How I Scaled My Agency To $2M/Year Using Only Paid Ads & AI

        ## Topics & Main Speaking Points

1. **Context & Proof** — Scaling from $50K/month (organic) to $200K/month (paid ads) in under a year
2. **The Full Funnel Overview** — Marketing → Sales → Fulfillment framework
3. **Marketing: Meta Ads Strategy** — Why Meta, creative types, the winning ad breakdown
4. **Landing Page & Qualification** — Type forms, blocking unqualified traffic, pixel training
5. **Pre-Call Propaganda** — Warming cold traffic with emails, texts, calls, and videos
6. **Sales Process** — Show rates, close rates, day-one AOV targets
7. **Fulfillment Principles** — Onboarding, account management, churn reduction, upsells
8. **AI Tools Used** — Poppy.ai, ElevenLabs, Claude, Manis for ad scripting
9. **Unit Economics** — CAC, LTV, client-financed acquisition, why high day-one AOV matters

### Introduction

In this video, I'm going to walk you through how I used paid advertising and a sprinkling of AI to scale my marketing agency to over $200,000 a month with 50+ active clients.

I'm going to give you everything: the context, the proof, the entire funnel, the exact winning ad transcript, the landing page, the AI tools, the full pre-call sales process, the actual sales process, and the fulfillment system that allowed us to keep clients and charge more over time.

My name is George. I'm the founder of Paid House, and I'm documenting my journey to a million a month using paid ads to run my agencies.

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### Context

I started Paid House in September 2022 when the agency market was hot and running an ecom agency was cool. I processed my first $700 payment and obviously thought I was rich.

Between 2022 and 2024, we were a Google Ads agency exclusively for e-commerce brands. One service, one avatar — the standard stuff. We rebranded in January 2024 to "The Paid Search Company," then again in January 2025 to "Paid House" because we wanted to introduce other services.

At our peak, we were a 25-person fully remote team with departments for paid ads, email marketing, CRO, creative, sales, and operations.

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### The Proof

It took me two years to get to $50,000 a month in revenue — from starting all the way until October 2024. The reason? I was relying solely on organic methods. I was posting five times a day on X (Twitter). That's where pretty much all my clients came from. I was doing a little YouTube on the side, making lead magnets, giveaways, posts, videos — I was grinding.

$50K/month isn't a bad outcome, but I got into business to make a lot more than that. After expenses and taxes, you're probably left with $20-30K net. As we say here in the UK, it's a long day.

I knew something had to change. I had a friend running Meta ads, so I paid someone to teach me. They didn't do a great job, but I learned the basics. I did more research, iterated on the process, and eventually scaled to $160K/month by January. We 3x'd.

This isn't the biggest agency in the world — there are people doing $500K or a million a month — but the rate of growth was impressive.

From January to November, we did $1.2 million. We had a $30K day. $200K was our best month. And we did this at 50-60% margins.

All of this happened without posting content. Maybe a couple tweets and four YouTube videos total — which is absolutely nothing if you know anything about content. No cold email whatsoever. Very few referrals. Not really any partnerships.

It was 99% ads.

Over 80% of this revenue came from new clients we started acquiring when we switched on ads. Most of the old clients had churned out by then.

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### Why I'm Sharing This

I see so many agencies that are lost. They're on the content hamster wheel, shooting cold emails out left, right, and center. What that gets you is unpredictability — revenue goes up a little, down a little. There's no system where you can put $1 in and get $3 out.

That's exactly what paid ads gives you. I was in full control of my growth. The only reason we didn't scale further was hard capacity constraints. When you're operating in the ecom niche, fulfillment is difficult. You can't just mega-scale. It's not like an info product — you actually have to hire really good people, and that takes time.

But if you want to enjoy your life running an agency and actually scale to $100K, $200K, $500K a month and beyond, you have to build this funnel.

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### The Full Funnel

There are three components: Marketing, Sales, and Fulfillment.

#### Marketing

We run ads on Meta. It's the best platform to run ads on. I've had so many people ask about X, LinkedIn, Pinterest — no. Meta is one of the world's most valuable companies. It has the most advertising spend of any single company in the world. Because it's been around so long, it has the most sophisticated targeting algorithm. It will find your ideal customer better than any other platform because it has better data on how people use Instagram and Facebook.

Google and YouTube are a close second, but if you want to succeed with ads at a relatively low budget, Meta is the place to start.

On Meta, we ran a few different types of creatives. 70% of mine were talking head ads because they converted best. We drove traffic to a simple landing page with a VSSL (or sometimes without one).

On that landing page, we had qualifications via Typeform. This is your guardian angel — your shield against unqualified people. A lot of unqualified traffic will initially come through as Meta optimizes to find the right person.

This system assumes you're selling a high-ticket productized service — $2K to $20K or even $30K.

#### Why Qualification Matters

When someone books a call, you need a pixel with a specific conversion action. In our case, it was a "schedule" action that fired when people booked and landed on a thank-you page.

This trains the pixel to find more people like that. If we let anyone book, Meta goes haywire. The fundamental reality is there are more poor people than rich people. If you let unqualified people in, you'll get way more of them because they're easier for Meta to find.

That's how you destroy your chances of success with paid ads.

So we asked questions like: "What's your monthly recurring revenue?" We wanted to target at least the top 10% of the niche — people with money to buy. We asked for name, email, phone number, revenue, current ad spend.

You might think that adds friction. Yes, exactly. We want friction so we only get qualified people on the call.

A lot of people think cost per call is an important metric. It's not. The only important metric is return on ad spend. You could have a $1,000 cost per call, and if that person buys because they're hyperqualified, you've had a great outcome.

#### Pre-Call Propaganda

This is super important. Trust is low, and there are a lot of people advertising offers. You need to understand the difference between warm and cold traffic.

Warm traffic — people who book through content or referrals — know, like, and trust you. They remember the call, respect your time, show up, and conduct themselves professionally.

Cold traffic is the opposite. You're irrelevant to them. You're interrupting their day. Even if they book a call, they'll probably forget. Their intent is highest when they book, then drops every second after.

We need to make it absolutely certain they remember who we are. We do that by:

- Sending multiple emails per day (up to 15 before the call)
- Sending selfie videos
- Sending Looms
- Content remarketing
- Texting them a link to the call
- Texting reminders
- Calling prospects who booked before the call (this worked really well)
- Sending iMessages/WhatsApps from the closer

Do all of that correctly and you'll get very high show rates. We had 70-80% show rates in e-commerce, which is super hard because we're dealing with extremely market-sophisticated people.

#### The Offer

The offer fuels everything. The quality of your offer determines the quality of everything else. I'm not going into $100 Million Offers territory here, but you need an offer your market actually wants, using their language, focused on outcomes and benefits — not your service.

If you run an ad saying "I sell Google Ads, do you want Google Ads?" — not effective. But if you say "Hey, do you want a 4x ROAS?" and Google Ads happens to be your mechanism — that's better.

#### Key Metrics

Once we got them to show up, we typically saw:
- 80% show rates
- 40-60% close rates on live calls
- Day-one AOV of $4K+

A lot of people try to run ads like a software business, selling something as cheap as $2-3K on the front end. The industry average CAC is probably around $2,000. Our CAC was anywhere between $2-3K.

If you're breaking even on the front end, you have no excess profit to reinvest into acquiring more clients. This is called client-financed acquisition.

I highly recommend engineering an offer with a high day-one AOV that's at least 2x your CAC. If you charge $3K/month, make it a 3-month offer so you're collecting $9K upfront.

One of our mistakes was running a one-month offer at $3K. Our CAC was $2K, plus we had to pay people to deliver. We were breaking even. When we pivoted to selling something at $6K on the front end, we did way better and could scale more aggressively.

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### Fulfillment

Once we close, we enter fulfillment:

- Onboarding
- Sub-10% monthly churn
- 1:1 account manager model (scalable — you can't be involved in every client)
- LTV of $20-30K+

If the industry average CAC is $2-3K, we're getting a 10x return on revenue. With a 50% profit margin, that's a 5x LTV:CAC on profit over 10 months.

We had about a $30K client LTV with 10-15% monthly churn, keeping clients roughly 7-10 months. One in three clients who bought our front-end offer would buy another offer (like email marketing).

We redistributed that profit back into ads, eventually spending $30K+ per month. For agencies delivering high-complexity done-for-you services, that's quite a lot because you have to hire to keep up.

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### The Winning Ad

Our best ad spent about $60K and scheduled 132+ sales calls. Honestly, I can't completely understand why it was our best ad — it had terrible editing, bad lighting, and a bad mic setup. It was one of my first ads, but it just crushed.

Here's the transcript structure:

**Hook (first 1-3 seconds):**
> "What if you could get a 4x ROAS on cold traffic without even touching Meta ads?"

I was selling Google Ads, so the point was to vilify Meta and deify Google. Most ecom brands run Meta, not Google.

**Authority Statement:**
> "I've worked with over 100 different brands with an average ROI of 5.6x using Google Ads."

**Objection Handle:**
> "No, this does not include branded search."

We analyzed hundreds of sales calls to find our most common objections and handled them in ads, VSSLs, and email sequences. Handle objections before the call so your salespeople become cashiers just taking money.

**Direct Offer:**
> "We will do this for you on a done-for-you basis..."

I like getting into the offer quickly. In fact, the market has evolved — you probably want the offer in the second line now. People know it's an ad. They want you to get to the point.

**Unique Mechanism:**
> Why are you different from the rest?

**Case Studies:**
> Social proof.

**CTA with Urgency:**
> "If you want the entire setup in your account, all for a one-time payment, click the learn more button below."

We really emphasized "30K a month or more" — in the ad, the Typeform, the landing page. That's probably why this ad did so well in terms of ROAS. Only people with money booked calls.

In retrospect, I would try targeting people doing $100K/month. Cost per call goes up, but CAC goes down and ROAS goes up.

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### The Landing Page

We called out the ICP, had a headline like "We'll run your Google Ads for 30 days," included a VSSL, case studies, proof, problems, solutions, how the process works, testimonials, CTAs, and FAQs.

Honestly, you can do way shorter. Most people don't scroll below the header. The headline, subheading, VSSL, ICP callout, and button are the most important things. Make sure the button is above the fold.

---

### AI Tools

I used AI to script every ad I ever ran.

**Poppy.ai** — My favorite. I'd give it context, a mission/role, examples of good ad practices, our winning ad, and market research. Poppy lets you drag all these resources into an AI agent so it learns from them and spits out ads. Very fast.

**ElevenLabs** — AI UGC and voiceovers.

**Manis** — Really good for writing content.

**Claude** — Good for rounding off content.

When you're spending $500-1,000/day, you need a lot of creatives — 8-20 new ones per month.

---

### Pre-Call Process

Once someone books, here's what we do:

1. **iMessage from salesperson** — Captured their details in Typeform. 33-50% replied. The closer could have a dialogue and handle initial objections.

2. **Thank-you page with FAQ videos** — Handling specific objections. Asking them to take the call in a quiet place. Main CTA: confirm the meeting on Google Calendar. If they confirm, they're very likely to show up.

3. **Automation sequence:**
   - Add to email sequence (7-15 emails, sometimes 3/day)
   - Slack notification to sales rep
   - Create lead in Close (our CRM)
   - Add to sales tracking sheet

Sending 3 emails a day sounds like overkill, but you need to handle objections and instill your propaganda. For us, it was: "Google Ads perform way better than Meta Ads."

---

### Sales Process

I'm not a sales expert — I'm much more on the marketing side. But I genuinely believe if you have fantastic marketing, sales becomes easy. Sales is a function of marketing.

If you're targeting the right person, handling objections before the call, and only allowing qualified people to book — you can get a B-level sales rep to close. You only need a great rep when you're trying to ram a square peg into a round hole.

Our process:
- Build rapport
- Discovery questions
- Pitch with slides (useful for cold traffic — more professional, more visual)
- Answer questions, handle objections
- Close
- Add to Slack on the call
- Take payment
- Send onboarding form link
- Closer fills out conversion form

The conversion form was huge. We were closing people onto many different things across different niches. It was the handshake between sales and fulfillment — getting all the data needed to fulfill.

The automation:
- Create new row in client dashboard
- Slack message
- Invite client to Slack
- Update opportunity in Close
- Create Asana project with tasks for fulfillment team

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### Fulfillment Principles

It's important to sell one offer on the front end. It's tempting to sell multiple things, but it's so hard to get one offer really good. Every customer should go through the same journey — repeatable, easy to fulfill.

Our six essential fulfillment principles:

1. **Onboarding call** (AM does this)
2. **Weekly client call** (AM does this)
3. **Weekly report to client** (AM does this)
4. **Weekly internal report** — marking clients as red/yellow/green based on likelihood to churn, plus ad spend and performance data
5. **Weekly team call** — review all clients, brainstorm ideas
6. **End-of-day report** — list major changes made for all clients

Pretty full-on, but that's how we got very good churn rates — 10-15% for most of the year. Sub-10% is ideal, but 10-15% you can scale with.

We also tracked upsell/cross-sell religiously. We'd have a relatively high CAC ($3K) because we advertised to sophisticated people, but they had money and needed multiple services. We had a monstrous LTV by selling them on Google first, then Meta, creative, email, etc.

I wouldn't recommend having too many services — it was a headache — but if you can have one or two logical upsells after the front-end offer, it's game-changing for LTV.

We wanted one in three customers to upsell successfully.

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### The Money Printer

If you can do all of this — sub-10% monthly churn, one in three upselling — you have a money printer. You do get diminishing returns if you scale ad spend too much, but I know companies doing $5 million a month with this exact funnel.

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### Final Thoughts

There's obviously loads more I want to dive into, but hopefully this has been valuable. Once you're past $30K/month, the only thing you need to focus on is scaling with ads, hiring salespeople, and building new service lines. That's the most important thing.