Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies · Jason Swenk

How to Raise Your Agency Prices From $2,500 to $45,000/Month (Without Changing Deliverables) With Eli Rubel | Ep #885

·30 min·2 clips

MatterMade went from $4.2 million in EBITDA to losing $200,000 a month after the tech crash.

Eli shows up as a founder who has already had to let go of a few neat stories. He talks about leaving the venture-backed SaaS path, launching MatterMade in early 2019, and thinking he was heading toward the big exit narrative before agency life gave him a different kind of pressure. That pressure did not stay abstract for long. By 2021, MatterMade was serving the tech sector in a market that made a lot of agency owners feel bulletproof, but the 2022 pullback turned that same base into a liability when portfolio companies cut support and started slashing spend. The drop came fast. Eli says the business went from peaking to losing about $200,000 a month almost overnight, and Jason lets him sit in that reality instead of rushing past it. He does not smooth it over. The problem was not only the revenue decline, but the instinct to treat the downturn as temporary and keep people on payroll longer than the client base could support. That delay hurt. Once the cuts happened, the lesson was blunt and uncomfortable: right size for the business you actually have, not the one you hope comes back next quarter. That is where the episode gets useful. Eli talks about looking at two rockstar designers and realizing there was not enough work to justify their roles, which is a clean example of how founder emotion can outrun operational math. Agency math wins. Jason keeps pressing on the bigger move, asking why someone would split or move upmarket instead of just chasing scale through consolidation, and Eli frames the answer as a pricing and positioning choice rather than a service expansion. The point is not that the work became magical. It is that the market pays differently when the agency is framed differently. He also points out how crowded the agency help space looks from the inside, with a lot of people selling support to the same owners. That makes clear positioning and differentiation matter more than polished branding. Nobody gets extra credit for sounding generic. The tone stays practical and a little rough edged, which fits a show built for agency owners who want tradeoffs instead of slogans. There is a bit of sponsor chatter up front. After that, the interview settles into a hard nosed discussion about pricing, client concentration, layoffs, and what it takes to rebuild an agency around a healthier market and a stronger price point.

As heard by us

A clear look at how an agency owner adjusts after a market shock forces a new pricing strategy.

This episode tracks Eli Rubel from launching MatterMade in 2019 through the rough 2022 tech market collapse and the move upmarket that followed.

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Why you'd press play

You want to raise prices after a market shock.

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