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I'm Co-Founder of Neil Patel Digital a self-funded performance marketing agency scaled to…
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Mike Kamo shared thisI mentor a guy who makes ads for companies before he even walks into the conference to pitch them. He walks up to someone from a Fortune 500 company, shows them the ads he made for them, and they love it. Gets into a pitch almost every time. Most people show up to conferences and just kind of wander around hoping to meet someone. That doesn't work unless you have a big personal brand like @Neil Patel. Everyone else has to do the homework. Get the attendee list. Pick five companies you actually want to work with. Do a bunch of research and put together something specific for each of them. Come in with a real perspective on their business. Either you found some things on their website that are broken and need to be fixed, or you have an idea that's been crushing it for another client and you think it can work really well for them. That's what gets you into a pitch. Not "hey, we'd love to work together." They don't care about that.
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Mike Kamo shared thisA good amount of the brands we pitch at NP Digital don't even know who Neil Patel is, and that's actually a good thing. Because we built the NP Digital brand independently in the US. We're all over the LLMs when people search for top agencies. We've won awards, built content, been mentioned by many major publications. But it wasn't always this way. Our first 3 years of business every lead coming in found us through Neil's blog or saw him speak at a conference. So they show up to a discovery call expecting Neil to pick up the phone. That's a brand problem. We then made a concerted effort to build the NP Digital brand by writing content, winning awards, having our employees build their own brands within the company, etc. This is also important if your company is built around your personal brand and you want to sell one day. The buyers will worry about key man risk so it's best to get ahead of it early on.
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Mike Kamo shared thisA marketing agency owner who works with dentists charges $2,000 a month. His client closes $50,000 cases off his ads. He's cheating himself. He was running Google Ads, email marketing, full Go High Level automations. Getting them 1-3 closed cases per month. Some months that's $150k in revenue for his client, and he's taking home two grand. When you're doing marketing for a high-ticket item, your rate has to be anchored to the revenue you generate. If somebody's charging $50k per case and you're getting them one to two of those a month, $2,000 is nothing. They're making so much money off you. What I'd do instead: charge $2,000 per case closed, or 10% of the sale. Same work, but now if they close three cases in a month you're making $6k-$15k instead of $2k. There's also a guy I know who does lead gen for lawyers on pure pay-for-performance. Takes a percentage of every case they win. Does over $20M a year. The pitch basically writes itself too: "If you don't make money, I don't make money." Just know your economics first. If you do, performance pricing can often beat a retainer in a high-ticket vertical.
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Mike Kamo shared thisI reviewed a founder's homepage live on a call and told him straight up: your website is 100% features and 0% benefits. He'd built a genuinely good platform for subscription businesses. And almost as an afterthought, he mentioned his dashboard shows clients 20x what they pay him. He charges $2,000 a month and shows them $40,000 to $50,000 in opportunity. That's a massive stat. And it was nowhere on his homepage. His header said "connects to your entire payment stack." All features. I still don't know what it does for me. So I told him: your homepage should be 80% results, 20% features. Lead with the 20x. The big header should be something like "our customers see 20x more revenue than what they pay us." Then put the features underneath. And your testimonials have to actually say something. "We were doing $400,000 a month and they got us to $550,000." That's a quote that closes deals. People don't buy features. They buy the outcome. If your homepage doesn't answer "how much more money will I make" in the first scroll, you're leaving a lot on the table.
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Mike Kamo shared thisI see agency owners blasting 500 cold messages a day on Apollo hoping for a half percent reply rate. That's garbage. What actually works when you want to land bigger clients: Make a wish list. Literally. 10 companies you want to work with. Go find the person you need to talk to. Sit down for 30-40 minutes and ask yourself, what do I need to say to this person to get them to have a conversation with me? Do you know how much more effective that is compared to spray and pray? When someone sees that you actually put in the effort to learn about their business and you come in with something real and tangible, they respond. And if you want the really big accounts, enterprise and mid-market, you have to get in front of them in person. Conferences, dinners, workshops. That's where relationships actually get built.
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Mike Kamo shared thisA founder doing $1M ARR thought he was running out of market. He had 50 clients in a niche with 5,000+ companies still untouched. He had 50-60 clients in a niche space, was going to all the conferences, getting referrals, and felt like he was hitting a ceiling. Asked me straight up: should I expand to new industries or go deeper? My answer: you only have 50-60 clients. There are probably more than 5,000 companies out there who are your ideal customers. You've barely scratched it. And going deeper doesn't mean just more conferences. The other 4,900 aren't going to stumble onto him either. You reach them through the platforms they already use, the tools they already pay for every month. That's where the untapped list actually lives. I see this pattern a lot with founders. They start looking for new markets when the existing one is hardly tapped into. Going deeper is almost always the right move at this stage.
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Mike Kamo shared thisWe bootstrapped an 800-person agency from a 75-square-foot WeWork office with zero outside funding. Here's what year one actually looked like. It was just me and Neil. I was handling the leads, the sales, the client fulfillment. Everything. There was no ops person, no account manager, no team. If something needed to get done, I was doing it. We'd close a client and I'd take that revenue and make the first hire. Then close another and make the second. No VC money, no safety net, no investors telling us what to do. Just: close a client, reinvest, repeat. People romanticize the early days of building a company. The reality is it's just you doing things you've never done before, figuring it out as you go, and trying not to screw up the clients who trusted you early. The hardest part was making each hire actually stick. Because every early hire either compounds your growth or slows everything down. Get it wrong and you're back to doing it yourself anyway. We got a lot of things wrong. We also got enough things right to keep going. From that 75-square-foot office, NP Digital grew to 800+ people across 28 countries, completely bootstrapped, zero outside funding. Agency owners come to me all the time stuck at the same inflection points we hit in year one, year two, year three. The hiring decisions, when to stop doing everything yourself, how to structure the first few roles so you can actually scale. Those problems don't change much whether you're at $500k or $5M. The key is to never give up, in fact some of the most stressful years ironically were the best.
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Mike Kamo shared thisI spent 8 years in the car business before my Co-Founder and I built a $100M performance marketing agency. Someone recently asked me if that time was wasted. For a long time I looked at that as time I could've spent doing something bigger. But here's what I actually think now: the reason I can do what I do today is because of ALL of it. The car sales, the finance office, the info products that never really took off. Every single project I put time and effort into. None of it was wasted. I was talking to a founder I mentor recently. He was spiraling a little, questioning whether he should scrap his current product and go do something that would just make more money faster. And I told him: even in the worst case scenario, where you spend six months on this and it never gets traction and you shut it down... you're learning sales, you're learning cold outreach, you're learning how to build something. You take all of that with you into whatever you do next. You can't look at any of it as wasted time. You're climbing the mountain. Every project is just another part of the climb. The founders I see struggling the most are the ones measuring themselves week to week. Pick a time frame you can actually commit to without losing your mind, set some real goals around it, and go. The learning compounds whether the business does or not.
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Mike Kamo shared thisDifficult conversations don't get easier. You stop being able to tolerate NOT having them. I wasn't always like this. Ask anyone who knew me in my early 20s. What changed it for me was the car business. Being 23 and having to tell a 50-year-old guy he's doing his job wrong. Those conversations are brutal when you're starting out. But you do enough of them and something flips. Then a friend told me something that stuck: the reason you feel the way you feel is because you're too afraid to confront the people making you feel that way. So the behavior just... continues. She was right. Once I started having those conversations consistently, my life improved. Because I was living on my terms. And once you taste that, you can't go back. You literally can't not do it anymore. The hardest one for me was my dad. He used to scream at me in front of employees if I made even the smallest mistake. I was terrified of him. When I finally told him "if you yell at me, I'm leaving and you're closing the store yourself"... he called me 10 times. I didn't go back. One or two more times after that, and he stopped. That's when I realized the importance of setting boundaries and having difficult conversations.
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Uday Tank not planning to but always good to be prepared in case we do
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Joe Youngblood My post mentions both. I know people doing marketing this way for both dentists and law firms
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Mike Kamo liked thisMike Kamo liked thisAre AI Overviews stealing your clicks? In this week's Brand Insider Hot Take, Nikki Lam, SVP, Head of Earned Media at NP Digital, cuts through the AI hype with a take that's refreshingly clear: "AI overviews are changing the way discovery works, giving searchers quick access to information, but also reducing click-through rates, especially for extensive, research-heavy searches." When AI answers the question before anyone clicks through, the game isn't about ranking for the search anymore, it's about surviving the summary. That's when everything changes for brands. Find out more: https://lnkd.in/gJUQF-nE #BrandInsider #MediaPostInsiderSummits
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Mike Kamo liked thisMike Kamo liked thisI haven't shared openly just how hard it is to work toward one goal for two decades, and then realize the US dental system makes it almost impossible for anyone who graduated in the last 10 years to win. Between the sacrifice - giving up your time and your life - to the student loans, to the insurance reimbursements that haven't moved with inflation since the 1960s, to dental school being all-consuming on the clinical side and leaving no time to learn the thing that actually determines whether you succeed - Business. I've spent the past 8 years obsessing about the business of dentistry - specifically my specialty, Invisalign - and figuring out how both the dentist and the patient can win. Follow along for my learnings.
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Mike Kamo liked thisMike Kamo liked thisMost content strategies stop at getting found. 🔍 This one goes all the way. Research, content, pipeline, automated follow-up. Every step between someone typing a question and becoming a client. Here is the full 5-step system. 📲 Try HighLevel. 30 days free: https://lnkd.in/dyxW9E-S
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Mike Kamo liked thisMike Kamo liked thisI get sad when I see business owners outsource their personal brand to AI. You're spending time and money to DESTROY your own reputation. To diminish trust people might otherwise have in you. In 2026 everyone is trying to make Claude post for them. It makes sense, right?? AI = more activity = more revenue In many areas of work, like coding or bookkeeping, it's true... But when it comes to areas that are 100% about human-to-human connections, like communication, sales, or media? I don't think "more AI" is the answer. The people your communication is directed at subconsciously feel "Oh, this guy decided to save time on me and dump this Claude slop on me, every day at 9 AM" And then they silently decide to never consume your stuff again. Does that help you sell? I think it does the opposite: it makes people doubt you more. It makes people associate you with BS. So don't let AI do "human things" for you. Keep it for precise work. Your relationships will prosper. And your $$ bottom line too. P.S. Be as human, as humanly possible ✌🏻 P.P.S. My company uses AI to help founders make content. But we do voice interviews, so every single piece of content comes directly from your mouth. Our AI just helps extract the "human stuff" easier. Instead of "engineering the human stuff for you". And because we use the latest tech, we make personal branding more affordable than the $5k/mo old agencies charge.
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Brandon Passley
Referrals are the best pipeline most agencies will ever have. They just feel unreliable because most agencies run them on memory-and-hope instead of a system. Usually the average referral happens by accident. A client says something nice, somebody remembers to ask, a name gets passed along, and everyone moves on. But for a sub-$5M agency, the highest-return motion in the whole business is... referrals. The typical agency thought is "stop relying on referrals"... but the real issue is relying on luck. Systematize the process and it becomes repeatable. Scan your network, ask for the intros, track who you've talked to, and reach back out every 60 days with something actually useful. The other motions matter too, outbound and personal brand and the rest, and they're worth testing. But a lot of them take months to build. If you're running an agency, I'd bet most of your business already comes from word of mouth, so that's the motion to systematize first. And now you can just use Claude to track it for you anyway.
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Mike Rome
If your DTC’s gross margin is under 65%, I can save you $660K-$1.3M right now. Save it with one decision: Don’t run ads. Agencies will say “we’ve got this.” 9 times out of 10, it’s bullsh*t. I don’t care what “edge” they claim. It’s not enough. They’ll take your retainer for 6-12 months. Then tell you this: “Ads can’t work unless you improve margin.” Here’s the math: $100K/month spend + $10K retainer. Over 6-12 months = $660K-$1.3M burned. Save the money. Fix gross margin first. -- *The one GM exception = notably higher AOVs/LTVs than avg.*
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