When Growth Becomes the Enemy: The Real Story

Most people know me from Experts Agency and generating $250M+ in client results through media buying. But here's what that journey actually taught me: the best marketing eventually hit the same ceiling. You can only optimize campaigns so far before operational constraints become the real bottleneck.

I discovered this pattern after spending years in the marketing world. First building a technical agency that set up CRMs, autoresponders, automations, and landing pages for businesses. Then joining Keala Kanae as the first hire to build a business from $0 to over $60 million in four years.

But my foundation wasn't in marketing at all. It started in high school with programming. They gave us a book with everything we'd build for the semester. Five months of curriculum. I finished it in three weeks. Second semester was even faster. That led to me working in the back of the room with the teacher on more advanced projects together. It was the only class I ever got a perfect A in. Not because I was particularly gifted, but because I learned to think in systems and patterns.

That systematic thinking would become the thread connecting everything that followed.

The First Warning Signs

When I joined Keala's company, we were essentially starting from scratch. No technology foundation, no landing pages, no fulfillment systems. Within six months, we went from $0 to over a million dollars a month.

As we scaled, I was thrust into every role imaginable. For a long time, it was just Keala and me working side by side in his office until 4am every single night. Together we built the tech foundation, the landing pages, the marketing systems, and fulfillment infrastructure.

This naturally morphed into me handling operations, running marketing execution (assembling the pieces, not crafting strategy), even shooting courses. As I "moved" between departments, I still had my hands in everything. I became what I now recognize as a dangerous bottleneck: the person trying to hold all the technology together, the liaison between the owner's vision and actual implementation.

The pattern was clear even then. We could drive all the traffic in the world, create the best offers, optimize every campaign. But when operations couldn't handle the volume, we just created expensive lessons. Leads would pile up. Internal costs would balloon. It became confusing how we were generating so much revenue but somehow that didn't translate into profit.

The Victory Before the Fall

My transition to media buying wasn't planned. When I was running marketing, I heard Nick Shackelford speak at an event about his approach. Something clicked. Not the creative or strategy side, but the technical aspect of understanding algorithms at a fundamental level.

This brought me right back to my programming foundation. While everyone else was following case studies and copying tactics, I was reverse engineering why things worked. Dissecting how algorithms learned, how signals function, getting into the head of the machine.

When I transitioned to media buying internally, every "best" agency we'd hired hadn't been able to turn us profitable. I decided to start with no data, nothing to work from, because I understood that using bad data would just train the algorithm wrong. But I also knew how to manipulate fresh data to train the algorithm correctly. What happened? We went from $0 in spend to over $10k per day in less than a month with a 3x lower CPA.

I wasn't just media buying. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was decoding the algorithm to identify levers based on theories I'd crafted from reverse engineering those case studies. Not taking them at face value, but understanding what happened before, after, and why the algorithm would react that way.

These were case studies from high-volume, low-margin businesses. Nothing like the information industry we were in. Things don't translate from longer data and buying cycles. I had to find a way to not only emulate those patterns but also create drastically more data points for our funnel structure.

Was that because I was a "marketer"? No, quite the opposite. I wasn't buying media. I was learning the legos, the foundations, crafting and refining theories based on algorithms, not human emotion.

Winning the Battle, Losing the War

Here's what happens when you dial in marketing: You generate more leads than operations can handle. You bring in more clients than fulfillment can serve. You create more opportunities than your systems can process.

After running my own 7-figure agency for years, I watched this same pattern everywhere. We'd achieve the client's goals - lower CPA, scaled ad spend, quality traffic. But then they'd hit operational walls we couldn't fix with better ads. Sales closing rates would drop. Churn would spike. Key players would leave. In almost every situation, they were worse off than when they started.

Then the platforms shifted the game entirely. They removed the technical levers, assuming their algorithms no longer needed manual optimization. The new leverage moved to creative - copy, video, images.

The agency adapted brilliantly. The team evolved with the platforms, mastering creative strategy and emotional triggers. They became exceptional at what the market now demanded. But that systematic, technical thinking that drove our early success? It had no home in this new creative-first landscape.

That's when the realization hit: The constraint wasn't in the marketing anymore.

The Answer Hidden in 1,305 Files

An accident that nearly killed me became the catalyst for finding where the real constraints lived. If they weren't in marketing, where were they?

So I went deep into AI and automation. Not the surface-level "use this tool" content everyone teaches, but the foundational understanding of how these systems actually think and operate. Breaking down all the tools and tech into lego blocks that could be reassembled in countless ways.

Initially, I started with things needed for the agency. That soon shifted and expanded far outside of the knowledge that could be contained in one agency. At that point, I was finding problems that didn't exist so I could solve them. Just the way my brain works, I love solving problems. But we already had the foundation to triple in size from where we were currently.

Then over 1,305 files in Notion later: research, ideation, experiments, frameworks - patterns emerged. The same operational breakdowns appeared everywhere. Different industries, different sizes, same fundamental constraints. All of the dots connected on what our clients were actually experiencing.

The gap was clear: Vendors solve surface problems because they've never felt the operational pain beneath them. Business owners can't articulate their real constraints because no one's ever shown them what's possible.

That's when I knew the market demanded something different. The marketing was covered, but not the operational glue that holds it all together. That's what led to Operion - the bridge between understanding constraints and knowing what's technically possible.

Most AI and automation vendors have never owned a business. So when you hire them, you get technically perfect solutions that miss the point entirely. They'll deliver exactly what you asked for, then wonder why you're not seeing results.

Where Marketing Success Goes to Die

The 1,305 files revealed something no one was talking about. While vendors were building features and businesses were buying solutions, the real constraints remained untouched. They lived in the space between departments, in the invisible handoffs, in the knowledge gaps nobody documented.

Looking at businesses generating $3M to $25M, the same three constraints appeared everywhere:

The operational process breakdown - where handoffs between departments create delays, everything takes longer than it should, and teams are constantly firefighting.

The founder bottleneck - where the owner gets dragged into every "urgent" approval, trading strategic planning for daily firefighting.

The tribal knowledge trap - where your best people hold the reasoning behind decisions in their heads, SOPs can't anticipate real-world variations, and new hires learn tasks but never the thinking. This creates a manager's paradox that compounds with growth.

These patterns were universal. Different industries, different business models, same fundamental breaks. And here's what made it worse: these weren't marketing problems that better campaigns could solve. They were operational constraints that turned marketing success into operational chaos.

The more effective your marketing, the faster these constraints would destroy your business.

What This Means for Your Business

Every business has hidden constraints creating invisible ceilings. You can add more people, more tools, more budget to marketing. But until you identify and remove the operational constraint, you're just creating pressure in a system that can't handle it.

Right now, one of those three patterns is creating dozens of visible problems in your business. Remove it, and you'll trigger a cascade of improvements throughout your entire operation.

Our Method for Building Permanent Solutions →

Note: This journey from marketing mastery to operational architecture didn't happen in isolation. Experts Agency continues to drive sophisticated growth for clients while Operion removes the operational walls that limit that growth. Learn why this dual approach multiplies results →