AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
How to Scale a Digital Agency to $5M
By Tony Lael
By Tony Lael
Growing a digital agency is exciting, chaotic, and often brutally expensive.
Few people understand that journey better than Tony Lael, part-owner of four US-based digital marketing agencies (including Aponus Consulting) and on track to partner in 10 within the next three years.
In this Agency Growth Club feature, Tony breaks down the frameworks, financial disciplines, and leadership principles that help agency owners move from the early treadmill phase to building companies that run, and grow, without them.
Below are the biggest takeaways from our conversation.
When agency founders start their journey, they’re driven by passion, for marketing, creative work, or new technology. But as Tony explains, most get stuck firefighting:
“Everybody gets on the treadmill putting out fires. They forget why they started in the first place, and they forget what it means to build wealth.”
Tony’s upcoming book, From Grind to Gold, teaches owners how to stop thinking like operators and start thinking like investors. True wealth, he argues, comes when an agency can pay you entirely from profit, not from a salary.
That’s the “win state” on the board game Cashflow, which he credits for shaping his mindset.
Tony starts every agency partnership the same way: with Profit First.
Most founders operate with this structure:
Profit First flips that logic:
This exposes waste immediately.
“Profit First puts a glaring spotlight on the stuff you should not be spending money on — or the people you should not be spending money on.”
The biggest quick win?
Identifying when a $50/hr team member is doing $10/hr work.
Tony doesn’t pay out profits until the agency has three months of expenses and COGS in the bank.
This isn’t primarily for emergencies, it’s for confidence.
“It’s not because you’ll use the cash. It’s so you feel confident enough to make better decisions. It frees your mind.”
Without hesitation, Tony shared his most painful experience:
“Hiring the wrong person. It was a $260,000 mistake. Massive. I’ll never make it again.”
Why hiring mistakes hurt so much:
One of the simplest rules we love to also highlight, came from RE:Signal’s founder, Kevin Gibbons:
“Hire everyone as if you were putting them in front of your best client.”
Most sub-$1M agencies still hire for skill over culture. Tony argues this is why they can’t break the next threshold.
“When you define what you believe, who you are, and why you help the people you help, it becomes obvious who fits, and who doesn’t.”
Strong culture does two things:
Culture should attract great clients and repel the wrong ones.
Tony has helped multiple agencies implement EOS. The biggest issue?
Overloading the to-do list.
“Teams want to do everything at once. They overload themselves and end up being good at nothing.”
Instead:
Master one thing at a time.
Tony calls it the “slow down to speed up” principle.
Most owners don’t struggle with systems, they struggle with priorities.
You can’t build systems until you know:
He breaks agency systems into three loops:
Pressure in one system exposes weakness in the next. Growth is cyclical.
Tony’s favourite analogy for leadership is the old Western stagecoach:
The founder’s job is NOT to pull the wagon.
“Our job as owners is to support the leaders, clear obstacles, get them resources, and help them get unstuck. They’re the ones who pull.”
A-players solve problems without you.
B-players wait for you to solve problems.
Leadership must shift from doing to directing.
Tony boils every growth plan down to three pillars:
Everything else, finances, team structure, culture, flows from those three.
There’s no secret hack.
There’s only discipline, visibility, and execution.
If you’re scaling and don’t want hiring to slow down your momentum, that’s where we can help.
We work with 100+ agencies globally and help founders build high-performance teams that drive revenue.
With 95% of roles filled within 25 days, our approach is built for pace and backed by a 1 year guarantee. Get access to the systems and frameworks that power elite SFH teams.
