that is what's happening. That is like becoming adopted by thousands and thousands and thousands of people quickly, right? Because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of engineers who are saying this stuff. But like from a company perspective, think about the implications. If you're running a campaign for a client, like think about this, this shit's crazy. You're running a campaign for a client. You have an agent, an AI strategist agent whose job is to assess based to create benchmarks per clients or be given benchmarks per clients. And then to assess from a strategic perspective, which, you know, these things don't really do it that well, but like I know people are doing this. What needs to be adjusted to hit the client goals? So if you're running SEO agency for law firms, there's a lot of those. And your goal is to get a certain amount of leads to a law firm on a monthly basis. You will have a target and then you will have pacing if you're on track to get to that target from the sense of are they getting leads from Google business for a while, from local, from maps, from LLMs. And that strategist agent can interface with a bunch of other agents and it will just say, we're on track, we're off track. And for off track, here's what we should test. And then it will assign those things to test the next agent. They'll pass off the context window to the next agent and the agent will take that and try to go do it. It will implement it. It will wait a day, see the results. And these loops don't require humans. The human is there to kind of intervene and it can and improve and prompt it, like create a harness better. But this is what's coming. This is like actually mind boggling for me. And while why this is really exciting, this is where we want to get to. But what I have seen now, what's also really common now in Q2, you know, we're at the end of Q2 or in like the final month of Q2, 2026, when I'm recording this. I'm recording this at the start of June are skills. So skills started to become commonly used in marketing and she's in Q1 of this year. And if you don't know what a skill is, a skill is a series of files that allow you to execute a repeated task. When we engage with an agency nowadays, my first thing is to assess, number one, what is it that you're trying to accomplish? Number two, what are the inputs for that? So let's just say a lot of agencies come to me and they say, I want to increase my profit from a million a year to $1.5 million a year. Today, I actually spoke to an SEO agency. Their margin is 14% on 4 million and they want to get to 30%. So when we run that strategy, I'm looking at, okay, why they have 14%, what is the summation of all the costs? They have strategists, content writers, they got some white label people, they got admins. I'm looking at those costs and then looking at the things, what do they do? What are the repeated tasks? So this is an SEO agency. So they're doing on page, off page, content writing, briefing, backlinking strategy. And there's a lot of functions that just, they're all manual. They don't have a single skill deployed. And when we look at these things, we then say, what are the repeated tasks? A skill in layman's terms says, take a process, instead of saying content writing, because there's inputs to content writing, let's just say keyword research as that's the skill. How do you do keyword research at your agency? And it will build the document, the procedure of markdown files, that's what it gets stored in, to say, here's how we do keyword research at our agency. Then if you're trying to run keyword research for a client, it will take keyword research and then it will look at context for a client. So how do we do keyword research at our agency? How do we do keyword research per client? And then what is this client's specific niche or ICP? So it combines these files and you could run a process. So when you're running a skill, you could basically run these skills on what's called cron jobs, automated time intervals that says on every Monday for every client, we're going to run a new index of keyword research, which is like you wouldn't do. You would get the keywords once. What would be relevant there is content briefing. So you write the brief for the piece and then you write the actual piece of content. But the cron job, which could also be built off of a skill, right? So the cron jobs are repeated tasks and process you're going to do at a certain time interval. So every Monday, we're going to write our briefs for this client. We're going to publish five articles this week, five blogs on the website that are AI forward. And then, you know, it's going to look at the skill and then look at the client skill and then it's going to run it. Jeff 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 agents are stuck at seven figures because they're running their business on poor, ineffective or non-existent systems. There's no repeatable way to analyze data, to root cause constraints, to build the correct strategic plans, to source hire 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 eight figures in annual revenue, you need my 13 systems, not 12, not a couple of 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 is the difference between running an agency job and running an agency machine. If you want to learn all about these 13 systems to get your business to the next level, go to the link below and get my ebook on the 13 systems. So you could finally build a business that worked without you and hit eight 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 taxes were correct. 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 taxes he was filing were accurate. And to my surprise and my detriment, he didn't even care to look. Not because he's incompetent, because he was too busy. He was booked with clients out the wazoo 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 Eight Figure Finance, led by an amazing forensic accountant, CPA, Ben Sternberg. We have been delivering exceptional service and finances and 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 and make sure your finances and books are actually correct, go to eightfigurefinance.com where we will review your finances, P&L and books complimentary to ensure you're not getting screwed. You really don't need a lot of people anymore. Like we're going to get to a place extremely quickly. It's already half it. They're already here where agencies are just like, this is why you're going to have lifestyle agencies. I actually think running a lifestyle agency is extremely appealing, especially for people like me who have young kids. The more clients that have, the more annoying it is. But like, if you have, I don't know, 40 clients paying you 5k a month, you're making $200,000 a year. If you have two employees, which is extremely feasible, you have a really good strategist that you pay $200,000 a year, and then you give them some bonus account to make $300,000 a year, which by the way, like you're not going to really be able to find, like then you're going to get one of the best strategies on the market. Cause these W2 people, that's what a good strategist costs 150. The best ones you'll pay 300. If you have them and you have like an AI pilled associate, that strategist manages 40 accounts. So they're on call, maybe you do bi-weekly calls. So they get 20 calls a week and then they're working out of a terminal, which we'll talk about. They can manage 40 accounts, no question. And now between those people and the tech stack, you're talking about, it is so possible on $2.4 million in revenue to profit, $1.5 million in revenue and profit. Sorry. And if you're a solo founder who has a team of two, and that's easy to manage, and you could build an agentic SEO or whatever agency you want to run, like at $1.5 million in distribution as an owner, in majority of places in the world, your lifestyle is sick. If your ambition is not to own a yacht and to own a jet, you really don't need a lot more. And this is, I strongly anticipate a lot of agency owners will actually opt to do this because they're going to be able to live a lot more enjoyable life and make a lot more money. You know, the average agency, just for context, right? The average agency, if you're profiting $1.5 million a year, typically, if you're running that on a 20% margin, you have to do $7.5 million a year in revenue. $7.5 million a year in revenue means you're making $625,000 a month divided by $5,000 per client means you have 125 clients. It means you have a lot of people that you have to manage. And it's just like the juice isn't worth the squeeze for a lot of people. But now you have this opportunity where it's like, holy shit, I can make 100 to 150K a month and manage 40 clients. I can manage 20 of those. I can manage 10 of those. Holy shit, I have a family. I'm not seeing them as much. I would like to see them more. I should do this. And just, you could do this just on skills, just on skills, just on cron jobs. And then when you build that, then you could go into these loop processes, these agents that manage the skills. It gets nuts. And this is what I'm seeing right now for the world of agencies. You're going to have this, I think we're about to see a wave of lifestyle entrepreneurship, unlike anything where it's like people like us, you and I, who are the founder, who have the vision, who are able to be the genius, which you, to make a million dollars in profit, you have to be at a genius level. You're not an ordinary human. I just think it's so compelling. I really do. And that's like, frankly, that is what I'm doing. I'm scaling my own business to a model just like this. I'm at like a certain level of distribution that I'm happy right now. And I'm assessing where is the level that is anything beyond this level, things we get a little bit more stressful. And I just, I have young kids. I don't want to do it compared to what is right now. And I'm going to do that. And that's where I'm at. So I'm like, let's, let's pull back the kimono a little bit for me. So if you've been following my journey, have a holding company at the peak, we did 13 million. I was pretty unhappy. So I divested my equity in a bunch of these companies within the holding company. I went from this year, I went from four to three. I rolled eight figure OS and eight figure agency. And now I have three companies. I have an accounting firm, a lead syndication business and eight figure agency. And with lead, with one of my companies lead whisper. So if you go to lead hyphen whisper.com, that's me, we do off market lead syndication for like either paper intro or commission. I'm looking at this business and I actually have an engineer now that works for me. And I said, yo, make this entire thing fully autonomous. Like we need someone to talk to our clients and we need someone to like be in LinkedIn because LinkedIn, you can't be API'd into, but everything else X for the most part, you could API into it. Um, or a bunch of places online, like that business, there is so much we could do because we're literally just syndicating leads. Like it's a lead syndication business. It's an affiliate marketing business. There are so many leads and so many different places across the internet that like before without AI, I couldn't get to, I'll give you a quick example. We, in my business, we've historically seen a lot of leads locally for law firms in New York city or LA and San Francisco. But last year when we tried to build it, we hired the wrong team and engineering team, but like we were making good money and the investment to get to a point where I could then tap into those local markets and then hire a sales person and say, Hey, we have a bunch of leads for like, I don't know, tort law in New York city, go pursue that. Now I see that. And I say, I have one employee, a few people, I have a bunch of associates beneath them. We are automating the associate work because we really don't need them. So like, I'm going to, I'm about to cut my labor head count from like, by like 80 or 90%. That's going to free up a lot of cash. And then I'm looking strategically at the market and saying, there's just so many of these things we couldn't do, but now I could have these agents running on loops that we're going to build that are not hard to do. And we're just going to rip it. Like we're like, we're about to be able to find the leads using lead researching and scraping agents. We're going to build them into a database. We're going to assess the leads that we find. Are they worthwhile for different markets that we actually want to pursue? Like law firms, like how much does the average law firm pay per intro or whatever that case is. And then we just build outreach agents. And then we will then have tracking agents that'll look at how many leads do we find versus how many companies we're able to connect them to. And then we need a human to close deals to set these contracts up, these affiliate contracts up. And then you'll have this orchestration agent that's going to look at all this data. And on the loop, it will say, we were able to hit our revenue target or not. And then here's what we need to do differently. This business has just been a steady, we've been making a steady 400, 500 intros a month historically in this company. We've gone down a little bit because of some algo changes, but like there's no reason that company won't be able to do 2000 intros a month now because we were previously constrained by humans and now we're not. So it's like, there's a business I will literally have to put zero effort into and I'm probably going to 4x my income and my distribution is probably going to 5, 6, 7x. That's what's crazy for me. Like the biggest opportunities that I've seen that I'm personally experiencing, because I'm so tapped in on you guys as agency owners, I see a lot of opportunities for you guys as agency owners. I think a lot of the opportunity is it is in domain expertise. So you're going to see problems that you could solve. And I have an advertising agency owner, a friend who runs a $2 million ad agency, and he's been seeing, he's had an idea of like how to get better conversion for a while. I'm not going to give any more details, but like he built a software to increase conversion for his clients. It worked. And now he has every client that he signed, sign up for this software. He doesn't tell them it's his software. They pay for this software, like $150 a month, every client signs up for it. And now he's actually getting better results for his customers. He's making an extra $150 a month on like 99% margin. And he's only able to see that because he has domain expertise in a small niche. And like ultimately over time, that software might be compound over time, a one or $2 million software. So easy, no maintenance, minimal maintenance, minimal ticketing. And that's the opportunity. I think you're going to run an agency. You're going to see these things and now you could pursue them. And if you don't try these things, if you don't really leverage the skills, the skill libraries, number one, cron jobs, agents, loops, these are the things you need to be building right now between end of year. And then when you free up that time, you could build products and you built so many more things. It's a crazy time, guys. It's a really crazy time. There's no reason all of us shouldn't be making seven figures in distribution each. If you play your cards right, you will. If you're already making seven figures in distribution, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to double it without doubling your effort. And that's the game we're in right now. That's the landscape of agencies right now, summer of 2026. And if you want help with this, this is what I am doing. We're doing fractional COO and fractional AIO services. Fractional AI officer combined with fractional COO. We're looking at your processes and we're looking at your AI and we're saying, here's exactly how we're going to get the leverage for your company. Go to eightfigureagency.co or I'll put a link in the show notes. Actually, I'll do this. If you're running at least a seven-figure business or you're close, and you want to chat with me, I have very little availability. I will put my calendar link in here. I never do this. There won't be a lot of availability on my calendar because I really don't have a lot. Book at no more two weeks in advance if you want to chat with me, but book a call with us. I will show you how to add a lot of profit to your business. I'll map it out for you on a call. And if you end up not talking to me, talk with us. And then if profit isn't your objective, I had one client come today, new client. He came today and he said, my issue isn't profit. My issue is I'm constrained around LTV and I know how to solve it, but I don't know how to build it. We reviewed how to build it in 15 minutes on the call today. So get on a call with us. I'll help pave the path specific to the nuance of agencies. This is all we've been doing for over a year. And I'm riding this wave. I'm up till midnight every night learning and studying and making sure I'm riding this wave because it's changing so fast. You need an external party. Someone that's a hundred percent locked in on this for agencies. It's either an in-house person that you pay full-time or it's someone like me that you pay full-time that no agencies. And it's not just AI. It's AI ops and agencies. So guys, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for listening. Give me a holler. Holler at me. If you want to chat, Jordan at eightfigureagency.co. That's my email. I look at it. My Hermes agent looks at it first, but I've been looking at it too. So appreciate you guys. Thanks for tuning in. 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 it with a friend. If you're looking to scale your agency and you need help, you're looking for a true partner, go to eightfigureagency.co forward slash 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 eightfigureagency.co forward slash call or like share, subscribe to the pod. Thank you so much. I'll catch you on the next episode.