AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Nick Eubanks on the $1M Acquisition Mistake That Nearly Sank His Agency
Guest: Nick Eubanks
Guest: Nick Eubanks
Nick Eubanks, founder of From The Future (exited to private equity) and co-founder of Traffic Think Tank (acquired by Semrush), bought two agencies six days apart in 2018 and churned roughly 30% of the acquired client revenue in the first six months.
On this episode of the Agency Growth Club, he breaks down that mistake, the resource-utilization error that quietly caps most agencies’ margins, and why he eventually stepped back from CEO to focus on what he’s actually good at.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
In late 2017, Eubanks began negotiating one agency acquisition when a second opportunity appeared at almost the same time. The two deals closed six days apart, January 6 and January 12, 2018, leaving him trying to integrate two new teams and two new client bases into his own workflow simultaneously.
“It’s like kind of psychopathic to think that I could make that actually work. It didn’t work. It went horribly wrong.”
The core failure wasn’t team integration; it was assuming acquired clients would simply accept From The Future’s way of delivering the same services they’d been getting elsewhere. They didn’t. The agency churned roughly 30% of the acquired client revenue in the first six months, alongside the loss of several strong team members, and bled hundreds of thousands of dollars a month through most of 2018.
Actionable advice:
Eubanks’ most common finding when coaching agencies under $5M (up to roughly 40 people): they’re hiring too early. Founders get anxious about capacity around 70% utilization and hire to protect against ever turning down work, without realizing that decision guarantees margin never reaches the 30% a professional services business should target.
A board member reset his thinking after the 2018 acquisitions: run teams at 95 to 105% utilization, not 70%, and don’t make a hire until projected utilization over the next two months is confirmed above 100%, with contract resources as the buffer in between.
“You want to be overextended. You want to be running hot. That’s how you make money in an agency.”
Actionable advice:
Eubanks has personally put payroll on a credit card and gone without a paycheck himself so employees could still get paid, early in his agency career. His current approach is structural rather than reactive: hold at least three months of operating expenses in cash, with accounts receivable of a similar size and less than 90 days aging.
A tactic he credits to an early accountant: run two invoice cycles a month instead of one. Invoice the moment a deal signs, then route the client into either a first-of-month or 15th-of-month billing cycle depending on the signing date, so cash arrives at multiple points rather than in a single lump that has to cover the whole month’s expenses.
Actionable advice:
Eubanks’ first lever in a slow period is always upselling, not new business. His target: roughly 70% of an agency’s annual revenue growth should come from existing clients, achieved through structured quarterly business reviews (QBRs) with decision-makers, not casual check-ins.
He also recommends building a “rotating door” of smaller upsells, $1,500 to $3,500 offers included on the last page of every deliverable, likening it to the add-on menu at a car dealership: present it while the client is already in “buy mode.”
Actionable advice:
Eubanks’ clearest regret: he didn’t invest in growing entry-level talent into future leaders early enough, leaving the agency dependent on expensive, hard-to-find senior hires instead of a pipeline it had built itself. He also waited too long, until roughly 20 employees, to bring in HR support, a decision he says could have prevented avoidable conflicts between team members and managers if made closer to 10 employees.
Actionable advice:
Eubanks recounts a client who received a full strategy but declined to pay for implementation, then months later demanded to know why they weren’t seeing growth, despite never having made a single change to their website. The client threatened to sue over the perceived lack of results.
Because From The Future carried errors and omissions coverage, the agency’s attorney confirmed there was nothing to worry about even if the client filed. Eubanks frames it as a lesson worth having in place before you need it, not after.
Eubanks’ rule: fire the bottom 10% of clients every year, regardless of short-term revenue pain, because for every ten difficult clients there’s typically one exceptional one who pays on time and sustains a long-term relationship.
His preferred method for parting ways with a client who isn’t outright disrespectful, just draining, is what he calls the “asshole fee”: apply a disproportionate price increase (his example is 15% against a standard 5% increase) and let the client either self-select out or effectively pay for the extra difficulty of working with them. The one hard line: no amount of money justifies keeping a client who is mean to your team.
Actionable advice:
Eubanks’ clearest warning to SEO agency owners: “the worst way to grow your SEO agency is SEO”, it’s too slow a channel on its own. His actual growth mix combines sales enablement content built around a clear ideal customer profile, scaled outbound (DMs across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, not just email), paid social ads for lower-cost awareness, and the “Dream 100” account-based marketing exercise.
Below roughly $5M in revenue, he argues the founder’s personal brand is the highest-leverage use of their time, hand-written outreach emails included, precisely because that kind of unscalable effort compounds while the company is still small enough for it to matter.
Eubanks’ honest answer: recognizing that he himself was the biggest obstacle to his own company’s growth. He enjoyed sales and content creation but wasn’t, in his words, a great people manager, an admission that led him to hire a CEO for his last agency and hand over day-to-day leadership entirely.
“I’m not a people manager, and it’s really hard to be an agency CEO if you’re not a people manager unless you’ve got a great operations person.”
He frames it through the EOS model’s innovator/operator distinction: he’s a “zero to one guy,” not a “one to five guy,” and structuring the business around that self-knowledge, rather than around ego, was what let it keep growing.
Eubanks points to a perpetual curiosity to chase new ideas, and credits Dan Martell’s 2018 coaching program, and its “buy back your time” philosophy in particular, with reshaping how he thinks about where his time is actually best spent. His closing framing: failure is fine as long as you learn from it fast; it only becomes expensive when you refuse to accept it.
Nick Eubanks, founder of From The Future, acquired two agencies six days apart in January 2018 and churned roughly 30% of the acquired client revenue within six months, an outcome he attributes to assuming clients would accept a new service-delivery approach without a transition plan.
Eubanks recommends holding at least three months of operating expenses in cash, alongside accounts receivable of a similar size with less than 90 days aging, as the baseline cash-flow buffer for an agency.
It’s Nick Eubanks’ term for applying a disproportionate price increase, well above a standard annual increase, to a difficult but not abusive client, letting them either self-select out or effectively pay extra for the added difficulty of working with them.
Eubanks recognized he wasn’t a strong people manager despite enjoying sales and content creation, so he hired a CEO to run day-to-day operations and people management, freeing himself to focus on the parts of the business he was actually suited to.
Nick Eubanks recommends running teams at 95 to 105% utilization, not the roughly 70% at which many founders panic-hire, and waiting to hire until projected utilization over the next two months is confirmed above 100%.
Eubanks targets roughly 70% of annual revenue growth from existing clients through structured quarterly business reviews, rather than relying primarily on new business.
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