Pricing My Own Agency

It was 2017. I'd just moved into Facebook advertising, I was driving for Uber to cover rent, and I took whatever work came in: $1,500 here, $2,000 there, $500 when that was the offer. I was also in a training program with a sales mentor.

My price came from what I needed that month, so every sales conversation started from my rent instead of the client's revenue. My mentor refused to answer another one of my questions until I charged at least $5,000.

I flipped the pitch. I opened the prospect's ad account before each call and did the math on them. A typical account was a store doing $20,000 a month, barely profitable, running no split tests and no funnel, and targeting women 18 to 45 while calling that specific. I could see where the upside was, so I could tell them it was likely $50,000 a month or more with better margins, and price against that. The sale itself ran on a 27-page proposal with no landing page behind it. The last two pages were a letter from me as CEO, and the proposal tracked how long each reader spent in each section, so before the follow-up call I knew which parts a prospect had studied.

• Ad account review before every sales call
• 27-page proposal with section-level read tracking
• Facebook Ads
• Setup fee plus monthly management

I signed more clients at $5,000 than I could handle, so I doubled the price to $10,000, and people kept buying. I charged $20,000 flat for a setup after about eight clients at $5,000 and five at $10,000, with less than a year in the business. The agency launched in September and was doing six figures a month by February. I'd done five seven-figure scale-ups by the end of 2018, all started from scratch in 2017 and 2018.

The agency went on to run with a global team. I still do the math on a buyer's own account before I give a number.

Price from what the work will earn the client, worked out from their own ad account. People paid $20,000 to someone with less than a year in the business because the number came from their own data.