How Collin Built a $100K/Month Google Ads Agency — and Why He's Moving to Consulting

I got to sit down with Collin Schmelbeck, one of my Client Ascension students who runs a Google Ads agency primarily for e-commerce brands. When he joined, he was already doing around $50K/month. A few months later, he had his first six-figure month. What changed wasn't magic — it was one repositioning decision that most agency owners are too scared to make.

Here's what happened, and what you can take from it.

Stuck at 30K for a Year

For most of 2021, Collin was hovering around $30K/month. Solid, but stuck. He was still working at a Google Ads agency full-time while trying to grow his own book of clients. When he finally left that job and committed fully, things started to move. Consistency was the catalyst — not a new tactic, not a hack, just showing up and doing the work consistently over time.

By the time he joined Client Ascension, he was at $40–50K/month. But he was working 12-hour days and his team structure was creating a ceiling he couldn't break through.

The Problem Every Agency Owner Runs Into

Here's the pattern I see constantly: you do really great work for a client, you get them results, and then they say "we're going to take this in-house."

Collin was dealing with this. The question he brought me was: how do I make this stop?

My answer — you're the one enabling it. If a client is going to go hire someone and try to replicate your results, get in front of that. Sell them a consulting program and train the person they're about to hire. Now you're still in the ecosystem, still getting paid, and still the one they call when things don't work out.

And they will call. Collin had three or four clients leave in early-to-mid 2022. Within a quarter, most had come back. It actually doesn't work as simply as "just turn the ads back on." Google Ads is nuanced. That expertise has real value, and eventually they remember that.

The Consulting Repositioning

Collin launched his consulting offer after we talked through the in-house problem. He'd been thinking about it since March 2022 but kept putting it off. He finally pulled the trigger in August — and it drove his first six-figure month.

The structure is simple: instead of managing everything done-for-you, he sells a consulting program where he trains internal teams or works alongside in-house brand managers. Same expertise, different delivery model. And critically, it freed up his time.

Before this shift, he had three employees and was still buried in fulfillment. He was at a bottleneck and couldn't take on more clients without burning out. Now, with one full-time employee at $5K/month, Collin is down to about three to four hours of service delivery per day — and spending the rest of his time thinking about the business, building systems, and closing new consulting deals.

That's the point of hiring. Not to protect your margin. To buy back your thinking capacity.

Knowing Exactly Who You're Best For

This was one of the biggest unlocks for Collin. Within e-commerce, there's a very specific type of brand he gets exceptional results for — maybe a certain average order value, a certain LTV profile, specific niches. Once you identify that, selling stops feeling like selling. You just tell them what you can do, show them the proof, and let the conviction do the work.

He started looking back at his best clients — the ones who stayed a year or two — and asking: what did they all have in common? How do I find more of them? That kind of pattern recognition doesn't come from a course. It comes from experience. But you have to actually stop and look for it.

Once you find it, you can charge a lot more. Because you're not just running ads — you're delivering asymmetric returns for a very specific kind of business. That's worth $10K/month, not $2K.

Fundamentals Before Traffic

One thing I'll say about Collin — and about a lot of people who try to grow fast — is that it's tempting to chase volume before fixing the machine. I've seen people send 200 cold emails, get zero results, and blame outreach. Then I look at their funnel: no video on the page, no results displayed, and a response to a lead came eight days late.

You can't pump traffic into a broken system. Collin acknowledged that even at $40–50K/month, he hadn't set up a real CRM or worked through the foundational positioning. Going through the training and fixing that infrastructure is what allowed everything else to convert.

Hacks only work when the foundation is already solid.

Where He's Going Next

Collin's goal is to hit $2M in revenue, with 70–80% of it coming from consulting — not done-for-you. He wants fewer, higher-paying clients. Ten clients at $10K/month beats thirty clients at $3K/month in every way: margin, sanity, and leverage.

He's also building out YouTube and Twitter to support the consulting side. The content flywheel is the next layer. Once the offer is dialed and you know exactly who it's for, content just accelerates what's already working.

The path isn't complicated. It just requires you to actually walk it.