I’m 43 years old, been in sales and marketing for 20+ years. Started back when Yellow Pages was the thing.
I’ve built two marketing agencies before, both got to around $2M/year. Profit wasn’t crazy, maybe $100–300k, but we paid ourselves pretty aggressively (100–150k each), so margins could’ve been better if we wanted.
Both times I had partners. 3–4 of us. I handled sales and ran teams of 5–10 reps.
I’ve been out of the game for about 3 years. Now I’m back, but doing it a bit differently this time, leaning more into AI and systems.
Before, the model was super simple. We sold marketing to basically any SMB that would buy. Didn’t matter industry. High activity, always leads, always someone to call. It was more messy on the delivery side, not very scalable internally, but it worked.
This time I decided to do it differently. Got deeper into AI, automation, productizing and niching. Ended up focusing on contractors/trades here in Norway, partly because I actually did a carpentry apprenticeship as an adult, so I have some understanding of how that industry works.
What we’re building for them is more like a full traffic, leads/booking system with n8n, voiceflow and open ai. Landing pages, workflow automation in GHL, forms, booking, follow-up on email/SMS, etc. Basically traffic → landing page → qualify → book → follow-up. More structured and prodoctsize than what I used to do.
Right now we dont have a strong capital, so I’m doing everything outbound. Scraping Google, building lists, dumping it into our own CRM (made with claude code) and calling everybody. No paid acquisition yet.
I have alot of earlier experiance with inbound, funnels, leadmagnet etc, so I know that works, but we are not their yet.
Also, it’s just me at the moment. I’m doing sales, delivery, ops, everything. So a lot of context switching, which is probably my biggest bottleneck.
I’m trying to automate as much as possible and use AI to remove repetitive work, but it’s still early.
One thing that’s been hitting me is the actual market size. On paper there are like 60k construction/trade businesses in Norway, but a huge chunk are solo operators. One guy businesses, limited capacity, smaller budgets, not very system-driven.
So in reality the number of companies that are actually good clients is way smaller. Probably a few thousand, not tens of thousands.
I’ve been planning this for about 3 months and calling for about a month now, and honestly it just feels… slower than before.
Contractors are a different people. More skeptical, less digital, a lot of them project-based with lower LTV. And I’m selling something that’s more complex than just “we run ads for you”.
Part of me is wondering if I’ve overcomplicated the offer for this audience, or if I’ve niched down too hard in a relatively small market.
Before I could pretty much always close something because the net was so wide. Now it feels tighter, and harder to get momentum.
At the same time, marketing in general feels way more commoditized now. Everyone runs ads, everyone talks about funnels, AI lowered the barrier, clients don’t really see much difference.
To lower friction I’ve started offering a 30-day intro/test. Simple setup, basic funnel, some ads, minimal follow-up. Kind of like the old “test ads for 30 days” approach, then upsell. But even that is more work now than it used to be. I also tried to only "sell" a free demo/consultaion/booking, thats kind of work, but i dont feel its worth the time for one simple intro that cost 4-600$ for a test month.
So yeah… I guess I’m trying to figure out if this is just normal friction from repositioning, or if I’ve actually made it harder for myself than it needs to be.
Curious if anyone here has gone from broad agency → niche/systemized and hit the same wall.
Or if you’d just go back to a more general model in a market like this.
Would appreciate real input from guys that run an agency oor have som experiance with construction business.