He Turned His Father’s Bankruptcy Into a $20M Agency for Lawyers

Where He Started

Bill’s father ran a paving business worth two million dollars. When the 2008 recession hit, it went completely under. Bill watched his dad turn to alcohol, and he has a video of his father with a gun to his head, on the verge of ending his own life. It is, by his own account, one of the most painful things that has ever happened to him. It is also the reason SMB Team exists in its current form.

Looking back at what went wrong, Bill identified three specific failures: his dad had not chosen a recession-proof niche, he had no brand and depended entirely on direct lead generation like Yellow Pages ads, and he had never learned to build a team, so the business lived and died with his own personal output. Bill decided to do the opposite of all three. Before he had sold a single client, he wrote a ten-year revenue plan in an Excel spreadsheet, because, in his words, he had so much pain wrapped up in what happened that he needed a plan to hold himself to.

Choosing a Recession-Proof Niche

Bill did not pick lawyers because he liked lawyers. He researched IBISWorld data and found that legal services, along with roughly 20 to 25 other service verticals, were not tied to GDP swings. If someone gets in a car accident, they need a lawyer regardless of what the economy is doing, the same way an HVAC unit failing in July does not wait for a recession to end. He also screened for average profit per client, not gross revenue, reasoning that a low-margin business, however large its projects, will cancel a marketing contract the moment cash gets tight. Legal services cleared both bars, and lined up with the competencies SMB Team already had in local SEO and PPC.

From PPC Vendor to Full-Service Partner

Following the standard advice to pick one niche and one service, Bill took SMB Team to $1.5 million in year two running only PPC for attorneys. Retention was the problem. Clients were not sticking even when the campaigns produced results. Research and a hired consultant pointed to the same finding: the highest-retention agencies were not selling services a la carte. SMB Team added website design, SEO and Facebook ads alongside the PPC, and retention rose immediately, because the attorney no longer viewed the agency as one vendor among many, but as a single full-service partner.

SMB Team later layered an eight-million-dollar coaching arm on top of the marketing, teaching attorneys how to actually convert and scale from the leads they were sent. It is the offer Bill now calls blue ocean, because, in his words, no other company in the industry sells full-stack marketing and coaching together.

How COVID Rewired the Sales Model

SMB Team’s original growth engine was Google Ads spend, roughly $10,000 to $18,000 a month, feeding an in-house sales team. That model broke when Bill’s top salesperson quit and the business slid backward. Then COVID hit. Bill had already committed to his team, in writing, to grow from $1.5 million to $4.5 million that year. Rather than scrap the plan, he taught himself webinars from scratch and built one around lawyers navigating PPP loans.

His fourth webinar ever drew 3,777 lawyers to register, at a cost per registrant of about negative twenty cents. That list became a weekly “talk show,” deliberately not called a podcast because his older attorney audience responded better to that framing, where Bill later interviewed Magic Johnson, Kevin O’Leary, Daymond John, James Clear and Verne Harnish, among others.

Selling From the Stage

The talk show format evolved into quarterly virtual “summits.” At the most recent one, featuring Magic Johnson and Kevin O’Leary, roughly 980 lawyers registered, and SMB Team now reports bringing in about two million dollars in ARR per event. Contract length and price climbed with every event: three-month commitments became six, then twelve, and the monthly price rose from two thousand dollars to the current $6,497 a month, a roughly $78,000 annual offer sold live from the stage.

It has not always worked. Bill is candid that one event, run without any risk reversal in the offer, cost SMB Team roughly $250,000 in speaker fees and production and produced a single sale.

The 14-Day Guarantee That Fixed It

The fix was a structured guarantee, never called a trial. Attendees leave a $2,000 deposit at the event, then have 14 days to submit a one-page vision for their firm, attend an onboarding call and complete two weeks of coaching sessions. If they do all three and still are not satisfied, they get the deposit back. Bill says the stick rate on that guarantee runs north of 90 percent, on the condition that the first fourteen days of the client experience is tightly managed.

Retention Built on the Numbers, Not the Vibe

Bill treats net promoter score as the account of record for whether the agency is actually working. SMB Team’s first survey, sent through a randomized tool rather than to hand-picked happy clients, came back around 15, which he describes as trash. Rather than dismiss the complaints, the team rebuilt its onboarding around an “expectations agreement,” a checklist clients must work through line by line acknowledging exactly what will be frustrating and why, an idea Bill credits to two calls with Joey Coleman, author of Never Lose a Customer Again.

The same discipline got applied internally. SMB Team’s employee net promoter score was initially just as rough, and the diagnosis was a hiring problem more than a culture problem: the people who thrive in a two-person startup often cannot tolerate the accountability, deadlines and quarterly goals of a fifty-person company. Almost all of the company’s first ten employees have since moved on. After rebuilding recruiting around a shared four-page vision document, Bill says employee NPS has held in the 80 to 90 range for two years.

Where He Is Now

SMB Team is billing close to $1.5 million a month, a run rate coming up on $20 million ARR, four and a half years after Bill wrote that first spreadsheet. The agency employs 50 full-time W2 staff, holds a company net promoter score of 75, and keeps client renewal above 90 percent. Bill’s closing advice to agency owners chasing the next level is to stop chasing freedom directly and instead focus on the impact on clients, team and industry, on the theory that the freedom and profit follow rather than lead.