"Adam McChesney - Rebuilding a $2M Agency with Client Experience as a Growth Engine"

Adam McChesney's keynote on losing and rebuilding an agency, and treating client experience as the growth engine that drives retention, expansion, and referrals.

Adam McChesney, founder of Builders of Authority (buildauthority.co), delivered the Day 2 keynote, "Agency of Your Dreams." It is part personal story (losing his stake in an agency partnership, a months-long legal fight, and rebuilding from zero) and part operational blueprint. His core thesis is that client experience (CX) is a growth engine, not a cost center: reverse-engineer everything from client ROI, embed the agency into client systems, and turn happy clients into a referral flywheel.

Main takeaways

1. Client experience is the org's center of gravity, not a side function. Adam built CX into the literal core of his org chart (a COO over a CX manager over seven CX specialists) because unhappy clients leave even when results are good, while clients who feel valued keep paying the retainer.
2. Reverse-engineer everything from ROI, not vanity metrics. Adam refuses to sell on keyword rankings, impressions, or clicks. Business owners buy bottom-line ROI, and once the ROI conversation is framed clearly, retention, upsells, and referrals all get easier.
3. Embed the agency into the client's systems so leaving is hard. A CRM department and a dedicated integrations specialist wire call and lead tracking into each client's existing CRM or field-service tool, so every closed job is attributed to its lead source.
4. CX expands revenue, it does not just retain it. Upsells, cross-sells, and a referral flywheel (personal brand + business authority + exceptional CX) turn existing happy clients into the biggest source of new business, generating roughly 3 inbound leads per day.
5. Design the agency you actually want before rebuilding it. Adam answered five questions to spec his "dream agency," installed TRUST core values, and relaunched off his personal brand, scaling from zero to a multi-million-dollar business in about 20 months.

Key points

Backstory and timeline

• Background in medical device sales; got into rank and rent in 2018.
• First website built and ranked in 2018: an auto glass company on Weebly, generating 300-400 calls/month; still live today.
• Started his own auto glass company in January 2021; grew it to seven figures in four and a half years; sold it in October 2024; still does its marketing. Says he has "never repaired or replaced auto glass" and had the number one rated auto glass company in St. Louis.
• Prior agency: was a franchisee, Franchise of the Year two years in a row, then partner; built it to $1.75M in 2022; hit seven figures in 15 months.
• February 2024: told the partnership "I'm out." Had ~10 coaching clients and ~40 in a personal-brand mastermind at the time.
• Spoke at this event two years ago (son Murphy was 6 months old; wife Delaney) while mid-exit, expecting a buyout offer that Friday that never came.
• A week after asking out, was fired from his own company while on vacation at Disney World with his six-month-old.
• Is a type 1 diabetic; lost medical insurance after exiting, incurring medical bills.
• Started Builders of Authority (BOA) on the side in November 2023 while still at the old agency (mastermind + 1:1 coaching).
• Threw an in-person event in June 2024 (~100 attendees) with just his executive assistant.
• Lawsuit settled October 2024; non-compete waived; relaunched the agency that month.

The relaunch and the numbers

• Day he posted the relaunch (Oct 2024): 30+ business owners reached out via DMs, texts, calls, referrals, and emails.
• March 2025: 7 team members. September 2025: ~30 employees. Today: 44 people, ~30 from Nicaragua, plus Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
• Last 3 months of 2024: $500K in revenue.
• Full year 2025: $2.174 million revenue at ~26 percent profit.
• 2026 year-to-date: ~$980K (almost $1M), a ~$2.8M run rate.
• All achieved in ~20 months after restarting from zero.
• ~100 active clients; ~3 percent churn.
• ~3 inbound leads per day via website, SEO, YouTube, and podcast; ~90 percent traced to Facebook (DMs, group tags, partnerships).

The five questions (dream-agency blueprint)

1. What did I like about what we were doing before?
2. What were we doing wrong / where were the areas of opportunity?
3. How did I want to manage clients differently?
4. How did I want to deliver ROI?
5. How did I want to transform the space?

TRUST core values

• T - Take Action: "ask for forgiveness, not permission"; move quickly.
• R - Results Matter: "clients pay us to get ROI, not keyword rankings or vanity metrics."
• U - Utilize Resources: "be efficient, not busy"; leverage AI and technology.
• S - Set Expectations: "under-promise, over-deliver"; promise, deliver, repeat.
• T - Transform Lives: "it's why we do what we do."
• The acronym was chosen because most business owners "don't trust marketing agencies."

Team and org structure

• COO: Alejandra (started ~6 months ago as a paid ads manager; promoted to COO).
• Client Experience Manager: Laura (started as a CX specialist, built the department, promoted in September; manages and trains the 7 CX specialists, watches their Zoom calls, and is the escalation point before COO and Adam).
• 7 CX specialists, each managing ~20 accounts on average (varying by seniority).
• Ana (transcript also spells "Anna") manages website projects only (~30-35 projects at any moment).
• Most CX specialists were former SEO or paid-ad specialists with 2-3 years of product experience who wanted to be client-facing.
• One team member is a dedicated integrations specialist (does only CRM/system integrations).
• One SEO manager was turned into an AI developer who now builds custom dashboards full time.

Client-experience cadence ("TRUST on autopilot")

• Kickoff (Day 1): onboarding, strategy, expectations; relationship transferred from sales to CX.
• Weekly: automated check-ins, progress updates, quick wins.
• Bi-weekly or monthly meetings: depending on SEO-only vs SEO + ads.
• Quarterly Business Review (QBR): deep-dive ROI analysis and roadmap planning.

Revenue-expansion model

• Upsells: happy clients upgrade packages / increase ad spend = higher management fees. Adam admits he was "so bad at this in the beginning."
• Cross-sells: SEO to Ads to Social to Web.
• Referrals: "the most underrated growth strategy in the agency space."
• Referral flywheel: Personal Brand + Business Authority + Exceptional CX, then clients share results loudly, generating ~3 inbound leads/day, more clients, more referrals, repeat.

Embedding and integrations

• Runs a CRM department; builds CRMs for clients who lack one (a "leaky bucket").
• For clients with an existing CRM or field-service tool, the integrations specialist does a custom integration so lead/call/website tracking lands inside the client's own system.
• An attendee referenced WhatConverts (Adam confirmed the screenshot colors).
• Example: a ServiceTitan client integrated via Zapier plus custom build-out (every ServiceTitan setup is custom).
• Build approach: "We just type it in, Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera."
• Goal: every quote/job is attributed to its source (SEO landing page, Google PPC keyword, direct, organic social, email campaign).

Results and retention thesis

• "Clients rarely leave agencies that deliver ROI."
• "Clients rarely leave agencies embedded in their systems."
• "Clients will almost never leave agencies that treat them better than anyone else."
• Example client (a Florida roofing company): sold $377K last month, attributed across LSA, SEO, Google Business Profile, and PPC. (Stated as $377K in the narrative and $370K / $336K in the dashboard example; figures rounded and inconsistent in delivery.)
• A custom dashboard solves the home-services attribution lag: a lead from February that closes in April is credited as revenue across months, not just the month it arrived; it can show the trailing 6 months.
• On lost accounts: usually a sales problem (under-educated client, ignored red flags) or a product problem; "very rarely a client experience problem." Clients can switch CX specialists (happened once or twice).
• Memorable line (quoted by the moderator): "There's not many problems in an agency that more money can't solve."
• Deck slogan: "Written in pain. Built in public. Two years in the making."

Slides

Slides (32)

Source

Synthesized from this speaker's portion of the SEO Spring Training 2026 Day 2 session and the deck "Adam McChesney - Agency of Your Dreams" (source file adam-mcchesney-agency-of-your-dreams.txt). Slides above are rendered from that deck. Some figures (the roofing client's monthly revenue, exact run-rate rounding) were stated inconsistently in delivery and are noted as such; spellings of some team names (Ana/Anna) and the organizer name (Samuels/Samules) are unverified in the source.