Why I Shut Down My Agency

Apologies for the radio silence, but today I’ll explain why I’ve been absent.

The truth is, I had a rough year.

I feel like most entrepreneurs only share their wins, which can make you feel like you’re a failure if your business isn’t always up and to the right.

But that’s not how business works. Business is a rollercoaster.

And my rollercoaster just went pretty close to the ground.

What Happened?

From 2017-2025, I built my agency into one of world’s leading cold email agencies, serving over 3,000 clients globally.

I always knew results from cold email would continue to decline, but I didn’t anticipate the rapid decline that eventually came in mid-2025.

Positive reply rates plummeted 5-10x almost overnight.

We worked insanely hard to find a fix, but for the first time ever, we failed to plug the hole.

With virtually every client getting little to no results, we churned 75% of our client base and, with it, 75% of our revenue.

I burned an unholy amount of money trying to pivot, but pivoting with 20+ employees and $150k/m in overheads is no mean feat.

We eventually got back to break even. Once I came out of wartime CEO mode, I had to ask myself if I really wanted to rebuild an agency in this space.

The answer was no, and I want to tell you why.

But Cold Email Isn’t Dead, Is It?

I am a big believer that the type of business you choose to be in is way more important than how good you are as an operator.

I’ve seen many tweets from agency owners that are still operating in the cold email space, that are along the lines of “Only the strong survive. The ones that stay in the game will be rewarded”.

I’m here to tell you they are wrong.

Cold email might not be ‘dead’, but it’s a 4/10 business opportunity, at best.

Cold email agency economics no longer make sense…

In 2017, the ROI of a cold email campaign was more than 100x. It might cost £100 to get 10 meetings for my client that wins them £10k+ in revenue. That meant I could charge my client £500, and they’d still get a 20x. Everyone wins.

In 2024, lets say it was around 5x. It might cost £2k to get 10 meetings that bring in £10k+ in revenue. That meant I could charge my client £5k, and they’d get a 2x ROI. A win, but not what the client was hoping for. Churn goes up, reputation starts to waiver.

In 2025, it was more like 2-3x. It might cost £5k to get 10 meetings that bring in £10k+ in revenue. I charge my client £10k to make a profit, and they’d get a 1x-1.5x ROI. The client churns, leaves a bad review, and we struggle to find new clients to replace them because the market is saturated.

There are thousands of ‘overnight experts’ flooding the market and burning clients left right and centre. That makes it harder to sign new clients, and the ones that sign are barely staying long enough to cover the CAC.

The Pivot

Cold email wasn’t the only service we offered. We also went deep into Telemarketing, LinkedIn Ads and others.

But the truth is, they are all saturated, and the ROI of each is only going to keep getting worse.

It took nearly a decade before the secret success of cold email became known to everyone and the arbitrage was eaten. These days any new marketing arbitrage you find will be gone in months.

Can you still make a decent living running a cold email agency? Yes, if you’re an excellent operator. But your margins will continue to get squeezed, and you’ll never be able to sell the business.

If you’re a genuinely good entrepreneur, the opportunity cost of staying in the cold email space is huge.

So What Now?

For me, I was fortunate enough to have enough money to take some time off, reflect, and take my time choosing what type of business I wanted to go into next.

Success in business compounds, and you have to stay in a space for 5-10+ years to reap the rewards.

So I wanted to make sure I chose well.

I didn’t want to build my new house on sand, and find myself having to start over again in 5 years time.

My criteria:

• Should still be around in 50 years time (Likely won’t be eaten by AI)

• Attractive to PE buyers. The real money is in selling a business.

• Utilises the skillset and experience I built over a decade in B2B marketing

• It is hard to start. Barriers to entry are important to stop your market becoming saturated.

Preparing For Failure

Peter Levels is considered one of the best indie hackers around. He makes $3m per year as a solo entrepreneur. Only 5% of his businesses worked.

I have started 20+ ‘businesses’ in my life, and only a couple have been what I would call successful.

So I went into this prepared to spend 3-5 years failing across 5-10 projects before I hit gold.

If you don’t have the grit to do that, I’d suggest you don’t start.

The success stories you hear in the news and on X are people who accidentally caught lightening in a bottle. They are the exception, not the rule.

My $50m Idea

After trying and failing on a couple of different projects, I found the business I’m going to spend the next 5-10 years building.

It’s a curated events business that helps big companies get high-calibre enterprise B2B decision makers in a room. It’s essentially enterprise B2B lead gen.

Is it sexy? No.

Was it incredibly hard and expensive to get off the ground? Yes.

While everyone is off chasing the next arbitrage that will get crushed in a matter of months, I’m quietly building a boring company.

I spent tens of thousands of pounds of my own money, and thousands of hours working for free to get the snowball moving.

Even then, I only just made it.

Business is hard.

But I specifically chose this business because it is hard.

I don’t know who said ‘hard it a moat’, but they were right.

If it’s easy to start, you’ll be followed by thousands of others who see an easy pot of gold, and the margins will eventually get competed out.

Ask yourself, do you want to keep discovering and exploring short time arbitrages for the next decade, or do you want to build a long-term business that can be sold for 8-figures?

How Can You Help?

If you happen to sell a product or service that has an annual contract value of more than $10k, book a time with me here and I’ll show you how we can help generate you enterprise sales leads.

Thanks for reading!

Lee