Every dollar in my business needs a job.
My wife, Lauren E. Wesley, co-founded this agency with me. She runs ops and client experience — meaning she sees every number, every margin, every close call. When I brought her the plan to push real budget into paid ads, she didn’t flinch. That was either a green light or a sign we were both crazy. Maybe both.
We have two kids, a team, and a business we’ve built from scratch. That’s not dramatic; that’s the reality of why every dollar needs a job. So for a long time, the idea of pumping money into paid ads felt reckless. Referrals and organic SEO kept the lights on. Why mess with it?
That thinking kept us safe. It also kept us stuck.
For years I’ve been sitting across from business owners telling them the same thing: run ads. It’s one of the most reliable growth engines available to you. Stop sleeping on it.
It worked for them. Clients got leads, grew revenue, and scaled their teams.
But I wasn’t taking my own medicine. And underneath that hypocrisy was something I didn’t want to admit: fear. The scarcity mindset of a founder who watches every dollar go out the door and wants to control what he can. I had no LTV to CAC ratio worked out for my own business. I was telling clients to do math I hadn’t done on myself. Embarrassing to type, but true.
So I sat down and did the work.
I looked at client tenure. Average profit per relationship. That gave me LTV. From there I set a target ratio of 12:1. For every dollar spent acquiring a client, I wanted twelve back over the life of that relationship.
What the exercise revealed was uncomfortable: because we’d run on referrals for so long, our CAC had been effectively zero for years. That sounds like a win. It’s actually a trap. A zero CAC doesn’t teach you anything. No ceiling to spend toward, no number to optimize against, no way to build a predictable growth engine. We’d been flying blind and calling it discipline.
Once I had a real target, the budget question answered itself. The math said we weren’t being conservative. Instead, we were leaving pipeline on the table. And there was one other thing I had to get straight in my head: not pressing go is also a risk. Staying still has a cost. I just couldn’t see it on a spreadsheet.
So we stopped playing small. Booked a studio, wrote scripts, shot content built for paid, and launched a full website overhaul alongside it. You can see one of the ads below.
The website wasn’t just a redesign. It was a repositioning. We got sharper about who we serve — mid-market and growth stage companies who know they need to show up on social but want to make a smart choice of partner. The two angles we’re testing reflect that: boutique over big agency, and having an actual social system versus just posting and hoping.
A lot of businesses are sitting on that exact problem right now. They know social matters. They’ve tried it half-heartedly. They want a real team with a real process. That’s the conversation we’re trying to start.
Early results are mixed — it’s too soon to declare anything. But we’re in the game in a way we weren’t before, and that alone has changed how I think about growth.
If you’re a founder or marketing lead sitting on the sidelines of paid ads, one question before anything else: have you actually done the math? Not a gut check. The actual LTV to CAC exercise.
The scarcity mindset doesn’t survive contact with a spreadsheet.
Run the numbers. Then bet on yourself.
This post is part of the Building The Agency series, where I tell you stories from behind the scenes of building an agency. You can read more below.
