He Built 180+ Retainer Clients Charging Half What Everyone Else Charges

Where He Started

Billy Sticker’s background was sales and marketing in the precious metals business, selling silver, gold, and rare coins. He was doing well but wasn’t happy. A local chiropractor with multiple offices was looking for someone to run his marketing. Billy had no college degree, but he wrote an eleven-page marketing plan and handed it over with his resume. The chiropractor interviewed eight to ten people and kept coming back to him. “You’re the only one that doesn’t have a college degree, but this is really good,” he told Billy. “I could use this marketing plan and implement this stuff and grow my practice without you. What could I do if you were here?”

Billy took the job, fell in love with the chiropractic profession, and in 2007 or 2008 started the very first podcast for chiropractors, called Chiropractic Marketing University. “I only did six to ten episodes. It was horrible,” he said. He shelved it. In 2014 or 2015 he relaunched and rebranded it as ChiroCandy, still just a podcast at first, built around interviews and helping chiropractors write books.

The turn toward an actual agency came from a client he’d written a book for. That client had tried Facebook ads himself, had his account shut down, and asked Billy if he’d ever run ads for a chiropractor. Billy hadn’t, but said he’d give it a shot and didn’t charge for it. The first month produced “fifty something leads,” with case fees in that practice running $3,000 to $6,000. The client, an influencer in the profession, started referring people. That first free campaign is the whole reason ChiroCandy exists.

Building to 180-Plus Accounts

Five years after that first campaign, ChiroCandy was running Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads for more than 180 chiropractic offices. The pricing is deliberately underpriced relative to the market: a $1,500 setup fee, then $595 a month for Facebook and Instagram, with Google added for another $250. “We are a fraction of what everybody else is charging, but it works,” Billy said. He believes the low monthly fee is also why ChiroCandy didn’t lose many accounts during the COVID-19 shutdowns in spring 2020: “If you’re spending $1,500 to $2,000 a month for an agency, you’re more likely to say, right now we gotta stop that. But if it’s just $595… let’s keep that going.”

ChiroCandy also runs a referral mechanic borrowed from a network marketing company: if a client refers three other clients who stay active, that client’s Facebook management becomes free for as long as all three referrals stay active. Billy estimated only about three of their clients actually qualify for it at any given time, because referral counts cluster unevenly, but the clients who do refer tend to refer heavily.

Most new business now comes from a mix of referrals, retargeting ads built on a warm database, some inbound from the podcast, and speaking engagements at chiropractic colleges and conferences in the U.S. and overseas. Billy is candid that new agencies shouldn’t try to copy the niche: “If you’re starting off right now, I just think there are other niches that aren’t as crowded. It’s not a blue ocean.”

The Systems That Let Him Step Away

Billy no longer manages any client accounts or takes sales calls himself. Two designated salespeople take calls, using a pre-call video that covers ChiroCandy’s pitch before the prospect ever gets on the phone, so the call itself is mostly answering questions and taking a credit card. Staff are paid $100 per account they manage rather than a flat salary, which let ChiroCandy scale without a fixed payroll ceiling, though Billy admits they had to correct course once: paying people to manage a target number of accounts meant that as clients churned, staff ended up under-loaded while ChiroCandy kept hiring replacements, inflating payroll. They changed the model once they caught it.

Staff who bring in a referral from one of their own accounts can take that sales call themselves and earn a $300 commission plus an extra $100 a month if it closes. New clients and their in-office staff go through mandatory Teachable training on how to follow up with leads, because, as Billy put it, “nobody’s going to Facebook looking for a chiropractor.” Teachable’s completion tracking let ChiroCandy notice that most clients who canceled early had never finished the onboarding training, so they added an incentive: doctors and their staff get a branded “Who’s Your Chiropractor” T-shirt, costing $8 to $10, once they complete it. “We will spend 20 bucks if that means we’re gonna keep a client much longer. It’s a no-brainer,” Billy said.

Billy’s 22-year-old son Brady now runs the staff instead of managing accounts. Every staff member has a mandatory weekly one-on-one Zoom call with Brady to review what’s working and what isn’t. Billy credits a delegation exercise from a CEO conference for the shift: write down the tasks you hate but do well anyway (red), tasks you’re fine doing but don’t love (yellow), and tasks that light you up (green), then stop doing red, delegate yellow, and only keep green. “When you’re focused on your core competency, what you love doing, that fuels momentum,” Billy said the exercise taught him. It’s also why ChiroCandy refers out anyone who wants a website built: Billy never liked doing them.

Where It Stands Now

ChiroCandy runs at roughly $120,000 to $130,000 a month in revenue, is billing clients on close to a daily basis, and gains 20 or more new accounts most months against seven to ten lost to churn. The agency has won ClickFunnels’ Two Comma Club award for both a course funnel and a book funnel, and at the time of the interview had just launched a new book-and-course funnel: a free-plus-shipping book with a $27 audiobook order bump, a $97 add-on course, and a $997 upsell to the full Chiropractic Marketing University course. The very first person through that new funnel bought the full $997 upsell, though the launch wasn’t clean. A customer flagged a glitch in the funnel within hours of it going live, and Billy’s team shut the ads off immediately to fix it before scaling back up.

Billy still credits the very first free campaign for an influential client, thirteen years in the chiropractic profession, and a team built mostly from people he knows through church, as the reasons ChiroCandy could charge less than half the going rate and still keep growing.