Everyone you have hired learned Facebook ads on someone else's budget. I learned it on mine.
The person running your Facebook ads right now probably watched a course, got some kind of certification, and started practicing on live client accounts. Your account. Your money. That is how this industry works. The agency hires someone young and cheap, gives them a playbook, and bills you $8K a month while they figure it out. I did not do it that way.
I spent over a decade in corporate America building sales floors before I ever ran a Facebook ad. Most notably for Ancestry.com, where I built their sales division from zero to 800 employees doing $150 million a year. Did it again for a coaching company, built them to 500 employees doing $75 million a year as their EVP of sales and operations. We did lead gen, sales and fulfillment for some of the biggest coaches in the world, including the biggest.
About 13 years ago, I started my own sales company, got some angel funding, and one of my first clients was running Facebook ads. He showed me what he was doing over a couple of Skype calls and that was it for me. I was all in. I sold my ownership back to the angels, locked myself in my home office for six months, lighting money on fire learning the Facebook ad platform.
I cracked the code running Facebook traffic to affiliate offers, which was against policy on the platform back then. I had to get creative with zip submits, pre-landers, and jump pages. Scaled my personal ad spend to north of $10,000 a day and ran affiliates for about six years. We sold everything, moved overseas with our six kids, lived the digital nomad life before that was even a term. Then Facebook banned my business manager and all 800 accounts. Took eight months to get it back.
Most agency owners learned Facebook ads from a course. I learned it by spending millions of my own cash for six years straight getting a PhD in how the Facebook ad platform actually works. A level most media buyers will never reach because they have never had to. If it did not work, we lost it all.
After affiliates slowed down, I scaled a drone store from zero to a quarter million dollars in 45 days and did just under two million in the first year. But I had this question in the back of my mind that would not go away. Was I actually good at this or was I just getting lucky?
So I joined a full-stack agency to find out. They were losing clients faster than they could onboard new ones. Their media buyers were young college freelancers who had never spent a dime of their own money on Facebook ads. They could not scale anything profitably and clients were walking out the door. They brought me on to stop the bleeding.
Within four months they fired all four media buyers and turned all 15 accounts over to me.
Not a single brand left during the transition. Not one. I scaled many of them massively. A few I could not scale and they eventually left, but I am confident nobody else could have scaled them either. That answered my question. It was not luck.
But then I watched something happen that I could not stomach. The agency owners checked out. I was on every client call. I was in every Slack channel answering messages as fast as they came in. I became the face of the agency while the owners disappeared into the background. They would sell the services and then vanish. We lost big clients because of it. And I realized I was watching the exact thing that drives people crazy about agencies, the bait-and-switch where the person who sold you is not the person doing the work, except I was living it from the inside.
About seven years ago I left and started working with a small number of brands directly. My longest client has been with me almost seven years. Next is five. Then four. People do not stay that long unless the person managing their ads actually gives a damn.