AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Jules Davies (Scalerrs) on Going From $1M to $2M ARR in Months
Guest: Jules Davies
Guest: Jules Davies
Jules Davies took Scalerrs from a standing start to $1M ARR in about a year and a half, then to $2M just a few months after that.
On this episode of the Agency Growth Club, he breaks down the “ship fast” mindset behind that sprint, why he stopped paying himself so he could always stay one hire ahead, and what actually broke (operations, management, everything) once growth outpaced the systems holding it together.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Jules officially started Scalerrs at the beginning of 2024, initially focused on ecommerce clients. About 3-4 months in (around April), the agency pivoted to SaaS. From that pivot point, it took roughly a year and a half to reach $1M ARR, then only another 3-4 months to reach $2M ARR, a genuinely compressed growth curve by any standard.
Jules is upfront that his answer here isn’t necessarily what every agency owner wants to hear: workload and speed of execution are foundational. He describes actively instilling a “ship fast” mindset across the team, borrowed from how SaaS companies typically operate, applied to agency operations and service improvements directly.
His concrete example: if a team member proposes a process change (like giving a new idea directly to a client immediately rather than waiting for it to work through a slower internal review), the standard in a traditional team might be weeks to implement. Jules pushes for same-day implementation on the very next relevant client interaction instead. This is codified directly into Scalerrs’ stated values (“cut the fluff, move fast”).
Jules is candid about a second, more personal lever behind Scalerrs’ pace: for a long period, he didn’t pay himself meaningfully. That deliberate choice meant he could always afford to bring on another hire ahead of strictly proven need, rather than waiting until growth had already outpaced the team’s capacity.
“I’m always one hire ahead. So it means I’ve got the liberty, or the luxury, of affording a few hires which would usually be offset a little bit later on, because the founder is still paying himself quite a bit of money.”
Jules names a structural advantage he’s candid most people won’t love hearing: SEO, by nature, is a relatively sticky, high-LTV service. He cites an industry-average comparison directly, cold outbound agencies see roughly 6-month average client LTV, versus roughly 18 months for SEO, a full 3x difference. That means an outbound-style agency has to sign and retain three times as many clients just to match the same revenue an SEO agency generates by default.
The second structural lever: being in SaaS specifically gives Scalerrs a higher average order value and multi-service upsell potential than local SEO clients typically offer. “Compared to having to sell 100 local SEO clients, I could just sell 10 SaaS clients and do the same revenue.”
Jules doesn’t sugarcoat this: “Everything” broke, to some extent, and some things are still breaking today. The first real cracks showed up in internal operations, specifically how work was being allocated across team members, a model that had worked fine at a smaller client count stopped working correctly as volume increased.
The deeper issue, in hindsight, was managerial: more clients meant more team members, which meant Jules (still functionally head of SEO at the time) had to maintain oversight across a rapidly expanding set of both client relationships and direct reports simultaneously. That combination, not any single operational process, is what genuinely strained under the growth curve.
Jules identifies two specific, deliberate inputs behind the compounding growth from $1M to $2M, not simply momentum. First: fixing churn before trying to scale further, since unchecked churn would have offset any new growth investment, “the bucket just won’t scale” otherwise. He credits a friend, Dylan at Hey Digital, directly with sharing internal processes (client account management guidelines, pre-formatted Slack communication templates, weekly and monthly reporting structures) that gave Scalerrs a genuinely strong retention foundation early.
Second: proactively reinvesting in service quality, including building a custom client portal, specifically because Jules anticipated that reaching bigger, better customers would require meeting a materially higher standard of professionalism and infrastructure than smaller clients expected. “If you show up and say we’re going to work on Google Sheets and a Notion board, an enterprise client isn’t going to like that.” That investment directly unlocked access to a new tier of customer willing to sign on.
Actionable advice:
Jules names LinkedIn as the primary channel, supplemented by referrals and partnerships with sister agencies in adjacent verticals. He’s candid that Scalerrs isn’t yet a highly optimized acquisition machine overall, LinkedIn is genuinely producing strong leads now, but he wouldn’t say the broader acquisition strategy is fully dialed in yet.
Scalerrs runs LinkedIn on multiple fronts simultaneously: Jules posts personally (supported by two copywriters, one dedicated to his profile, one for broader marketing content), while actively encouraging the wider team to post as well, on the simple logic that more individual voices posting means more total reach. A dedicated “outbound guy” (Jules jokingly calls the role a “GTM engineer”) runs a workflow that scrapes engagement from LinkedIn lead magnets and feeds it into outbound outreach systems, combining inbound content with systematic outbound follow-up.
To incentivize team-driven referrals specifically, Scalerrs offers a straightforward 10% cut on any client that comes through a team member’s personal brand, a five-figure retainer, for example, would net that team member roughly $500. Jules cites team members currently sitting on pending deals worth exactly that kind of payout from their own LinkedIn activity.
Jules treats Scalerrs’ EVP (employer value proposition) page, complete with a 7-8 minute video sales letter and team testimonials, as seriously as a sales asset, because he considers agency quality fundamentally a people problem: “The quality of the people on your team is a direct reflection of the quality of you to execute for your clients.”
His practical logic: growing agencies need two functioning funnels, one for leads, one for talent, and if you want genuinely great people to join, you need to give them a real reason to. Jules built the page by directly answering the questions he’d want answered himself as a candidate: what are the actual values, what’s the remote/flexible work setup, who will I actually be working with, and will my ideas genuinely be heard, rather than defaulting to generic mission-statement language most careers pages rely on.
Jules is candid that hiring remains an area he’s still actively learning, despite three years of practice. His clearest reframed lesson: a mismatch doesn’t have to be catastrophic, hiring a Head of SEO without a clear picture of what that role should actually look like taught him what the role needed, even though the specific hire didn’t work out.
A second, more specific mistake: hiring based on strong mindset alone without accounting for the skill gap between where a candidate currently sits and where the role needs them to be quickly. His current fix: he now prefers candidates who are a few levels below “ready” but demonstrate a genuinely fast learning curve, since they’ll compound past a technically-qualified-but-slower-learning hire within months.
A third mistake, more procedural: ignoring a visible red flag on an application (a junior candidate who submitted an outdated, un-retitled Loom video) because the rest of the application looked strong, that same disrespect for process detail showed up later as a real performance problem on the job.
A fourth, more personal mistake: over-relying on one exceptionally skilled early hire (Scalerrs’ first Reddit specialist) to the point of genuine anxiety about the business’s dependency on that one person. When that person eventually left to start their own venture, Jules discovered the department could be, and was, replaced with two equally strong people, a lesson in not treating any single hire as irreplaceable, however talented.
Actionable advice:
Jules finds most of his actual signal at the application stage, before a live interview even happens. Concrete red flags: a poorly titled or clearly recycled Loom video submission, or an application reduced to a few generic bullet points with no real effort behind it.
His favorite diagnostic question: where do you actually learn from? Candidates who name specific, credible SEO practitioners and niche industry newsletters signal genuine personal investment in the craft; a generic, surface-level answer signals the opposite. He also treats genuine, specific enthusiasm about Scalerrs itself (not generic flattery) as a strong green flag, evidence a candidate has actually researched the company and self-selected in because the fit feels real, not just because they need a job.
Beyond the application, Jules names response speed as an underrated signal directly: candidates who reply quickly to small follow-up messages tend to perform with the same responsiveness once hired, while slow replies during the hiring process have reliably predicted sluggishness on the job in his experience. He’s also noticed, informally, that the strongest candidates tend to be among the very first to apply to a given opening, and in at least two cases, candidates who’d proactively bookmarked Scalerrs’ careers page in anticipation of an opening becoming available.
Jules shares the reasoning behind an explicit, deliberate choice to prioritize growth intensely rather than pace himself sustainably from the outset. His starting premise: most companies don’t fail in years three to five because the underlying business stops working, they fail because the founder burns out and decides to quit.
He credits a friend’s framing of a fellow founder (Carrie Rose) as “too big to fail” once core functions, growth, marketing, and fulfillment, are genuinely dialed in and no longer solely dependent on the founder’s daily involvement. Jules made a conscious choice: rather than grow at a sustainable medium pace for a long time, he’d rather sprint hard for a defined period and then deliberately slow down, betting that sustained moderate effort wasn’t realistically something he could maintain for years without eventually giving up entirely.
“I don’t think I can run at a medium pace for a very long time. I would prefer to sprint here for a while, and then have to try and run at a medium pace.”
He points to recently pitching three “unicorn” companies as early evidence the approach is working, a milestone that would have felt out of reach earlier in Scalerrs’ growth.
Jules is candid he’s still working roughly 70-hour weeks at the time of this recording, and hasn’t fully solved this yet. His current framing: an increasing calendar of internal alignment meetings (with team members, not just clients) is actually a sign of progress, since his role has shifted meaningfully toward giving direction and removing bottlenecks for a growing number of direct reports, even though it doesn’t yet feel like freed-up time.
The specific area he’s actively trying to delegate: client delivery work itself, the single biggest constraint currently preventing him from spending more time on growth and operations. His approach is incremental, identifying someone he fully trusts to take over day-to-day oversight of Scalerrs’ roughly 30 active clients, rather than a single dramatic restructuring.
Jules’ priority for the coming year is building out specific leadership functions, potentially a Head of Delivery (possibly split across service lines like content, Reddit, and SEO, since one person may be too much for all three) and a Head of Operations, specifically so he’s no longer the default bottleneck for day-to-day decisions.
Part of that plan includes deliberately reducing Scalerrs’ lowest-fit client base to concentrate senior team capacity more effectively. Jules is also explicit about a personal, values-driven goal underlying the operational one: he wants more time back for the parts of the business he’s genuinely passionate about, which he describes as business-building and systems, not SEO delivery itself, and considers protecting that enjoyment a legitimate founder priority, not just a nice-to-have.
Jules Davies credits a “ship fast” operating culture, deliberately not paying himself so he could always hire one person ahead of need, fixing client churn before investing further in growth, and reinvesting proactively in service quality (including a custom client portal) to access larger clients.
He argues most companies fail in years three to five not because the business model fails, but because the founder burns out and gives up, so he deliberately chose to sprint intensely for a defined period rather than try to sustain a moderate pace indefinitely.
Team members receive a 10% cut of any client that comes in through their own personal brand or LinkedIn activity, a straightforward, revenue-tied incentive rather than a formal internal recognition program.
Building out dedicated leadership functions (potentially a Head of Delivery and Head of Operations) so he’s no longer the default bottleneck for decisions, alongside trimming Scalerrs’ lowest-fit clients to concentrate senior team capacity more effectively.
Founder Jules Davies says operations (how work was allocated across the team) and management (his own ability to oversee a rapidly growing number of clients and staff simultaneously) were the first things to genuinely strain under the growth curve.
He now prioritizes candidates with a strong learning mindset over those who are technically further along but slower to develop, reasoning that fast learners compound past more “ready” but slower-growing hires within months. He also treats any visible red flag on an application as worth acting on directly.
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