AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
The Hidden Cost of Acquiring an Agency
Guest: Chris Dreyer
Guest: Chris Dreyer
What does it actually take to scale a legal SEO agency, survive private equity consolidation, and pull off a successful acquisition, all while keeping a 5.0 reputation score?
Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, sat down with Josh Peacock on the Agency Growth Club to answer every question agency owners are too afraid to ask.
In 14 years, Chris Dreyer has built what is widely considered the benchmark operation in legal search marketing.
Rankings.io works exclusively with personal injury law firms and legal brands who need SEO that delivers cases, not just rankings. The agency has maintained a perfect 5.0 review score across the board, and has done it long enough to attract acquisition offers from private equity firms, watch PE-backed competitors come and go, and still come out independent on the other side.
In this episode of the Agency Growth Club, Chris doesn’t give the polished conference version.
He gives the real one:
These are the takeaways that matter for any US-based legal SEO agency owner thinking about scale.
The first thing most agency founders get wrong about M&A is thinking it starts with a spreadsheet.
For Chris, the Gladiator acquisition started with a relationship. The owners of Gladiator, Adam and Lisa, had worked alongside Rankings.io in the legal space for years. They approached Chris through a representative. He wasn’t shopping for acquisitions. It landed in his lap.
“There are certain clients that are very sticky that you will only have the opportunity to acquire through acquisition. You won’t be able to get them through traditional marketing or outbound sales.”
That’s the strategic logic that most agency owners miss.
Acquisition isn’t just a revenue play, it’s a client acquisition strategy for accounts that will never respond to an email sequence.
In the legal SEO space, where relationships and reputation matter more than almost any other vertical, this is especially true. The secondary benefit was talent. Gladiator had built a team of operators who understood the space. Some of those people became some of Rankings.io’s strongest performers post-integration.
The takeaway for legal SEO agency owners: Your next acquisition may not be something you find. It may be something that finds you, if you’ve built the kind of reputation and relationships that make you the obvious acquirer.
This is the section most acquisition content skips. Chris was direct about it.
Before you can move on an acquisition, three things have to be in place:
1. A CFO or head of finance with M&A experience. Not a bookkeeper nor a fractional accountant. Someone who knows how to evaluate deal structure, read a quality of earnings report, and ask the right questions before an LOI is signed. Chris used AI (ChatGPT at the time, and now Claude) to stress-test deal structures and prepare due diligence questions, but the internal finance relationship was non-negotiable.
2. Established banking relationships. The Gladiator deal was done through an SBA loan. It took longer than Chris wanted because the banking relationship wasn’t fully established in advance. His lesson: if you’re even thinking about acquisition, go build that relationship now. Get a line of credit. Know your borrowing power before you need it.
3. A track record that creates leverage. Rankings.io had 14 years of clean books, quality of earnings, and a reputation that made banks want to work with them. That history is a financial asset.
“If you’re going to do M&A, have established means of getting capital in advance before you start pursuing it.”
The takeaway: Acquisition readiness is built over years, not months. The legal SEO agencies that will be in a position to acquire in 2027 are building their finance infrastructure now.
This is the part of the episode that agency owners will want to replay.
Chris walked through his real due diligence checklist on the specific things that matter in an agency acquisition in the legal SEO space.
The number that most agency founders throw around is revenue. The number that actually determines valuation is EBITDA.
Chris was specific: if you’re close to $1 million in EBITDA, you’re looking at a 4–5x multiple. From there, it starts ticking up as the number grows.
Revenue multiples exist, but they’re the exception rather than the rule, and typically only apply when there’s a specific strategic rationale, a client list, a technology, a market position that the acquirer can’t build organically.
“If you can get to close to $1 million in EBITDA, you’re looking at four to five generally, and it starts ticking up from there.”
For a legal SEO agency owner thinking about their exit: the path to a premium multiple is not just more revenue. It’s cleaner revenue, more recurring, less concentrated, with documented processes and a team that operates without constant founder involvement.
Which, not coincidentally, is exactly the model Chris has spent 14 years building.
This section of the episode will resonate with every independent agency owner in the legal SEO space who has fielded a PE approach in the last 18 months.
“Look, everybody is selling because it creates an opportunity. But I’m not going to name names, some of these owners are spinning how much of a benefit it is when everybody knows it’s re-traded in two to three years.”
Here’s the PE playbook Chris is describing: a firm buys at a 5–7x EBITDA multiple. They have 3–4 years to create value on paper, through cost-cutting, cross-selling, and financial engineering, before re-trading at a higher multiple to a larger fund. The incentive structure, once PE comes in, shifts from client outcomes to EBITDA optimisation.
For a legal SEO agency, where reputation is everything and client relationships take years to build, that trade-off is particularly costly. Chris has decision power to protect a client relationship, take a hit on a campaign, extend a contract, absorb a tough month. A PE-backed agency with a board and an exit clock cannot.
“It’s no longer client first. It’s the widget. I as the owner can come up with an entire year’s worth of investment and do that to preserve my reputation. But when you have investors and a board, they’re not going to easily do that.”
The takeaway for legal SEO agency owners: Independence, in the legal SEO space, is increasingly a differentiator. The firms that stay independent can make the long-term decisions that PE-backed competitors can’t.
Chris’s biggest lesson from the Gladiator acquisition wasn’t financial. It was human.
“Just make sure the culture is right. That’s the biggest thing. The integration, all that stuff is easy. It just takes time.”
In practice, the Rankings.io integration involved real friction. Gladiator’s team was working across Wrike and Google Docs. Rankings.io runs on Notion. Account managers at Gladiator were handling project management work that Rankings.io splits between dedicated account managers and project managers. The systems were different. The pace was different.
Some employees thrived. Some left, voluntarily, because they didn’t want to adjust to a faster, more process-driven environment. Rankings.io tracks voluntary and involuntary employee churn as a leading indicator. It went up post-acquisition, then stabilised as the team found its footing.
The clients who stayed, and most did, stayed because Adam and Lisa stayed actively involved in the transition. They went client by client, stayed close during the handover, and made sure service quality maintained or improved.
Client retention after the acquisition was strong. Voluntary client churn was very low.
“If the employee culture is similar to yours, you know they’re treating the client in a similar vein. Everything starts there.”
For any legal SEO agency owner thinking about an acquisition: Do the values audit before you do the financial audit. Get on a call with the team, not just the founder. Look at how they run client meetings. Check how they communicate internally. If the culture is a match, you can solve most other problems. If it isn’t, no multiple is worth the integration cost.
Chris closed the episode with where Rankings.io is placing its bets, and it’s not a retreat from search. It’s an expansion of what search means.
The Rankings.io offer has evolved from pure SEO to what Chris describes as a four-part stack: SEO, GEO (generative engine optimisation), LSA (Local Services Ads), and traditional Google Search. The reasoning: in a legal services search right now, the best virtual real estate isn’t even organic anymore. It’s LSA at the top, then Google Ads, then maps, then traditional search.
At the same time, the emergence of LLMs has shifted the value of being present across social platforms. YouTube content gets trained on by Google’s models. LinkedIn has a relationship with Microsoft and OpenAI. Being on those platforms isn’t just distribution, it’s training data.
“It’s search everywhere optimisation. Everything is so fragmented. Back in the day there was broadcast television, Facebook, and Google. Now you’ve got streaming, connected TV, all the LLMs, an abundance of social platforms. Attention is fragmented and you’ve got to adapt.”
The agencies that will dominate legal SEO in 2027 and 2028 are the ones building multi-channel presence now, not because every channel drives direct conversions, but because presence across channels reinforces authority in the models that are increasingly mediating the search relationship between law firms and potential clients.
Rankings.io is expanding into paid social, YouTube, and media. The legal marketing space is changing faster than most agency owners want to admit.
Rankings.io isn’t just a name we drop on a podcast. They’re our client.
When Chris needed to move fast on three Paid Search Specialist roles, without compromising on quality, his team came to us. We filled all three positions in 21 days. No job boards. No generalist recruiters. Direct access to the passive talent his team couldn’t reach on their own.
After that, we helped Rankings.io hire a Tech SEO specialist in 21 days, a hire who has since been promoted to lead a team of four and directly contributed to a 30% increase in client retention for their group. That’s the compounding effect of getting the right person in the right seat.
You can find the link to both case studies, respectively, below:
The full conversation between Josh Peacock and Chris Dreyer is on the Agency Growth Club, available on YouTube and all major podcast platforms.
If you’re a legal SEO agency founder thinking about scaling through acquisition, building toward an exit, or just trying to understand how the most respected operator in the space thinks about growth, this is the episode.
Rankings.io pulled off a successful acquisition and maintained a 5.0 reputation score by hiring the right people, and being disciplined enough not to hire the wrong ones.
At Search for Hire, we work exclusively with SEO, Paid Media, and Growth agencies and brands who need specialist talent, not generalist placeholders. We’ve placed the people behind some of the fastest-scaling digital agencies in the US and UK, including Rankings.io.
If you’re a legal SEO agency owner thinking about the team you need to build to get to your next milestone, let’s talk.
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