Agency Client Struggles

Sean Frank shares his experience transitioning from running a marketing agency to becoming deeply involved with Ridge Wallet, eventually merging his agency with the company and helping grow it from $5 million to over $200 million in annual revenue.

Key Points:

• Agency Business Reality:

  • "Most clients suck like if you guys have ever done client work like most clients fight with you they don't pay you like they're always trying to fire you"
  • The average client at his previous employer stayed only four months
  • Agency businesses typically exit for only "one x client contracts" or at peak "two x client contracts"

• Ridge Wallet Partnership:

  • Started as one of ten clients he brought when launching his own agency
  • Ridge was run by "really cool guys who didn't want to take any reins away from us"
  • The founders were "very happy with the $5,000,000 a year business" and had modest expectations
  • They were willing to give Sean's team more responsibility as they proved themselves

• Growth Indicators:

  • The key metric was scalable customer acquisition: "they could always put another dollar into Facebook and it could work"
  • Extremely efficient marketing: wallet ads had "like a $6 CAC" compared to $400 CAC for other products
  • The limiting factor wasn't demand but operations: "we had a year where we didn't have any wallets because we couldn't keep them in stock"

• Agency Evolution:

  • His agency gradually took over more functions: "we do their customer service, we do their product importation, we do all of their marketing, we do their web dev"
  • Ridge eventually became "60% of all agency billables"
  • The natural progression was to merge: "me and Connor take an equity stake, everyone in my agency just goes in house to Ridge"

• Marketing Channel Focus:

  • Started during early Facebook ads days (around 2015) when "nobody's an expert"
  • In retrospect: "if I could go back in time I would've been even deeper into Facebook"
  • "I should have put all of my dollars into Facebook back then up until like 2020"
  • "We try to diversify too fast" - a key lesson learned

• Results:

  • Helped grow Ridge from $5 million to $30 million to "over 200" million in annual revenue
  • The merger created significantly more value than the agency could have achieved independently