An Agency Story
First hand interviews of creative, digital, advertising, and marketing agency owners that have walked the talk of running an agency business. These are riveting stories of the thrill of starting up, hardships faced, and the keys to a successful business from agency owners around the world.
An Agency Story
Do Clients Trust Your Team… Or Just You? - Comet Fuel
Company: Comet Fuel
Guest: Jarod Spiewak
Year Started: 2018
Employees: 1-10
In this episode, Jarod Spiewak, founder of Comet Fuel, shares his unconventional journey, the pivotal shifts in his business model, and the hard-earned lessons behind building a system of value.
Key Takeaways
- Why saying “yes” strategically can unlock bigger client opportunities
- Ensuring you have R&D happening in your business
- The importance of tracking customer acquisition cost (CAC) for long-term growth
Hear details for an agency planning workshop event November 10th and 11th 2025. Visit anagencystory.com to learn more.
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where owners and experts share the real journey, the early struggles, the breakthrough moments, and everything in between. I'm your host Russell Dre, former eight figure agency owner, turn Business coach. Sold my agency and now helps agency leaders create their ideal business. Every agency has a story, and this is your front row seat. This is an agency story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Jared Spiewak with Comet Fuel with us here today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jared. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Well, I'm excited to get into it. To start us off right outta the gate, what does Comet Fuel do and who do you do it for? Yeah,
Jarod:absolutely. So Comet Fuel is a revenue marketing agency. We help service-based and SaaS businesses scale from about one to$2 million a year, uh, to about five to$10 million a year through our product that we call clicks to cash, which essentially is a four step system. The first step being crafting lead gen generation systems. The second step being refining measurement systems. The third step being building a sales machine. And then the fourth step being building a growth team.
Russel:I love that. I love a good transformational based positioning and clearly articulated who that is, what you do for them and how you do it. Sounds like you've put a lot of work into getting that so simplistic and concise.
Jarod:Yeah, I mean, like everything, it's a work in progress. I think it's been, uh, a long journey. We've been working on this product since sometime in 2020. We released an initial version in 2021, and then since then it's, it's evolved a lot. I'm sure it'll continue to evolve, but yeah, there's just been a, a lot of trial and error figuring out exactly not just how to communicate it, but also, what it actually does behind the scenes.
Russel:I'd love to dive more into that process, but we'll work chronologically as we typically do on this show. And young, Jared has a pretty fascinating, if not unique story, and tell us about what young Jared was doing and where he was headed in his life.
Jarod:Yeah, sure. So there's a couple different places that I'll start my story, but most commonly it's when I was in high school. So I started college at 15, graduated high school at 16. So I had a very early start to my career, and I did that by literally the first day of freshman year. I went out to my guidance counselor and I said, Hey, how can I be here for less time?
Russel:And why? Why was that important for you? Like what was the driving factor for that?
Jarod:I just didn't like school. Simple as that. I was, uh, fair. I was a CD student, not really the best student. I would literally just kind of sit in the back of the class, not really talk all semester. When I did talk, literally people would be like, I didn't know you had the ability to talk. But I would just sit back there like reading manga or um, doing Sudoku and, teachers left me alone'cause I didn't bother anybody. And yeah, I just kind of showed up and then when the bell rang, I left. And I wasn't very interested in anything that I was doing, so I wanted to do less of it. And the solution was actually going to two high schools at the same time. So I ended up going to both my main physical high school and then a virtual high school, which was all self-paced courses that still counted as credit. And most students took this because they wanted to avoid summer school or because they, you could take up to eight classes per semester. And so if you're like a straight A student taking all eight classes and you wanted to, um, you know, take a couple more, then that's usually when they would, um, go to the online school as well. But there's nothing preventing me from. Just signing up and getting those credits. So I was essentially just doing things, uh, twice as fast and the online school was a lot easier. Um, that is fascinating,
Russel:man. Wow. All right. Well, and then you were going down a path, not to derail, but truly fascinating.
Jarod:Yeah. So from there I started college early. I went to school for marketing and initially I thought the goal was to kind of climb the corporate ladder'cause that's what was, uh, kind of instilled into me. Um, doing anything on my own, wasn't really, uh, didn't think it was really in the cards or at least not full-time on my own. So I went to school for marketing. When I was 17, I got my. First and only corporate real estate, um, corporate marketing job for a real estate development company, uh, here in New Hampshire. And so what these guys do is they buy these old mill buildings from the 18 hundreds and they bring them up to code and then they rent them out. Most are residential, a couple of them are commercial spaces, but it's a very well recognized company locally. And so it was one of those things where it's like, wow, like my first ever real job is this. A company that at the very least looks great on a resume and I'm gonna be able to climb the corporate ladder from here. Uh, about six to eight months in, I realized that there wasn't a future for me at that particular company, but I still believe that the corporate ladder was where I was going to be. So I ended up, uh, signing up for a site that was little known at the time called Upwork. Pretty well known now and. My goal, there wasn't to really freelance, but it was to gain a portfolio so that when I was doing these interviews, I didn't have just, Hey, here's this 18-year-old at the time who has like a year of experience, but I could actually go there with, you know, work product and portfolio items, so on and so forth. So I signed up to Upwork. I was charging$5 an hour just trying to grow my portfolio. Uh, I was interviewing at a couple places. I was just trying to do a bunch of other stuff on the side, just trying to figure out where is my future and. Off of that, I ended up getting a full-time job offer from a law firm marketing agency, which ended up selling a couple years ago. And, and, and you
Russel:were like 18 or so, is that what you said? Yeah, 18. Yep. Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah.
Jarod:So I, uh, yeah, they offered me a full-time job work from home making double per hour what I was making at the corporate job. So two weeks later I was out of there, and then I was, uh, doing law firm marketing for a little under two years before I ended up starting my own agency.
Russel:Wow. Okay. I, I mean. When you think about, and I, I, obviously you've always been you, but I don't know anybody personally that I've ever heard that's, yeah. Graduated high school, early, done that got their first full-time job, and one someone even willing to take a chance on something like that. Um, I mean. I don't know what the question is even there, other than just very fascinating.
Jarod:Yeah. I mean it's something that even at the time I wasn't really thinking too hard about it. It was just things I was doing right. There was no real like, wow, like this age doing this thing. It was just, this is just the next thing that I'm doing and it just felt normal. It felt fine and then I did it, and then, yeah. Over time people have come in like, Hey, like, you know that that's like not the typical story that people have, but for me it's just. Just, it's just what I did and I just personally don't think that much about it, but I understand that it's not, yeah, the normal path that people
Russel:take. I mean, I guess maybe just you look at something where you want to go and whatever that next thing is, but you kind of just throw out what traditional norms are, how to get there, and it's like, where's the quickest best path to get to? Where I'm going is, is that just part and parcel to your thinking?
Jarod:Yeah, I mean, I'd say that's pretty fair. When I know what I'm trying to achieve, I tend to do it fairly quickly and effectively. My downfall is deciding what of the 85,000 things that I wanna do is the thing that I wanna do, and that takes up 90% of my head space, and then 10% of the time is just actually executing on that thing.
Russel:But it's kinda like a measure twice cut once approach, right? Rather than diving in head first, you take the time to explore it. But then again, as part of that research and thought process, yeah, what's the fastest path?
Jarod:Yeah, I mean, I would say more like measure a thousand times before cutting once, but fair, fair too. Yeah. I do try to just find the path of loose resistance because at the same time I'm also, uh. I also consider myself fairly lazy. Like the way that I think about something is if you ask me to click a button like a thousand times, I'm just not gonna do it. But I will find a way to automate clicking that button. And if I can't find the way to automate clicking that button, I'm just not gonna click it. Like, I just don't see a point.
Russel:Yeah, I mean, it's given a lot of um, uh, four Hour Workweek Vibes. I don't know if you've read that. I haven't. Are you familiar with the concept or whatever?
Jarod:I own the book. I've owned it for like 10 years. I've never, I haven't even opened it.
Russel:Yeah. You know what's funny is I actually did the same thing.'cause I think just by concept I was like, we're our work week. Get the heck outta here man. Come on. But when I read the book, there's some out there takes, but then there's also just that same thought process of just. Be strategic where you want to go and just brainstorm. You know, again, forget norms. Brainstorm what it's gonna take to get there. And I think even kind of talks about be a little lazy, like there are things you can just let go that can happen and will be fine. Or you'll figure out, again, a very fast solution, how to take care of those once you see all the things fall through the cracks. But, um, I might encourage you to read that'cause it might, If nothing else, give some, um, I don't know, I don't even know if you need validation, but just some interesting takes on what very much seems to be your operating style. Um, yeah, I'm gonna have to, yeah. Well, fascinating. Okay, so you're at the point, like, when did you decide to start your agency and how did that go about? And tell us a little bit about the, the very early days.
Jarod:Yeah, sure. So while I was working for the Law firm agency, I was focused just on SEO at the time. So I eventually became, I went from an on-page SEO person to the lead, SEO strategist, and at the time I was just like, okay, like I just wanna know everything. So I was reading all the blog posts, watching all the videos, listening to all podcasts. But not everything that I was learning about was actually applicable to the sizes of the sites I was working on or within the legal industry. So I ended up doing some amount of freelancing on the side to really just test out ideas. There were, you know, concepts that I've heard about that, some people said worked, other people said didn't. So I started taking on some additional clients on my own. And as that started to just grow, it was just this sort of natural progression of going from full-time at the agency down to part-time, to eventually no time when I hit this point where I was doing. 20,000 a monthly recurring revenue. I was in an event in Thailand at the time. I flew back to the States, had a meeting with my manager, business as normal. And I was telling her what I had been like working on, like what I was up to. And she just kind of looked at me. She says like, what are you still doing here? Like, why do you still work here? Um, because like I said at the time, like. I did not believe that there was ever really a future that I would do something on my own. I think I was making a lot of moves behind the scenes that made it appear as though I was gonna make that decision. But I really didn't feel as though I'd ever be able to let working at least a job part-time for somebody else go.'cause I just did not have the confidence that I would really make it on my own and be able to sustain it for a long period of time. And if it did fall off a cliff, I wasn't confident that I'd be able to bring it back up. So I was very, very hesitant. To really make that full transition. But after that conversation, I don't remember the exact timeline, but very quickly I kind of made the decision like, okay, I am going to kind of go about this on my own. And that was at the end of 2017. And then, you know, I started the first iteration of my agency, which was originally called Blue Dog Media back in February, 2018.
Russel:Okay. You know, it's funny when you just shared that, right, of what comes across as very risk averse, but already in what you've shared. I mean, you've made big moves already, you know, in this story, and we're just a smidgen into this. Um. But maybe that is where, I don't know, just any introspection there of just that because you do think so deeply about what you're going to do, that it doesn't feel risky or that you set yourself up for success because yeah, those, sometimes those feel like those wouldn't be so congruent of these big moves you've made.
Jarod:Yeah, I mean the, I. Kind of pedantic is I try to almost like a chess board, which sounds like a very, like, I'm missing the word, but, uh, the way that I think about it is, here are all the pieces that I can imagine in my mind. Here are all the potential moves. Here are all the counter moves to those moves. And only once I feel confident about all my potential moves, how that might be countered and what I might do to counter that. Do I feel confident enough to then make a decision? Which is why in my mind it takes me forever to make a decision because there's. 85,000 things, as I mentioned, all being thought about at the same time, which makes me very hesitant to make any decision. But once I can kind of narrow in on this is what I'm gonna do, this is what might happen as a result, and this is how I'll counter based off of what happens, then I just feel a lot more confident actually making that decision.'cause I feel as though I've already thought through everything good and everything bad that could happen, and I already know how I will pivot before that. Happens, happens. What's interesting is that, as lame as it kind of sounds to say this out loud, the reason why I started thinking like this was because when I was in middle school, I was reading. That is called Death Note. And I think it's gotten more popular. It's like a US based version. Um, now I think as well. But the main character likemy or Kira, depending on how you wanna pronounce it, like that's just like way that he thinks. And I thought it was just so interesting how like he always just thinks like, what could happen as a result of this and like, what have you. And I just literally would take that same applicable thinking to school and I'd be like, okay, I did not do the homework yesterday. The teacher might not collect it, no problem. They might collect it and not be mad at me. That's fine. They might be mad at me and they might ask these questions and this is how I'll respond to them based off of how they respond to me. Um, and it just kind of stuck and it's worked out for me. So, like I said, as lame as that, it kind of sounds, as, you know, I read like a comic and then, took something major away from that. It has. Worked in my favor, I'd say
Russel:That's cool. Um, I don't know how many high schoolers listen to this show, but there are probably some sitting there if, if there are any out there, uh, either got parents are gonna ban this episode from them or they're gonna, um, not that they even should, but yeah, they're, they're gonna get some ideas. You know. It already sounds like you've made at least one pivot in times of how you're thinking about your product service and delivering it in your agency. I don't know if there's been, I'm sure there's been a lot of micro iterations, but what has been the major transition points from how you started as a service and how you're showing up in the world to where you're at today?
Jarod:Yeah, so I'd say one of the biggest ones was transitioning from freelancer to agency. So at the time. What I really liked about being a freelancer was I felt as though I had a deep understanding of my client's businesses, their needs. Everything that's going on. And I understood kind of the bigger picture, but when I was working with the agency and when I was doing some white label work for other agencies, uh, I felt as though that the clients were just, a website. Like I didn't really feel anything if things worked or didn't work out for them.'cause I didn't know them. I didn't know who they were. And one of the things that I still do today is I still handle pretty much all the sales, all the account management, but like 90% of it because I still felt as though that the. Personal touch that I can provide. Being the one in charge of everything, just. Give so many advantages compared to working with so many other agencies. We're gonna get assigned an account manager, a project manager who's two, three people removed from the person who's actually doing the work. You know, that's only sustainable for so long. But I have designed who we take on as clients, how much work we do, the type of work they we do, et cetera, around me still being that main point of contact, foreseeable future. So that was one, making that transition. We. Initially started, we were an SEO company. We did SEO, just for service-based businesses. And one big pivot point there was I really struggled with sales. Like, I'm not very good at sales. I can talk technical all day, but trying to like, uh, convince people like see the vision, I'm not particularly great at that. And so what I did notice was that the way that SEO was being sold was. Here's my budget. What can you do with it? Or here's my website. What budget will you charge? Or how much will you charge me, uh, to work with me? And then after you move forward with somebody, that's when you figure out what you're actually going to be doing. Or you kind of have this kind of like a pre templated, uh, plan. So what we did on the sales side was. Turn the service into kind of a separate product. So at first you'd go through a process that we called, uh, the blueprint at a time, which, uh, funnily enough, then Ryan Stewart released something that he called the Blueprint. Like a month? No, literally two days after. Like I announced it'cause I gave a talk and he gave a talk two days later announcing his company called the SEO Blueprint, which, anyways, that's fine. That, that was years ago. I have no problem with that. None at all. Um, so basically what we did is we took the first month of what engagements would normally look like and made that a separate product. We would say like, Hey, like you're not getting a proposal. We're gonna have a call. You're gonna pay us X amount of money, whatever the pricing was at the time. We're gonna go through, do all the auditing, create all the plans and the analysis, and then we're gonna present you an actual proposal that's gonna be much more robust than anyone's gonna present to you. Because we've put in dozens of hours of work, we created a plan that says, this is what you need done on your specific website to hit this specific goal. This is what we recommend as a budget, and here's all of our data and analysis backing up why we believe this is how much work you. It actually needs to go into this product. And then that was essentially the proposal that we actually did. And, uh, it was hard to position that at first, but once we kind of figured out the messaging, it was just a different approach. And because it was different, it stuck out in people's minds a lot. And then they were much more impressed with that proposal because it wasn't generic. That's something we put, you know, 20 minutes of work into. It was literally initially 80 hours of like manual work and eventually we automated and streamlined it to about 25, 30 hours.
Russel:There are just a couple notes that I was just taking as you're going through that, and I want to circle back just for the folks at home to just hear more about the concepts, but one of those that you were sharing, and I think this is very common. It's not removing yourself from sales and even some of that account management function. That one, I think so many owners don't understand how much experience and value they bring to the sales process because of their own experience and knowledge that is so hard to duplicate. Unless you have a lot of really good intentionality in breaking that down and how you share that and communicate that and have a process that supports that and not indifferent and even in the client account management function that you know, sometimes when. Owners want to remove themselves from an AM role. They don't know that they're bringing the strategy piece with them to, and that someone they're oftentimes putting in that role doesn't have that.
Jarod:Yeah, so what I find is a couple things. Like one is. People get so much more excited when they hear that it's the founder that they're having a conversation with and it's the founder that they're gonna continue to have a conversation with. It's the same exact reason why the mortgage lender that we use, why we use him is because he has a decent sized company. But if I need something done, he's gonna do it. If I need to close on a property in two weeks, we're gonna close on a property in two weeks.'cause he can make that move. And it's the same exact reason why I've done that as well. If somebody needs something done, I have the ultimate authority to say. Yes or no, it doesn't have to go through three or four people. And on the sales side, that is one of the selling points that almost everybody mentions is that man, we've had conversations with a bunch of different agencies and they're always usually debating between us and a freelancer very quickly. They write off a lot of the other agencies that they're talking to.'cause they almost always say, I don't like that. Their team is so big, I feel like I'm gonna be left behind. I don't like that the person that I'm gonna be talking to isn't the one doing the work and has never done the work before, and I don't like that. That person that I'm talking to is still two to three people removed. And so we do get a lot of people explicitly saying that that's one of the reasons why they ended up working with us. And then on the backend, I just kind of optimize the sales and account management process to make it as efficient as possible so that people don't need to reach out that often. So that, you know, the sales process takes as little time as possible to enable myself to still be in that position as we continue to grow.
Russel:Yeah, I mean, makes sense and kinda, I approach things you're, you're solving problems that will solve other problems or get ahead of the game. Another interesting thing I think you did mention is license and just the license that an owner can carry in both of those roles and how important that can be to think on your feet and to, you know. We don't wanna go sell things that are completely different than the process, but, you know, just allows a little more customization in those conversations to be valuable, be strategic. And then I think this is getting more common, but what we were kind of talking about as a paid discovery aspect that where it know, is a little buried or entry for a client and gives them something too ultimately that if they didn't. Choose you for execution, which in all likelihood they're probably going to, that they still have something that is valuable that they can take to market elsewhere. That is becoming a lot more common in the agency space. Are you picking up your inspiration from other places, or do you tend to be the one that kind of derives it on your own?
Jarod:Earlier on it was really just looking at what others are doing, adopting their process and then iterating on it over time. When we transitioned from focusing on SEO to ads in 2019, behind the scenes in 2020 publicly, I stopped paying attention to a lot of content. Like I don't really put out a whole lot of content myself anymore. I don't really am involved in a lot of the groups. I don't really go to the conferences because. As we kind of transition from SEO to ads, like I didn't know anybody in the ad space where I knew a ton of people in the SEO space. And so I've just gotten over time, less and less involved in the actual industry. And I have noticed that the way that I will solve problems when I talk to other agencies, like we have solved the problem in very different ways because I just don't know how others have solved it. I'm just like, this is my idea. And like, maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, you know, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I definitely do, you know, I'll still read stuff and I'll take. Inspiration from various things, but not nearly as, I'm not nearly as involved as I was a couple years ago. Yeah,
Russel:and I, I'm honestly a big advocate of that. And not to say we can't take inspiration, that we should be closed-minded and not learn from what's going on in the world and understand really the essence of what it is, rather than try to copy. But I think it is to important in this very thought driven strategic work to embrace our own journey, that we don't want to actually get the answers and the tactics from someone else because. How they arrived at it could have been 50 billion different ways than we're ever gonna see. And so it is that journey of that exploration that failing, that figuring out what works and doesn't in your own unique way that I do think ultimately creates the secret sauce. So we can look out the window, but we don't need to be staring out the window. And maybe is another way to put it.
Jarod:Yeah, I think that there's a lot that you can learn and you can definitely speed up your timeline for learning. A lot other people have experienced the same exact problem that you're experiencing and they have solved it one way or another and you might, try five ways that didn't work the same, five ways that didn't work for them. And, you missed out on here's actually the super simple solution. Um, but what bothers me is when people. Have the solution, but they don't understand the why behind it. Like they don't understand the mechanics behind it. A very basic example might be something like, uh, like a landing page. I'll talk to various businesses or agencies and they're like, oh, like we build landing pages. Like, cool, I was too, but like, why do you build landing pages? It's like, well,'cause you need a landing page. Like, do you, what's the purpose? What is the utility? Why do landing pages exist? Like, what are you supposed to use'em for? Um, and it's like, well, I was just taught that. You build landing pages and then you send the apps to the landing page and it's like, alright, well the purpose is to convert better than the other assets that you have. And a very common conversation I have with people as well. If you don't know what your website converts at, then you don't know if your landing page is actually converting better. And so you're spending thousands of dollars building all these assets that you're gonna send tens of thousands of dollars, they're gonna point tens of thousands of dollars of ad spend to for an asset that you don't even know if it's doing its job because. You know how well that converts, but you don't know how well the alternative converts it. You know? That's just one example. But yeah, I just find that if you just look at what other people are doing and you copy that solution, which is fine as a starting point, but you don't understand like what actually brought them to the point of that specific solution, and what specific problems to define, it may not solve the exact problem for you.
Russel:No, I love the way you explained that and Right. Ultimately too, when you go down that route is you probably abandoned things long before you actually even give them an opportunity for success because they appear to not be working. And in all reality, that's just part of the process. But you might be going down a right or wrong path, you don't actually know because you really haven't reverse engineered it in a very intentional and specific way. It's more copying, which generally we don't wanna do in business too often. Something else that you shared that really stood out as. It really seems like you're leading with value in terms of what you're creating and doing, and then figuring out on the backside, well, how do I do that? How do I streamline that value? And that's kind of where, and I get in the whole camp of where I don't like measuring hours in an agency because that's not a measurement of value, that's just a measurement of time. But ultimately we just need to create something of value and then we can figure out how we do that simpler, easier, et cetera.
Jarod:Yeah, I mean. One thing that's becoming increasingly difficult is what I used to do is I would go, here's this thing that I wanted to do. Here's this new strategy. Here's this new approach. Here's this new concept of executing this thing. We're just gonna do it and figure it out. And then once we kind of figure it out, then we'll figure out how to, like, how to pitch it, how to refine it, bring it to market, et cetera. And that would be fine, especially when I was the only one doing pretty much everything.'cause it didn't matter what I priced at, if it's$500, I make$500, if it's priced at a thousand, whatever. And so it was very easy to just. Say conceptually, this is what I think I'm gonna be doing. Yay or nay, here's a fairly reasonable price. Okay, great. Lemme yeah, what feels good? Lemme figure it out and then refine it over time. And that process then brought us to being hemorrhaging cash because as the team grew and as other people were doing that it was like, oh man, this is actually like r and d is actually very expensive when you're not the one doing it all. Um, and so we've had to change how we. Release things or kind of adapt things over time because it's just so much more expensive. Where we don't have as much flexibility before is just to say, here's like a low price and we'll just figure it out because it's almost a hundred percent profit.'cause I'm doing it all versus like, I'm gonna be paying people a couple thousand dollars to go and figure this out. Um. We're just gonna have to keep spending that money over and over and over and over again until we've really figured out how it's supposed to work, and then how can we streamline it from there. So, yeah, that it is a good approach, but it's an increasingly complex and expensive approach.
Russel:But I think honestly is. Anything good takes an investment like that and it takes that refinement and it kind of falls back into this. You know what I think I've learned of not over 20 years of business now is there is no easy money. You kinda shared that story. What might appear to be easy money maybe isn't. And that ultimately the regression to the mean will always be, there is no easy money unless you do the hard work to make things easier and actually make that investment in, in the r and d process like you shared.
Jarod:Yeah,
Russel:absolutely. Going back to even how you spoke to the very succinct way, you're, you're thinking about this offering and your positioning today. Tell us more about where the goals are at and where the future is and how you're looking to grow the agency from here.
Jarod:Yeah, so to give you kind of a quick rundown, when we transitioned to ads initially, the thought process was to develop a SaaS product. At the time, we were working with fairly small advertisers. I would say the biggest advertiser we worked with was spending about eight grand a month on their ads. And so, as you do, we were building systems and processes and documentation and all this kind of good stuff. We got to a point where it was fairly repeatable and I have enough development knowledge that I felt comfortable turning what we were doing into whether that's like writing scripts that will run in spreadsheets, or whether that's writing scripts that'll run inside of ad accounts, or you know. Outside of that accounts, what have you to say, we could actually probably automate a good process of this, turn it into an internal SaaS and eventually turn it into a private label SaaS, and then eventually turn it into a public SaaS as we kind of refine this over time. And then all of a sudden we ended up getting a lead and they're spending like 12 grand a month on their ads or something like that. Not massive, but they ran into this weird issue where their previous agency just couldn't solve a problem for the past, like four or five months. And the client was just getting really annoyed that they were making no progress. So they brought us in. It was a somewhat technical issue, but it wasn't that hard for us to solve. So we looked like heroes in their eyes. And as we started to work with those larger ad accounts, we were like, well, the S just isn't really gonna work for them. Because it was meant to be like, Hey, you go in, do this exact thing every single time, and that's just how it works. But this type of work was just so much more custom and so. We kind of got to this place where we're like, okay, well now we're working with more impressive accounts, but the work that we're doing is fairly generic. Like there's no real differentiator to what we're doing. So kind of going back into startup mode, if you will. I just started having conversations with clients. I was like, okay, like talk to me about your business. Like, what's going right, what's going wrong? Uh, doing the same thing with prospects. And that eventually led me to talking about measurement, and I started asking clients like, okay, like how much money did you spend on your ads last month? Everybody can answer that. Pretty straightforward. How much money did you make from your ads? And all of a sudden nobody can answer that question. And that was regardless of if they're a small business or doing like, you know, a couple million dollars a year. And we started diving into how, you know, the founder teams or the, you know, the marketing teams in these businesses would measure their own marketing. And we found that most of'em just simply don't. The ones that do typically don't do a great job of measuring it. And the ones that do do a really good job of measuring it, usually they suffer from a fog of war where the information's then not communicated to all the applicable teams for the act. Mm-hmm. For the information to be actionable. And so that started us down a path of really focusing on attribution and measurement. And we started doing a lot more sophisticated tracking and attribution for clients and. That's where clicks to cash started. So this kind of started with me breaking out a spreadsheet of a, like a sales pipeline. Here's your cost per click, here's your conversion rate, here's your qualified lead rate, here's your close rate, here's your A OV, here's your LTV. Multiply all those together and you get your ROI. And I would show people, here's what happens if you just focus on and incrementally improving your cost per click and your conversion rate versus what happens if you also target higher value leads if you increase your pricing a little bit. So on and so forth. And the example would be, here's what most people do. Here's a 300% ROI, and here's what you could do, and here's like an 1100% R oi, whatever the example was. And so we started talking to people like, well, if you start actually measuring this, you can start solving. Deeper problems in the business.'cause you can start looking at who's your best salesperson? Who's your best salesperson for this particular marketing channel? What are your highest and lowest close rates per thing that you sell? And are you focusing your marketing spend based off of what is most likely to turn into sales revenue, you know, profit, et cetera. And so we started getting really, really heavy into that and that we kind of repositioned our entire offering around it. And we did that for about a year, year and a half. In that ultimately. It's not that it didn't work, but what we found is that the problem was a lot more complex.'cause it's one thing to educate people about it. It's another thing to say you need to start using a CRM. Yeah. Your salespeople need to start actually keeping notes in here. Like every time that you add a new whatever, your UTM parameters need to be updated to make sure that everything's being attributed properly. Oh, you have this. Additional form systems,
Russel:you basically have to go run their business for them.
Jarod:Yeah. And so we had, I think this was 2022, uh, we lost money eight outta 12 months of that year, which agencies are cashflow businesses. It's very hard to lose money in, in an agency. And we were hemorrhaging cash, or worse month, I think we lost about 25 grand. And it was because it was so expensive for us to set up and maintain all these systems and hire the people to set'em up. So one of the big lessons that we learned was actually we can't just go in there with the expectation that everyone's gonna adapt to how we need them to adapt. We need them to be bought in first. And the big issue is that we did not have enough trust with these clients because when we beta tested this, whatever you wanna call it, we started doing this for our existing clients. People that we'd worked with for years, people who already knew, liked, and trust us, that if we said, Hey, you need to upgrade your package on whatever software. You're using, they did it. If we say you need to switch software,'cause they don't have these features, they did it. And then when we were doing it for these newer clients, you know, we'd share our case studies from our existing clients. They get bought into that. Theoretically we start working with them. But when they're using a system that. Can't do any amount of source attribution does not allow you to add any sort of custom fields for any sort of attribution. It's really difficult for us to do what we were trying to do. But that was one of the biggest things that we had to realize is that we were just trying to do too much too fast without really trust to do it. And we had to almost take a step back and become more modest in our approach, solve the initial problem, help them recognize the second problem, and then solve it when it was just a better time and opportunity.
Russel:I mean, wonderfully detailed explanation and I, I really appreciate you really going through that much detail to see the inner workings of how that plays out. And we found the same thing in our business and we mostly focused on websites, website building, but we'd get very into the weeds of their business and, you know, try to do all kinds of technology integrations and stuff. Um, but if we started the conversation with all the things like that, I mean, eyes glazed over and probably really kind of. Put the halt on an engagement because they were coming to us and saying, look, we want our website redone. You know, probably in your case I want ads. And they're not really, and to the point, even trust, there's not a lot of trust there. So we had to tamper that conversation early on. Build the trust, solve the initial need, and then, right, you can dive deeper and deeper into the business once you've built that trust and already proved you can do one thing capable before you try to do 20. Absolutely. So, and it's so much
Jarod:easier to not just get buy-in for whatever that. Next step is, but also for the pricing of it as well. Because we're in a space where there's always gonna be someone who's willing to do it cheaper because there's no barrier to entry to what we're doing, right. Especially nowadays with, you know, AI or whatever, like anybody can be like, yes, I'll build you a website. Here's like the AI website tool, put in a one sentence prop, copy and paste done. Um, gimme 50 bucks and it's done. And for the consumer who does not really realize the difference between a$50,000 website and a$50 website, it's really hard to get them to say yes to that when the one looks just as good in their eyes. When you actually start to build that relationship, they're willing to actually listen to your arguments and actually be like, oh, you're trying to educate me, not just trying to sell me on something.
Russel:Yeah. Great example. It just goes to this idea that, you know, ultimately. And I think this is really how agency services, marketing services are transitioning is gone is the day of providing the service. I showed up and did the six Instagram reels and ran ads and stuff like that and that's gonna cut it. That we actually have to solve meaningful problems. We have to measure, we have to prove that value, but that ultimately on the backside of that, if we do that similar in the way the path it sounds like you've gone to, that's how we can charge more. That's how we can become inseparable from that company is if we get our hands dirty. And show and figure out how to solve all these complex problems, especially in large organizations. That's the path to being indispensable or priceless, I guess you could say.
Jarod:Yeah, and what I was really shocked about is we spent, I was very hard on this for a while where I would say, this is our product. This is what we do. No more, no less, like this is our scope of work. Because, you know, everybody's always worried about scope creep, right? And. You also like resource management, utilization rates, the whole shebang, and over time I just started to say yes a little bit more, especially as we grew our team and I didn't have to do everything myself anymore. What has happened is, as. Our clients have got to know us more and whatnot. The floodgates have just opened of like, here's a problem I don't know how to solve. I'm just gonna toss you a cursory email just in case you know how to solve it. And the amount of opportunities we've been able to find of sometimes just people coming to us and just being like, we have this, we're happy to pay you to implement it.
Russel:Or that's just the path you've gone down solving, and either way you've gotta, whatever the level and. Sophistication and that you wanna solve in your product and service that you've identified as for that customer and what that solution is, then so be it. But it is that path and process that I think is so important. I mean, right. You said you've made a heavy investment in your r and d and understanding where this is gonna work and not work, and one of the things I wanna make sure we get to, because. What I'm remember from our early stage conversation was this knowledge that you have a extremely high acquisition cost that you're willing to bear to find these opportunities. And I find that just fascinating.'cause you don't, you don't hear a talk, a lot of talk about that from an agency perspective. We do it for our customers, but we don't hear this notion of how much we're willing to spend to get customers.
Jarod:Yeah. So for us. The rules that I'll typically apply for like a new channel is I wanna see an$8,000 CAC or less within three months. A$5,000 CAC or less within, uh, six months and a$3,000 CAC or less within 12 months. And then a$2,000 CAC or less within, uh, 24 months. That's like a blanket, like if we're working together, like I'm just gonna spit out those numbers and you know, we can kind of adjust it in the interim. Um. But for me, like I think the challenge of an agency is just getting people in the door because there's just so much noise out there. The consumer OB generally can't really tell the differences between a lot of companies, even when they're fairly differentiated. And so I'm willing to pay. A lot of money on the front end and just consider that, you know, learning experience at worst and at best, you know, that's somebody who, you know, I'm confident that they're gonna be happy with the work that we're doing. I'm confident that we're gonna retain them for a long time, even if we don't retain them for a long time. I'm confident that we'll be able to get portfolio items out of that, which will help us get the next person on board a little bit faster, A little bit of a lower cost where. As long as I'm tracking it, then I don't particularly care what the number is.'cause if it gets too high, I'm tracking it and I can kind of nip it in the bud there. Um, you know what's scary to me is not knowing what the CAC is. Like if the CAC is a dollar or$10,000, whatever,'cause I know what it is, but I become very uncomfortable when I don't have a way to, not necessarily know it down to the penny, but have a way to get a rough idea of how long it takes to get somebody in. How much does it cost? But aside from that, like I'm happy. Throw the money at it, and if I don't have the money, I'm happy to finance the money to throw money at it or you know what have you.
Russel:I mean, you've proven to yourself, you're playing a numbers game. And yes, we wanna make those numbers as efficient as possible, but if we know our ideal customer are willing to say no, that to folks that aren't, you know, and even kind of gave some different scenarios where folks just aren't. Amenable to what you're trying to do within their business. That's an important part of the process. Uh, and just so folks at home that may not be familiar with specific terminology in your space, what does CAC stand for?
Jarod:Customer acquisition costs. You know, how much money did you spend versus divided by the number of customers that you acquired?
Russel:I would be willing to bet. A lot of agencies don't necessarily know what that is for themselves, and so many agencies are just living off a referral, which feels like a zero. CAC in that sense. But anyway, very fascinating take, And one last big question for you, or entrepreneurs born or are they made.
Jarod:I think like anything, it's a skill. Some people are naturally born being better at things than others, but, uh, like any skill, your natural ability is only gonna carry you so far. So I'm just living with it and figuring out day by day. But I think as long as you're intentional and you're like, I know this is the good, I know this is the bad, and I'm actively working to improve the bad, I think you're going to be okay. Where people run into trouble, whether that's entrepreneurship, whether that's your marketing campaign, or whether that's, you know.
Russel:Your
Jarod:personal relationship, your finances, what have you, is it's, I've done nothing and I'm out of ideas. I try to think it didn't work. I have no idea. I have not tried to figure out why it didn't work. I have not thought about what I can do next. And so, you know, that's it. That's a really bad position to be in. But if as long as you're trying to figure out why you failed, then I think you're gonna be fine because you're able to show that you're making progress.
Russel:Great example. you were sharing an analogy and I, I gotta expand upon this'cause, uh, kind of seeing this play out and I've got a son that's in sports and I remember seeing this, you know, when he was younger and you would see these athletes, they're like, oh my gosh, that kid's gonna be in the NFL or whatever someday. And, seeing the different iterations by the time of high school, you don't see that person anymore. And it's not that they're not still playing the game, it's they. Didn't develop some of that work ethics. They just had that natural ability and then they got surpassed by the person that was still started to figure out what working hard looks like and doing that extra work. And then you see that drop off tremendously once you get into college level that you know now you've still got some natural, but you, everyone's generally. Worked to be there at some level, but, you know, just really, you know, wrestling's my main sport and, and to see the survivors games where, I mean, I've seen Olympic qualifiers that barely made their high school team and that they just stuck around. They kept figuring it out and there is no timetable for success. But maybe to kind of what it sounds like, your core point there is you gotta just be willing to continue to bash your head into the wall and not stop at failure or what. Looks like hard work.
Jarod:Yeah, and it's intentional improvement.
Russel:I want to go so far down this rabbit hole, but I know we can't, and so that will have to be for another day. If people wanna know more about Comet Fuel, where can they go?
Jarod:Yeah, absolutely. So if you wanna learn more about Comet Fuel, go to comet fuel.com. And if you are a talented digital marketer and you're not happy with whatever agency that you're working at now'cause you feel undervalued or underpaid, then feel free to reach out and I'll see if we can do something with you.
Russel:Beautiful. Well. So many great concepts you share. Really appreciate just the, the digging in the unique path. How do we create value and what's the fastest path to get there? I mean, there's 157 takeaways I think we can ultimately pull from this episode and just really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today, Jared. Yeah, I appreciate you letting me come here. Likewise, likewise. Awesome. Thank you for listening to an agency story podcast where every story helps you write your own. Subscribe, share, and join us again for more real stories, lessons learned, and breakthroughs ahead. What's next? You'll want to visit an agency story.com/podcast and follow us on Instagram at an agency story for the latest updates.
Jarod:What the perception of somebody is an influencer, a content creator, whatever, on the front end versus what was happening behind the scenes. So to give you a part of my story is when I was doing the freelancing stuff, I got up to about 8,000 a month of recurring revenue, all profit. And I was like, okay, what am I gonna do now? I was in the online groups becoming a little bit more of a recognizable name. Ended up leasing an office space,$900 a month, 2,240 square feet. All to myself. It was'cause it was a basement unit and so on and so forth. It was pretty cheap. But this big office, people would assume, big office, big money. Big office, big team, uh, but it was just me all kind of by myself. And then, you know, so I'm gaining this more notoriety on the public side and then sign the lease for the office a week later. My two biggest clients, no warning, fire me. I'm done at 4,500 a month while I'm paying$900 plus utilities for this new office. I'm paying myself about 2,500 a month, working 60 hours a week, effectively,$10 an hour. I just lost these two clients. I'm scared I'm gonna lose more, so I lower my pay even more. And now I'm effectively making$6 an hour. L publicly, I'm getting more and more attention. So time goes on, revenue starts to tick up again. I get up to about 20,000 monthly recurring revenue when that happens. I was in Thailand at the time for the first C-M-S-E-O event. There's this podcast called The Line Zeal podcast. Very popular at the time, I don't think it exists anymore. We were filming in person this kind of big event, you know, bunch of people on, on set. We had this nice apartment. We had lav mics looked very professional. Episode comes out one to two months later. As soon as it comes out, people are reaching out for advice. They want me to come on their show, I'm being asked to speak at events. It just all of a sudden, it absolutely surreal the amount of, I wanna say like fame, because still very small in a small space, but all of a sudden it's just like, wow, I'm making all this money. I'm being put in the spotlight. This is more than I ever could have imagined. But behind the scenes. I had all these clients, no systems, no documentation. The 60 hour work week turned into a 90 hour work week, sleeping at the office, developed a Polyphasic sleep schedule, literally working till I couldn't sleeping, getting up, meeting, repeat, and then started losing clients. I forgot to bill people. I was still doing work for people that I forgot that I didn't realize weren't paying me. I. Forgot to do work for other clients'cause it was just an absolute mess. So, uh, I don't know if there's a moral to the story, but I just find it, uh, funny and interesting that while I was being in, put in the spotlight was the same exact time that I had gone from making$20,000 a month all the way down to$3,000 a month. And so while I was doing well, it was almost crickets. And then while I'm like, holy crap. I might be, you know, bankrupt out of business, whatever, and who knows days. That's when I was kind of being propelled and put in the spotlight. Here's the guy that you need to talk to. This is the person I want on my show. This is, you know, the person I want speaking at my event.'cause look at what they've achieved and at the same time I'm like. And it's gone. Yeah. You know, so again, no moral to the story, but I did think it was interesting.
Russel:Uh, there's a moral, I think you were, you were highlighting at the beginning of just that you can't judge your backstage by someone else's front stage. You just ultimately have no idea what's going on back there. And, um, not all things that look like success are success. Um, but then, and just appreciate the open, honest story there.