Agency Operators: Level Up

Growing a mastermind of Agency Operators, teaching agency operations.

In 16 weeks, I help agency owners Install Operational Excellence through:

1. Getting clarity on your Core Metrics
2. Creating the 6 Foundations
3. Increasing team Capacity (and profitability)

Founder

WKND Digital

Advisor to WKND Digital Leadership & Ecomm Investments

Advisor

Responsible for: 
- Implementing LEAN business systems
- Developing the overall business strategy
- Coaching and mentoring service line leaders
- Overall P&L and service line P&Ls

Chief Operating Officer & Partner

WKND Investments

WKND Investments exists to be the #1 growth vehicle for passionate brand owners.

We are brand owners who have done more than $45M in revenue, and are looking to partner with great DTC e-comm brands to help them scale and exit.

We own a world-class digital marketing agency that manages our investment's core infrastructure.

Co-Founder

Family Gifts Co.

Family Gifts Co. is an 8-Figure DTC E-Commerce brand in the family gifts niche. Our mission is to Bring Families Together, and we do that through our extensive catalog of unique, personalized gifts.

-Responsible for overall marketing strategy, product development, and managing a team of amazing people.

Chief Executive Officer

Vatizam 

Vatizam is a boutique marketing consulting firm that works with 7 and 8 figure brands to grow their businesses through paid advertising.

Aetna

Provide medical, dental, life & disability products to Orlando clients through broker distribution by relationship building, product differentiation, and consultative sales approach.

2012 Results:
o $10,595,000 in medical sales 
o $545,000 in dental sales 
o $455,000 in life / disability sales

Middle Market Account Executive - Central Florida

Provide medical, dental, life & disability products to South Florida clients through broker distribution by relationship building, product differentiation, and consultative sales approach.

2011 Results: 
o $2,725,000 in medical sales 
o $255,000 in dental sales 
o $75,000 in life / disability sales 

2010 Results: 
o $425,000 in dental sales 
o $100,000 in life / disability sales

Middle Market Account Executive - South Florida

• Prospect and qualify potential small business (1-50) clients
• Receive goal of 2 prospect meetings a week by cold calling 100-150 people a day

Sales Intern

Kyle Hunt is an American entrepreneur and business investor, with over 12 years of experience in starting, scaling, buying, and selling 7 and 8 figure E-commerce brands and Agencies. 

According to his wife, he is also "the best husband."

With humble roots in Orlando, FL, Kyle has quickly grown to be one of the most respected names in the Agency space.

He is currently the Founder of Agency Operators: Level Up, which helps $50k-250k/mo. agency owners install operational excellence in their agencies.

He is also the CEO of Family Gifts Co., a multi-8 figure DTC E-commerce brand.

Previously, he was:

Co-Founder of WKND Investments, a company dedicated to investing in the best $5-$30m/yr. USA based DTC e-commerce brands.

CEO of Vatizam, a marketing consulting agency that scales Brands to 7 and 8 figures through funnel optimization & paid traffic.

Kyle Hunt

Twelve years ago, you couldn’t spot me without a drink in my hand.

Six nights a week.
Out with friends.
Partying like the world was ending.
Because that was just “being social,” right?

2 weeks ago, I went out with a big group of guys.
Heavy hitters in my industry.
Drinks everywhere.
Shots going around like candy.

And me?
I had zero urge to join in.

So, what changed?

Simple.
I met my wife.

She never touched alcohol.
(No objection to it, just never wanted it).

Our early dates?
I felt like the odd one out, always ordering a drink while she just smiled and sipped water.
To be honest, it made me pay attention to my habits for the first time.

Over time, things shifted.
One less drink here, one less there.
The wild nights faded.
Now, it’s maybe a drink or two, and only for a real celebration.

Turns out, the right person doesn’t just accept you - they actually make you better, whether you realize it or not.

Wild how someone else’s example can rewrite your own story.

Ever had someone change your life without trying?
Share yours or tag them.

wknd-investments

familygiftsco

JSESSIONID

li_at

Talks about #ecommerce, #marketing, #acquisitions, and #entrepreneurship

8-Figure Agency COO | Helping Ecomm & Digital Marketing Agency Owners Build $5M/yr Self-Managing Profit Machines | Proud Girl Dad | 7-Figure Agency Exit

After running AdTribe for six years and managing over $100M in ad spend, I learned how hard it is to build and keep a world-class media buying team.

Finding great talent takes months.
Training takes even longer.
And the wrong hire can cost you clients and profit fast.

So I built the service I wish existed back then — Haven.

Haven is a white-label media buying partner that helps marketing agencies scale without hiring.

For $799 per account, you get a complete senior-level growth team:

✅ Media buyer
✅ Creative designer
✅ Video editor
✅ Developer
✅ Performance strategist

No hiring. No overhead. No training headaches.

Today, more than 20 agencies partner with us to handle their paid media.

A few of them said it best:

Olivia Kean, CEO at Fusion Hub
👉 “It’s allowed me to focus on the things I love, knowing they’re crushing it on their end.”

Kory Baraba, CEO at Grow Fast
👉 “We’ve worked with 4–5 different media buyers from Haven, and they’ve all been amazing.”

See more client stories here: https://www.hirewithhaven.com/clients

If you run a marketing agency and want to scale fulfillment without adding headcount,
connect with me or reach out at dmitry@hirewithhaven.com

Dmitry Fesenko

I'm running two marketing agencies full-time.

These 7 tools generate 20-30 qualified calls every single month:

1/ HeyReach

Sends 30-40 connection requests daily to agency owners.
Acceptance rate: 42%. Reply rate: 14%.
Gets me in front of 200+ decision makers weekly.

2/ Clay

Enriches every lead with company data before I reach out. 
Tells me their employee count, estimated revenue, tech stack. 
I know if they need help before they know it themselves.

3/ Unipile

We run LinkedIn outbound from 7 team member profiles. 
Unipile manages all conversations in one inbox. 
No more account switching.

4/ N8N

My SDR loves n8n.
We automated everything from intent signals to data cleanup to routing warm leads into our CRM.
Zero manual work.

5/ Smartlead

Cold email on steroids.
Warms up 10 email accounts. Sends 300 emails daily.
Gets me in front of agencies not active on LinkedIn.

6/ RapidAPI

Pulls LinkedIn data straight into my CRM.
Shows me who viewed my posts, who engaged, who is quietly checking my profile.
Perfect timing for warm outreach.

7/ Folk CRM

Tracks every prospect from first touch to placement.
One dashboard shows pipeline value, conversion rates, follow-ups needed.
My close rate jumped from 20% to 45% once I could see patterns.

These tools run 24/7. 
All I do is show up to calls.

Total monthly cost: $847/month

What sales tools are actually moving the needle for you?
👇 Share below.

CEO at Haven | Hire world-class media buyers for 65% less than in the US | $100M+ in managed ad spend

7 sales tools

When I started my first agency in 2018, I made a huge mistake.

I hired full-time employees way too early.

At the time, I had only one year of media buying experience and was managing 15 clients as a freelancer.

I decided it was time to build something bigger than myself and start an agency.

Over the next 6 months I hired:

→ 6 full-time media buyers
→ 1 social media manager
→ 1 part-time developer

On the outside, it looked like I made it.

Big team. Cool office. Friday parties.

The reality?

I was maxing out credit cards to pay salaries.

My lead flow was inconsistent, so most media buyers were operating at half capacity.

Our service quality was mediocre because I had no hiring or training process.

Client churn was high.

Then Covid hit and I had to let go most of the team and cut all bonuses for the rest.

It was rough.

Looking back, I made my life much harder than it needed to be.

If I had to do it again, I would:

→ Stay a freelancer longer and save more money
→ Keep raising prices until I had 10 solid clients
→ Outsource some clients to a contractor or a white label partner like Haven
→ Hire a full time media buyer only when their salary is no more than 25% of agency revenue

The lesson?

You don’t need a big team to build a real business.

You need a good offer, a good lead flow, and a fulfillment partner you can rely on.

Agency life is already hard.

Don’t make it harder.

We will hire a vetted offshore media buyer for your agency in under 30 days or you don’t pay.

Over the last 7 years, we’ve hired and trained 50+ media buyers for my two agencies, AdTribe and Haven.

Most of our talent comes from Ukraine and Eastern Europe. They work hard, learn fast, and know the platforms inside out.

It has been my secret weapon.

A few months ago, an agency owner DM’d me asking if we could hire and train a media buyer for his agency.

That one message turned into our Media Buyer Placement Offer. 

Since then, demand exploded.
We even brought on a full-time recruiter to increase our hiring capacity.

Here’s what agencies get when they work with us:

✅ World-class offshore talent with real platform depth
✅ Every candidate is vetted by our Head of Paid Media
✅ 90-day replacement guarantee
✅ Additional support and access to our SOPs

Keep in mind, this is not our main focus. 

We still hire and manage our own internal team of media buyers running ads for 90+ accounts.

So we only take up to 5 placements per month.

If you’re hiring in the next 60 days, DM me.

We've rebuilt our media buyer compensation system 6 times in 7 years.

Here's the full evolution:

↳ 2018: Tiny base, no bonus

Started my first agency with no money. Hired juniors who'd never heard of marketing and taught them Facebook ads.

My current Head of Paid Media started at $500/month.

↳ 2019-2020: Higher base + fixed bonus

Fixed bonus per account managed.

It was simple and easy to calculate, but incentivized the wrong things: quantity over quality.

↳ 2021: Weighted bonus

Paid a consultant $3K to build the "perfect" system.

Weighted by account complexity, niche difficulty, retention metrics.

 Once we hit 50 accounts, payroll took 10 days to calculate.

It was too complex to maintain.

↳ 2022-2024: retention system + CEO bonus

Fixed bonus per account plus extra for 6+ month retention. Added "CEO bonus" for outlier accounts that were unusually demanding.

This system lasted the longest.

↳ 2025: % of rev or fixed bonus

Split the team into AdTribe and Haven. 

Media buyers who worked with direct clients earned % of revenue, media buyers who worked with agencies got fixed bonus per account. 

Couldn't generate enough volume for both. Merged them back after 6 months.

↳ 2026: Revenue share

We're changing compensation again to reflect our new pricing. 

Stay tuned.

***

After 6 iterations, what I learned is that there is no perfect system.

What works depends on your stage and who you want to attract. 

A 25-year-old takes risk for reward. A 35-year-old with a mortgage wants predictable income.

Your compensation structure IS your culture.

Choose wisely.

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." - Charlie Munger

The main thing that kills agency margins is simple:

too many managers who don’t do any billable work.

At Haven, every team lead and even our head of paid media manages at least a few strategic accounts.

Four reasons:

→ it keeps our COGS low
→ they stay sharp and keep practicing their craft
→ they actually understand what good looks like
→ fulfillment doesn’t suffer when a media buyer takes a vacation

At the end of the day, your best managers never stop being practitioners.

Otherwise, you end up building a company where managers manage managers and no one knows how to do the work.

🚀 October 2025 results at Haven

Ad spend: $1.2M
Revenue: $3.1M 
Leads generated: 91,870

Top-performing niches: 

→ Apparel & Accessories ($1.8M in rev) 
→ Home & Lifestyle ($517K in rev) 
→ Food & Beverage ($320K in rev)

Platform breakdown: 

→ Meta: 58% 
→ Google: 41% 
→ LinkedIn, TikTok, Taboola, Email: 1%

Wins this month: 

✅ 71% of accounts hit or exceeded targets
✅ Introduced a new media buyer placement offer ($12,500 in contracts closed)
✅ Onboarded a few new agencies (ecom + B2B)
✅ Team started logging all inputs in Asana
✅ Hired a new media buyer

P.S.

Q4 is almost done. 
Black Friday is around the corner. 
This is when most agencies scramble.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

At Haven, we help marketing agencies scale without the stress of hiring.

Our senior media buyers run Meta and Google ads under your brand so you can take on more clients and protect your margins.

We have one spot left to fill our 2025 capacity.

Your CAC is irrelevant.

Ask yourself:

Would you rather pay $200 to get someone who spends $500?

Or $1,000 to get someone who spends $5,000?

I had this conversation last week with one of our MedSpa clients.

We kept pushing their hangover drip because it had the lowest CAC. On the surface, it looked like the right move.

Then we dug deeper.

Hangover drip customers almost never come back. 
They buy once and disappear.

Wellness drip customers are the opposite.
They turn into long-term clients spending over $5,000 every year.

Yes, the CAC to acquire them is higher.
But the CAC to LTV ratio makes way more sense.

Lesson?

Don't just push ad spend toward the products with the lowest CAC.
Focus on the offers that attract whale customers with the highest LTV instead.

That's how you build a great business.

I used to think my main job as a founder was to hire smart people and let them cook.

Turns out, that’s only part of the equation.

Even the most talented team needs structure. Your business should run like a well-oiled machine, not depend on individual brilliance.

And that comes down to systems.

If your operations are messy, even A-players won’t save you.

From how you onboard new talent to how you define “great work,” everything needs to be documented, clear, and repeatable.

And once you set those standards, your job still isn’t done. You have to make sure everyone actually follows them.

That means meetings, reviews, accountability, and constant communication.

My point is, building an agency is hard. Very hard

It’s a never-ending cycle of winning clients, fulfilling work, hiring, and managing people.

But there’s a way to remove at least half of that stress.

👉 Hire Haven

We handle most of the client fulfillment so you can focus on growth.

And finally take a vacation without your phone blowing up.

Last week, we did an account audit for one of our agency partners.

Here’s the message they sent us after sharing it with their prospect 👇

"We had a great call yesterday evening. The prospect should be signing this week."

And this isn’t an exception.

Our audits convert over 50 percent of prospects into paying clients for our partners.

Here’s what the audit covers:

→ account structure 
→ creative strategy 
→ competitors analysis
→ website & CRO recommendations
→ a clear step by step action plan

It costs only $199.

The best part? Every new partner gets one audit for free.

DM me “audit” and I’ll send you the details.

Every agency has access to the same AI tools.

ChatGPT costs $20. Claude costs $20. Everyone can afford it.

Which means the tools themselves are not an advantage.

Knowing how to write prompts is not advantage either. 
You can literally ask ChatGPT to write the perfect prompt for you.

So what actually gives you an edge?

Data.

Data is the moat.

The more high-quality data you have, the better your AI outputs will be.

Once I realized this, we:

→ Moved all spreadsheets into Airtable 
→ Started logging every action in Asana 
→ Stored 7 years of campaign performance in our database 
→ Updated SOPs so LLMs can actually digest them 
→ Added ChatGPT to all our Slack channels
→ Saved all my LinkedIn posts and newsletters for voice training

Piece by piece, we're building our agency's second brain.

It's not sexy. 
Most people would rather build another ChatGPT wrapper that produces mediocre results.

We're aiming for excellence and willing to do the boring work.

That's what it takes to build a true AI-powered agency.

I was skimming through "Unreasonable Hospitality" the other day, and one line popped up:

"The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.”

It's true in restaurants. It's even more true in agencies.

 After hiring 50+ media buyers over 7 years, I've learned the best ones are always detail-oriented and organized.

They:

→ use clean naming conventions
→ show up to meetings on time
→ never miss a deadline
→ document their tests 
→ set up campaigns without mistakes

When hiring at Haven, I look for these small signals first. Not their experience. Not their certifications. The details.

Because if someone can't follow a simple naming convention, they won't follow complex SOPs either. If they're sloppy with campaign structure, they'll be sloppy with your budget.

Excellence starts with the details.

We stopped running Haven like one big team.

Instead, we built it around pods: 
small independent teams that operate like mini agencies inside Haven.

Each pod has a team lead who acts like a CEO.

They hire their own people, manage their own mini P&L, and take full ownership of results.

It changed everything.

Before, I had to review every decision, jump into Slack threads, and fix small fires every day.

Now, team leads make decisions fast, solve problems on their own, and take full accountability for outcomes.

Each pod has its own strengths:

Pod #1 - Meta and Klaviyo 
Pod #2 - Meta and Google 
Pod #3 - Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn 

Team leads are incentivized like founders.

They earn a percentage of their pod’s profit, so when the pod wins, the whole agency wins.

Extreme ownership is how we scale without losing quality.

Each month, our media buyers review what's working across 90+ accounts.  

Here are 6 things that stood out in November:

1/ New case study for CPG

We scaled a beef jerky brand from $5k in ad spend to $25k/month at 3.0 ROAS.

 What worked:

→ BOGO offer 
→ Build your bundle LP
→ Creative diversity
→ ABO < CBO

2/ Smaller radius = higher ROI for local businesses

Wellness client kept expanding radius to get more leads. Cost per lead kept climbing.

Worse: No one drives 10+ miles for IV therapy.

We cut radius to 5 miles. 
Optimized GMB.
ROI has increased from 2.5 to 4.97

His clinic is fully booked now.

3/ Inventory kills momentum

Tableware client: $4-5K daily revenue during peak season.

Ran out of stock. Had to cut ad spend. Revenue crashed to $2K/day.

We had winning ads pulling 3.5 ROAS but nothing to sell.

Another reminder why I don't start my own ecom store 😅

4/ Excluding branded keywords backfired

Client wanted more new customers. We excluded branded keywords from PMax.

→ ROAS tanked
→ New customer rate increased only 2% 
→ Competitors started bidding on their brand

Never leave your branded search unprotected.

5/ Pmax for lead gen clients 

Most lead gen PMax campaigns fail. Google drives tons of volume, but nothing converts.

Why? You're optimizing for cheap calls, not revenue.

Solution: push offline conversion value back to ads manager

We did this for a MedSpa client and increased appointment value by 67%. 

Treat every lead gen account like ecom. 

6/ Friction kills conversions

Client's 25% off sale failed completely.  

The problem: Promo code buried in the creative. Not auto-applied at checkout.  

The fix: Code in headline + Meta's promo extension or Shopify auto-apply URLs.

Small friction = big revenue loss.

P.S.  Managing 90+ accounts means we see patterns before they become trends.  

If your agency needs media buyers who actually know what they're doing (and cost 65% less than US talent), DM me

I posted my first LinkedIn post back in 2020.

It got 6 likes.

I remember spending hours writing it and thinking it was a waste of time when I could be doing something more important.

So I stopped.

But here’s what I realized:
If I had stayed consistent, both of my agencies would probably be 3x bigger by now.

I finally started posting regularly this year.

Here's what happened:

→ my calendar got packed with leads
→ I met amazing people who became close friends
→ hiring talent became 10x easier

The math is simple:
More visibility = more opportunities.

But here's the thing most people miss: it's not about going viral.

It's about showing up consistently so the right people find you when they need you.

If you run a B2B business, LinkedIn is still the best marketing channel to go all in on.

The best time to start was 5 years ago.
The second best time is today.

We used to send 30 to 40 invoices manually every month. Now it's all done automatically in Airtable. 

Before...

...everything lived across spreadsheets and Slack messages

...invoices for small one-time projects were getting missed 

...our accountant had to log in to Stripe and send every invoice by hand

...no one really knew which invoices were already sent or still pending

In short, it was messy. 

Once we moved our entire back end to Airtable, it finally made sense to automate the whole thing.

And we did. Here's how it works now:

→ A script pulls all active accounts with the retainers we charge
→ Head of Paid Media goes through the list and approves everything
→ Agencies confirm their accounts through Airtable Interfaces
→ Airtable pushes invoices straight to Stripe through API

Now, I don’t even think about invoicing anymore (almost 😅). 

The team reviews their part, agencies confirm their active accounts, and Stripe sends everything on its own.

It finally feels like a real system instead of something I had to babysit every month.

Airtable has been our biggest operational win this year.

Super happy we made the switch.

Another week, another round of wins from our agency partners 💪

Love seeing these messages pop up in Slack.  

90+ accounts under management.  
18 agency partners. 
Wins like these every single week.  

This is why we do what we do.

Our $199 audits are closing deals for agency partners.

Here's what one of them just told us: 

"Whoever did the audit, please tell them they did a great job! I like how they incorporated infographics and embedded videos directly in the audit. Overall it was very thorough and helped me close this client."

We've done 30+ audits in the last 3 months.

They convert over 50% of prospects into paying clients.

 Here's what every audit includes:

→ Full account structure analysis 
→ Creative strategy breakdown with examples 
→ Competitor analysis with actual ad screenshots 
→ Website & CRO recommendations 
→ Step-by-step action plan for the first 90 days

After reviewing dozens of accounts, we see the same patterns:  

Most agencies are leaving money on the table with poor campaign structure. 
Creative testing is almost non-existent.
Landing pages don't match ad messaging.  

The audit shows prospects exactly what they're missing. And more importantly, how to fix it.

Price is $199. 
But every new partner gets their first audit free.

We only do 10 audits per month because our Head of Paid Media reviews each one personally.  

If you have a prospect on the fence, DM me "audit" and we'll help you close them.

When I started Haven, I wanted it to be fully productized.

Same deliverables.
Same process.
Same price

But I learned very fast that with agencies, this is not gonna work.

Every agency I talked to had its own workflow, its own reporting style, its own way of communicating with clients.

I couldn’t force them into our system, so we had to change our approach.

Now, for each agency we work with, we create a separate Notion doc:

"How to work with agency X"

Each doc covers: 

→ how they like communication
→ what reports their clients expect
→ what “good” means in their niche
→ what we need from them to do our best work

It does make our ops more complex.

Just think about it:
we are managing more than 90 accounts across 18 agency partners in multiple niches: ecommerce, home improvement, medspa, apps, coaching, and a few others.

Each agency and each niche needs a tailored way of working. There is no one-size-fits-all.

But the deeper we integrate ourselves into those agencies, the longer they stay.

We still have agencies that worked with me 7 years ago when I was a freelancer. 

And in the agency world, retention is the only thing that really matters.

If you can retain clients for years, you can always optimize your processes to improve margins.

But if you lose clients left and right, your agency will always feel like it’s on fire.

One of the most useful things I use AI for has nothing to do with writing or creative work.

Every month, I ask Claude a simple question:

“Which clients are at risk of churning?”

It analyzes our Airtable data: ROAS, retention, % of goals hit, creative performance. 

Then gives us a breakdown like this:

🔴 High-risk clients
🟠 Medium-risk clients
🟢 Stable clients

My head of paid media and I review it together.

We use it to:

→ Spot accounts that need attention
→ Identify patterns across underperforming campaigns
→ And plan cash flow accordingly

Instead of waiting for clients to Slack me “hey, can we hop on a call?”, we reach out first. 

We flag the performance concern and bring solutions before they have to ask.

Most people use AI to write posts or make funny videos with Sora.

But the real unlock is data analysis.

What used to take hours in spreadsheets now takes 30 seconds.

How are you using AI in your agency?

Another week, another round of wins from our agency partners 😊

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The Battle

Kyle Hunt

Dmitry Fesenko

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The Battle

Kyle Hunt

Dmitry Fesenko

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Kyle Hunt's LinkedIn Performance

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