He Built the World’s Largest Google Ads Agency Without Ever Running One Campaign

Where He Started

Kasim Aslam wanted to be an actor. He started a small web design agency on the side because film sets involve a lot of waiting around, and he needed something to do between takes. The acting never took off. The business did.

Solutions 8 began as what he calls a full-funnel agency, doing “everything to everybody.” Video production, web design, app creation, software development, marketing, PPC, SEO, “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” in his words. It had eight core service lines, which is where the name came from. As he started niching down the service lines, the agency started making more money.

The Bridge Builder Who Never Ran a Campaign

Here’s the part of the story that surprises people. Solutions 8 became, in the words of Kasim’s own M&A advisor, likely the largest Google Ads agency at the time it sold. And Kasim has never run a Google Ads campaign himself.

For the first three years the agency was Google Ads-focused, it outsourced the actual work to another agency. That freed Kasim to build the business instead of doing the work inside it. When Solutions 8 eventually brought the work in-house, margins exploded. By the time he sold, he was running 40 percent margins in an industry that targets 15 percent.

He calls himself “the dumbest guy in the room” on purpose. He’d sit with his strategists and ask them to explain what was working and what wasn’t like he was a toddler, then he’d re-explain it to clients and prospects in plain language. That habit of translating expert work into something a non-expert could understand became the foundation of the agency’s entire content engine.

Niching Down, Then Broadening Back Out

Kasim describes his approach as an hourglass: start broad on industry focus, narrow the service lines until you’re genuinely excellent at one thing, then let the niche pull you back into a broader set of services once you understand exactly what that niche needs.

Not every niche worked. He tried to build a practice around dental implants after seeing a client spend $2,000 a month and generate $200,000 in gross revenue. He couldn’t get in front of the dentists. Other agencies already had that market locked down. He tried stonemasons for the same reason, decent client economics, wide open competitive field, and ran into the same wall: those businesses were hard to work with and inefficient as clients.

What did work: a real estate investment ad campaign that became, in his words, the highest performing in the industry for seven years. He spun that off as a standalone business, and it became his first exit. He also built a Montessori school marketing agency mostly because he personally loves Montessori education. That business now nets close to $400,000 a year, with about 15 minutes a week of his time.

The YouTube Engine

Solutions 8’s growth engine was YouTube, both organic and paid, and Kasim is blunt that most agency owners would have quit the channel early because the attribution doesn’t show up in 30-day windows.

The rules he learned, mostly from YouTuber Evan Carmichael, were specific: shoot a video every business day for 180 days straight before expecting the algorithm to reward you, keep videos over 10 minutes, hold 70 percent retention through the 60-second mark, obsess over the thumbnail and title before shooting anything, and always point the call to action at another YouTube video, never off-platform.

The channel reached roughly 30,000 subscribers by the time of the sale, and Kasim says the vast majority of clients who weren’t referrals came from it. He’s candid that this only works on a long timeline: “think in quarters, preferably longer.”

Building a Team Around Peak Performers, Not Cogs

Kasim’s hiring philosophy is built on the Pareto principle, the idea that a small slice of any team produces most of the results. At Solutions 8, one employee, John Moran, was managing 40 percent of total revenue and eventually became a business partner.

Rather than treating employees as interchangeable, he built a hiring process designed to find and pay for outsized talent internationally, paying meaningfully more than the local high water mark rather than trying to pay less and get more. One Google Ads specialist he hired from India, for example, was paid several times the going local rate for that role because of the work he produced, not out of charity. That approach to hiring is the seed of Pareto Talent, the recruiting company Kasim now co-runs.

The Exit

Solutions 8 sold in October 2022 to a SoftBank-backed martech company Kasim describes as carrying a $1.4 billion valuation. At the time, the agency had 80 employees, 200 clients, roughly $100 million in ad spend under management, and just under $6 million in gross revenue.

Kasim describes it as a low eight-figure exit, built on two years of demonstrated 40 percent margins and EBITDA he says was approaching, and he believes ultimately exceeded, $2 million. He points to three practical decisions that made the deal possible: keeping every client contract transferable so the sale didn’t require re-signing 200 relationships, getting GAAP-compliant books in order well before a buyer ever looked at them, and hiring an M&A advisor instead of a business broker.

He also names the honest tradeoff behind the number. An M&A contact told him that if he’d grown EBIT to $5 million, a 13X multiple could have put the exit near $65 million instead of the low eight figures he actually took. He says he doesn’t regret it.

That drop from 200 clients to 130 happened under the new ownership, after Kasim was no longer running day-to-day fulfillment. He points to it as the reason he’s glad he took the check when he did rather than holding out for a bigger multiple later.

Where He Is Now

Kasim has since built and sold additional businesses, describes himself as having had three exits total, and now co-runs Pareto Talent, an international recruiting company built on the same hiring philosophy that helped Solutions 8 hit 40 percent margins. He also co-founded Driven Mastermind, a paid community for agency and business owners, and publishes his hiring frameworks for free through his newsletter at kasim.me.

His closing advice to agency owners is the same lesson that ran through the whole conversation: know your number, the amount that makes you financially free, and don’t romanticize holding out past it, because the market can change faster than any agency model can adapt.