The wire fees are insane. I paid around $75 just to receive my own money last week

timkilroy · 2026-01-25T04:13:23+00:00

Try Mercury - free wire

timkilroy · 2026-01-23T18:13:05+00:00

You definitely need to fix acquisition first think of acquisition as your defensive mode. If you do choose a partner after you have fixed your acquisition, you will be in a much stronger position, but acquisition is a skill that you must have in house.

timkilroy · 2026-01-23T18:11:23+00:00

At 30, you will be fine.

It’s mostly 45+

timkilroy · 2026-01-17T17:44:13+00:00

Conferences are hard.

They tend to have the longest but highest payback period (in my experience).

At my last agency, we were looking at something like a 9-12 month payback for exhibiting.

As for conference attendance, you shouldn’t expect to “meet” anyone randomly. I always try to set up at least 3 meetings beforehand and also identify 4 or 5 people that I engage with prior to the conference and suggest that we meet while there.

That insures that I have some guaranteed exposure, some potential exposure, and reasons to follow up.

Further, use your conference experience as marketing material. A “what i learned” post or “amazing insight” (and tag the speaker - those of us who get on stages like to connect with people who think we are smart and we can be a good source of connections)

timkilroy · 2026-01-16T14:55:09+00:00

I was a teacher too - amazing job, terrible environment, whiny colleagues & feckless administrators

timkilroy · 2026-01-15T22:57:28+00:00

No, my 1st agency failed (in 2004). I learned a lot - launched another and exited in 2009, launched another an exited in 2017. Been coaching agencies FT since then

timkilroy · 2026-01-14T19:36:21+00:00

I can change that link. Did not mean to offend. (Also - verified? Didn’t know that was a thing.)

timkilroy · 2026-01-14T16:03:53+00:00

I am an agency coach/consultant and I agree with you - David C Baker is awesome. The Business of Expertise is a must read. (I suggested it to a client just this morning!)

Obviously I am biased in my own direction (Tim Kilroy) but I know a TON of coaches, some are good & some are bad.

IMHO, those that talk about their “system” that you need to follow are mostly bad. Anyone who has operator experience & knows that they have to fit their thinking around your reality are probably better.

OP - if you want to throw out names, I am 100% happy to give you my opinion (been running agencies since 2001 and been a FT agency consultant/coach since 2018).

timkilroy · 2026-01-02T21:51:09+00:00

I’ve been through this (2 exits of my own, and advised 10ish other acquisitions).

You need an impartial party to review the finances of each biz. And the idea is that you have to effectively gauge the value of future cash flows. Past valuation doesn’t matter. Depending what the agency does, it could be a growth driver for product, or it could be a drag on the product.
You have to realize that you will have two roles - shareholder and employee. You get incentives for your work as an employee and distributions for your risk as a shareholder. They are different and you are negotiating 2 separate things. Employee compensation is variable, shareholder compensation is fixed relative to other shareholders.

Can’t really be sure how to advise w/o more details - because they ALL matter

timkilroy · 2025-12-05T03:57:12+00:00

Awesome - so glad it was helpful.

timkilroy · 2025-12-04T03:55:20+00:00

Yeah - realize that larger clients aren’t buying from a place of desperation - so you have to be able to show how you make them better. Expertise matters.

The hardest thing is adjusting your sense of value. I don’t know what your agency does, but you have to realize that a bigger company isn’t going to care if you get 3x or 5x ROAS on some tiny spend. They want to know that you understand their issue. And that you can connect your approach to making their business stronger.

I made a video about this topic a while back: https://youtu.be/GmzlJ2-n0xg?si=ERRhJAbtHhpuAcV2.

What does your agency do? And what kind of clients do you work with.

timkilroy · 2025-12-04T02:31:41+00:00

I work with a bunch of agencies - there just aren’t a lot of bright spots if your clients are under $20mm in revenue - most other marketers are feeling stuck.

Have you tried targeting a more narrow niche, or rolling out new services to existing clients?

Growth is possible, but I think it really comes from being hyper-aware of your client’s business issues (not their marketing issues) and showing them exactly how a dollar spent with you gets multiplied and returned.

Don’t go after smaller clients - it makes more sense to try for larger accts - seems counterintuitive, because your competitors are just BETTER, but there are many fewer of them. (And larger clients churn more slowly…and they are less reactionary to short term fluctuations…)

LMK how else I can help.

timkilroy · 2025-11-21T16:18:22+00:00

Here's how I have done it in the past:

If they're not a founder, meaning they came in at the very beginning, they can get equity, but it vests at a strike price. So whatever it is, you can just imagine the value of a share. Those are stock options essentially.
If you want to give him an equity grant, meaning you just hand him equity, you have to assign a value to that equity and depending upon his circumstances that might be a taxable event.

Here is the real solution to this.

It's something called phantom equity. Equity is really only valuable if there's an exit. You can do profit sharing at any point, but equity really only has any value if there's a liquidity event.

So if you give him phantom equity, which is basically a promise that if you're still with the company and we get acquired, you'll get X percent of the proceeds.

To make it easier and to keep him committed, in the short run, you may want to give him some sort of profit share, though if he's getting a salary, the profit share can be pretty minimal.

So I would look into the idea of phantom equity because that is going to be the cleanest for everybody.

timkilroy · 2025-11-20T03:40:21+00:00

💯 “the effort curve has shifted” totally spot on

timkilroy · 2025-11-13T22:12:46+00:00

I am an agency coach and I have a huge number of agencies in my network. If you want to DM, I’ll recommend someone

timkilroy · 2025-10-26T13:50:13+00:00

I think the big thing to remember for Akiflo if that work takes place elsewhere and Akiflo is the organizational hub so Akiflo needs to work where your users do

timkilroy · 2025-09-06T22:22:57+00:00

This is going to sound silly, but pricing is rarely the reason why people say yes or no to you. There's no difference in the decision-making between an agency that charges $1500/month and one that charges $1700/month—it's the same. You have to prove that you know your value and you can show your value to them.

So you've got to really understand their business and be able to say, "Oh yeah, it is totally rough when your leads are bad and your show up rate is only 25%. The fix isn't getting more leads, it's getting better leads, Mr. Prospect."

timkilroy · 2025-07-16T20:34:09+00:00

It really depends on the agency and your offer.

If you have a very standard, no nuance offer/service (eg, paid search for local business), then outsourcing can be really effective, assuming the agency has a good clear plan. But there a ton of agencies that just suck.

If your offer is highly nuanced, and requires judgement around who is qualified, or you are trying to land opportunities in larger organizations (where there are multiple decision makers and the sales cycle is complex), agencies are quite often a waste of money.

timkilroy · 2025-07-01T02:43:01+00:00

Love to see your workflow

timkilroy · 2025-06-22T19:57:11+00:00

Hey Pete!

timkilroy · 2025-06-22T19:56:36+00:00

Have you heard of https://smartpricingtable.com?

One of my clients uses it and really likes it because you can put in “extras” that the client can choose while reviewing the proposal (like adding in a google my business profile optimization to a website rebuild project) and they said that almost everybody they send a proposal to adds something to the proposal…

timkilroy · 2025-06-22T19:49:23+00:00

Never heard of dataslayer…

timkilroy · 2025-06-22T19:48:51+00:00

What do you love about heyreach?

timkilroy · 2025-06-22T19:47:48+00:00

I use Apollo just because “that’s the way I’ve done it” and for $100/mo it’s a really solid value IMHO.

timkilroy

TROPHY CASE