Alex Danner is an introvert with a software engineering background who hates following up with people. He now runs a $160,000 per month recurring revenue agency with 26 full-time team members, serving fence and deck contractors.
That combination should not work on paper. It works because he stopped trying to out-think the plan and started running it.
I sat down with Alex, founder of Fence & Deck Marketers, for a full interview on how he got there. Here is the path, with the numbers, in the order it actually happened.
Where the agency sits today
- About $160K MRR
- 26 full-time team members, all virtual, no office
- Client churn under 3%, running around 2% this year
- Services: websites, SEO, AI optimization, pay-per-click, Local Services Ads, Facebook
- Program pricing: $2,000 to $4,000 per month per location
- Running on EOS with a real leadership team and weekly Level 10 meetings
His first SEO client paid him $200 a month. He and his partner thought they had found a goldmine.
From coder to website guy to agency owner
Alex went to college for software engineering, heard Instagram sold for around a billion dollars, and decided he wanted to build apps. He got out of school, wrote code for someone else, then started working nights for free with a friend who ran a custom app shop just to get better and get closer to owning something.
Then he hit the wall every project-based business hits. You build the site, you ship the project, and the revenue stops. There is nothing left to sell and no consistent flow.
So he taught himself SEO, learned from people like Brian Dean, signed that $200 a month client, and started building something with recurring revenue underneath it. That is the real starting point of the agency. Not a big idea. A recurring revenue model replacing a project model.
How he picked the niche (and why he broke one of my rules)
Alex gets asked about niche selection constantly and he wishes he had a sexier answer. He does not have one, and that is the point.
He was a generalist working with anybody and everybody. When he joined Seven Figure Agency, he fought the niching advice for a while. His words: he probably heard it a hundred times before it stuck.
When it finally stuck, his selection criteria were dead simple:
- He already had clients in fencing and decking. Proof of concept was sitting in his own book of business.
- He liked those clients and those industries. He was not signing up for ten years of work he would resent.
- Nobody else was there. No wall of agencies already claiming the space.
- He could build real case studies with them. He needed provable results, and those were the accounts where he had them.
He also picked two verticals instead of one, which technically breaks the rule. It works here for the same reason plumbing and HVAC works as a pair: fence and deck contractors sit in the same vertical, refer work back and forth, and show up at the same industry events and associations. Two niches that share one audience is one niche with two doors.
If you are a generalist right now, this is the exercise. Look at your existing client base and ask: who am I getting great results for, who do I actually enjoy working with, and where can I build a case study? Pick from the best of what you already have. You are not guessing at a market from scratch.
The transition was slow, and he says too slow
Alex did not flip a switch. He played both sides for a while, because you do what you have to do to pay your mortgage and take care of your family.
He even bought a small agency from someone he met inside Seven Figure Agency. The owner wanted out, the price was good, and it came with a pile of non-niche clients. He ended up losing almost all of those clients. He got it cheap enough to still profit, but it stung.
The lesson he took away is the one he repeats: it is incredibly hard to be great at building websites and running SEO for a law firm, a chiropractor, and a contractor at the same time. He does not think you actually can be.
So he shifted focus more and more toward the two industries. New clients came from the niche. Legacy clients churned out or got let go. Referrals for everything else went to other agency owners in the network. Eventually he could say “no more” and mean it.
His own assessment of the transition: probably moved too slow. If you are sitting in the same spot, that is your permission slip to move faster than he did.
Program packaging: three tiers, one price ladder
Alex keeps the offer boring on purpose:
- Base: website, SEO, AI optimization
- Middle: add pay-per-click or Local Services Ads
- Top: add Facebook
$2K, $3K, $4K per month. Multiple locations cost more. That is the whole menu.
He also cut a service, and that decision is worth as much as anything he added. Social media management was the cheapest thing he sold at around $500 a month, and it generated the most client friction. Deck and fence work is aesthetic, so owners had strong opinions about how every post should look. He was collecting the smallest checks in exchange for the biggest headaches.
He killed it. That turned out to be a good idea.
Look at your own service list and find the line item that produces the least revenue and the most complaints. That is not a service, that is a tax on your delivery team.
What actually broke the growth ceiling
The first five or six niche clients came from Facebook ads and referrals. He never had big success with the ads. Things were, in his words, very stagnant.
The shift happened when he stopped trying to grow from behind a screen. He is a self-described big-time introvert, and the growth plan asked him to do the exact things introverts avoid: get into the industry, work a booth at trade shows, speak on stage, invite the biggest names in the industry onto a podcast.
He did it anyway. “All right, whatever. I'm gonna do all the pieces, and I'm just gonna go for it.”
That is where the momentum came from. Industry events. Relationships with the association leaders and coaches who already own the audience's attention. A weekly podcast that now sits at roughly 100 episodes. Monthly webinars. A nurture sequence that runs whether or not he can prove it is working. All of it running at once, in one ecosystem.
Two of those levers deserve their own breakdown, and we wrote them up separately:
- The trade show booth playbook, including the hanging challenge that pays out $100 bills
- The niche podcast play and why he calls it the single best idea in the growth system
His reasoning for sticking with all of it when nothing looked measurable is the most useful thing he said in the entire interview: “Why would I think I'm smart enough to outsmart this when you did this and everybody else did this? Why would I be special?” He put the ego aside and ran the play.
The sales process: he only talks to pre-qualified prospects
Alex does not take first calls. Matilde on his team does.
She answers inbound, handles the follow-up he openly hates, and runs a qualification checklist: revenue threshold, does the business look legit, are there bad reviews all over the place. If it passes, she books a strategy call with Alex.
On that call he presents. It starts with slides and moves into a live screen share where he walks the prospect through a custom audit of their market. No cookie cutter deck. He has been told he goes into too much detail, and he does it anyway, because he wants the prospect to have aha moments they have never had with another marketer. His close rate is high.
Two structural moves there worth copying. First, the owner's time only goes to qualified opportunities. Second, the presentation is custom enough that it is worth showing up for even if the prospect never buys.
Operations: EOS, and the org chart moment
Alex resisted EOS because it was expensive. Lynn Askin, one of his mentors inside the program, pushed him, and things reached a breaking point anyway.
The org chart exercise is what broke it open. They mapped out the departments an agency needs and wrote names in the boxes. Alex was on roughly 80% of them. His operations manager, Oxa, had the rest.
His reaction: “Oh wow. We had no idea this was how big of a problem this was.”
From there he hired department leaders for development, content, SEO, ads, and graphic design under an operations manager, with sales sitting with him and Matilde. As revenue grew, he could afford better roles. Plenty of trial and error along the way.
The other surprise: he assumed people would want to manage a department. Most did not. He had to hire specifically for people who wanted the role, not just people who were good at the craft.
He is now removed from the weekly team meetings entirely. He sits in the leadership Level 10. Oxa runs the rest, and often solves problems before he ever hears about them. Full operations and retention breakdown is here.
One piece of wisdom for the agency owner trying to get to the next level
I asked Alex for his one takeaway. Paraphrased, with his own edge on it:
Get out of your head and do the things that people further along than you are telling you to do. If there is a unanimous vote that something works, do not stall on whether it is expensive. Do it and figure it out later. You are never going to plan it perfectly, so stop trying. Do the proven thing, add your own edge to it, say yes to opportunities that have a decent chance of paying off even when they are not slam dunks, and keep showing up. And hire. Everything you hate, you are probably not good at. Find the stuff you hate, get someone better at it, and keep growing.
Introvert. No sales background. Two boring niches. $160K MRR and 26 people. Relentless beats clever.
What to take from this if you are under $50K MRR
- Pick the niche from your own client list. Best results, clients you like, provable case studies.
- Build a three-tier program and stop customizing. Base, plus ads, plus social. Price it $2K to $4K.
- Cut the cheap service that creates all the friction. Today.
- Get physically into the industry. Events, booths, associations, stages. Discomfort is the price.
- Start the podcast. It is the lowest-friction way to build relationships with the people who own the audience.
- Take yourself out of first calls. Someone qualifies, you present.
- Write the org chart and count how many boxes have your name in them. Then hire against it.
That is the model. It is not complicated and it is not new. Alex's edge was running it without arguing with it.
If you want help mapping this to your agency, with your niche, your numbers, and your team, that is exactly what we do inside the Seven Figure Agency coaching program.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Alex Danner's agency charge per client?
Programs run $2,000, $3,000, and $4,000 per month depending on tier. The base package includes website, SEO, and AI optimization. The next tier adds pay-per-click or Local Services Ads, and the top tier adds Facebook. Clients with multiple locations pay more.
Is fencing and decking a good niche for a marketing agency?
It worked for Alex for three reasons: he already had clients and results there, very few agencies were competing for the space, and fence and deck contractors share industry events, associations, and referral networks. The specific vertical matters less than those three conditions being true for you.
Can you pick two niches instead of one?
You can when the two verticals share the same audience, the same events, and refer work to each other, the way fencing and decking do or plumbing and HVAC do. What does not work is picking two unrelated industries and calling it a niche. That is just being a generalist with extra steps.
How did he grow with no sales background as an introvert?
He hired for what he was bad at and ran the uncomfortable plays anyway. Matilde handles inbound, qualification, and follow-up. He shows up for the strategy call presentation, the trade show booth, the stage, and the podcast. His own read is that a stronger salesperson would have grown faster but risked outrunning operations.
What is his client churn rate?
Under 3% consistently, and around 2% this year. He credits well-trained account managers, fast response times, real results, and running the business on EOS so quality does not slip as headcount grows.
How long did the generalist-to-niche transition take?
It was gradual over several years, with legacy clients slowly churning or being released while niche clients replaced them. Alex's own assessment is that he moved too slowly and would compress the timeline if he did it again.
