Scalability School

The Zach Stuck returns to Scalability School for one of the most packed episodes to date. Coming off a massive run of activity: selling his agency, Homestead to Verndale, co-founding MarsMen and closing a $27.5M Series A with L Catterton (ofcourse lets not forget becoming a new dad, too).

Zach walks through what actually happened, what it took, and what he'd do differently.
The conversation covers three major arcs. First, the sale of Homestead: how it grew from Zach posting case studies on Twitter to an 85-person agency specializing in paid acquisition and email/SMS retention, why they decided to go to market when they did, and what the M&A process actually feels like when you're in the middle of it for the first time. Second, MarsMen: the origin story of the brand, the subscription-first bet that changed everything, and what it means to go from six figures a month to a nine-figure run rate by obsessing over every detail, from landing page, CRO tests, to cohort metrics. Third, the bigger picture: where agencies are headed as AI compresses margins, why surrounding yourself with people ahead of where you want to be is non-negotiable, and what it means to finally be doing the thing you always actually wanted to do.

Key Takeaways

What it actually feels like to sell your agency and what they never tell you before the deal closes 
Why media buying-only Agencies likely only have 18 months left to survive 
How Mars Men went from six figures to a $100M run rate in under 18 months (without raising a single dollar until it was already printing money) 
Knowing when the right time to raise money is for your brand (Hint: It's not when you need it the most)
The one thing most agency owners never do that would make their business 10x more sellable
Why Zach went from agency life to brand building and how it actually feels to be on the other side 
What happens when you hire for vibes and smarts over credentials 
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality , they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Host Brad flies solo to walk through exactly how his team structures Meta creative testing across eight figures a year in ad spend. The episode is a tactical follow-up to a previous episode with Phil, prompted by a viral Twitter thread Brad posted on the same topic.
The core philosophy: stop trying to outthink Meta's algorithm on budget allocation. Instead, run a single CBO campaign per product or offer, treat ad sets as simple folders (not audience segments), and let Meta decide where the money goes. Brad backs this up with real ad account screenshots, shows why a higher-spending campaign with a lower ROAS can actually be healthier than it looks, and closes out with answers to the most common follow-up questions he received from the community.
Key Takeaways
Why Meta's algorithm is smarter than you at deciding which of your ads deserves more budget and what that means for how you should structure your campaigns.
The single reason you need to stop creating more ad sets and start stacking all your ads in one.
Your top-spending ad set has a lower ROAS than the one barely getting any spend, does that mean you're burning money, or is Meta showing you something you're missing?
The truth behind what actually happens when you pull it into an ABO to force-test it.
How do you build a creative testing system that generates consistent weekly output without needing a huge production budget or team.
What "spend is a signal" actually means for your creatives and how you should decide when to turn an ad off (You might actually be turning them off too early)
Is splitting your account into a testing campaign and a scaling campaign helping you, or just adding complexity that slows down Meta's learning?
How new visitor percentage and frequency metrics should change the way you interpret your campaign's ROAS.
The actual risk of running ads to two completely different customer personas inside the same ad set on broad targeting.
How to tell when it's time to question your creative quality versus just staying patient with your launch cadence.
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality , they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

In this episode of Scalability School, Andrew Foxwell is joined by Sarah Levenger and special guest host Will Sartoris for a deep conversation on what separates average creative strategy from high-performing creative strategy in 2026.
The core theme is that winning creative is not just about producing more ads or testing more formats. It is about understanding people better. Sarah breaks down how the best creative strategists build repeatable systems for ideation, stay close to the customer experience, and work backward from business goals instead of defaulting to ad format first. From there, the episode gets tactical with a breakdown of behavioral-science principles like loss aversion, anchoring, framing effects, social proof, bandwagon effect, and System 1 vs. System 2 thinking.
The big takeaway is that most brands are still overusing urgency, surface-level psychology, and creative trend chasing. The better path is sharper positioning, better message framing, more respect for the customer, and creative diversity rooted in psychology, not just format.
Key takeaways
Are the best creative strategists winning because they make better ads, or because they build better systems for ideas?
Are you still choosing ad format first over business objective and customer type?
Have you already burned through your early adopters without realizing your message needs to evolve?
Are your ads accidentally disrespecting your potential customers?
Should your brand be using supportive or guilt-based messaging to convert?
Is plain old social proof losing power?
Does your internal team believe the same thing about the brand that your customers do?
Is AI helping your team think more clearly, or just helping you make more of the same content faster?
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality , they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To learn more about Sarah Levinger, you can follow her here: https://x.com/SarahLevinger
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Andrew Foxwell (Foxwell Founders / Scalability School) sits down with Andrew Faris (AJF Growth / The Andrew Faris Podcast) for a joint co-release episode to break down the findings from the Foxwell Founders x Motion 2026 State of Agencies Report. A data-rich survey of hundreds of agency owners and in-house operators across 30 countries. The conversation covers AI's dual role as the #1 growth opportunity and the #1 threat for agencies, why only 11% of agencies have produced clear top-performing AI-generated ad winners, the reality behind agency margins (42% running net margins above 30% while many founders still struggle), why in-housing is the #1 reason agencies lose clients — and why it usually backfires — and the uncomfortable truth that many agency founders grow for ego rather than strategy.
Along the way, Faris offers a sharp framework on how brands should think about paying their agencies, and Foxwell shares candid coaching insights on what separates agencies that thrive from those that stall out.
Key Takeaways:
Why 26% of agencies say AI-powered services are their biggest growth opportunity — yet privately admit they're terrified of it?
Is AI actually working for creatives or is just generating slop? (Only 11% of agencies have produced a clear top-performing AI-generated ad winner.)
42% of agencies report net margins above 30%. So why are so many agency founders telling Andrew Foxwell they're broke?
Is in-housing the worst move most brands make?
The gross margin range your agency should be sitting between.
Are agency founders growing because they have a strategy or because they want to sit at the big [kid] agency table?
 When the average tenure of an in-house growth director might only be ~18 months, is there a fundamental misalignment between founders and the people they hire?
If AI amplifies slop just as well as it amplifies great ideas, why do so many agencies think volume is the play?
Should more brands be firing their CRO agency and building more with Claude Code?
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To learn more about Andrew Faris, The Andrew Faris Podcast and AJF Growth you can follow him on
X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@andrewfarispodcast
Email: [email protected]
Work With AJF Growth: https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

In this episode of the Scalability School podcast, hosts Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Reza, co-founder of Motion, for a deep dive into how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way DTC creative teams operate. Reza shares his perspective on the widening gap between data-driven media buyers and creative producers, and why the most valuable professionals in the space are the ones who can bridge both worlds.
The conversation covers the evolution of the creative strategist role from simple brief-writing to a full-stack function that blends paid social performance analysis, creative concepting, and now AI-powered agent workflows. Reza introduces a powerful mental model: every knowledge worker should think of themselves as an allocator of AI tokens, and the goal is to push agents to work for longer and longer stretches autonomously.
The episode also explores practical use cases for AI agents in creative strategy, including analyzing thousands of agent conversations using swarms of AI workers, iterating on top-performing ads using existing footage, and how Motion's AI agent (Runneth) is processing and categorizing every ad creative to surface actionable insights. Reza drops a provocative prediction: in the near future, the only job left will be allocating AI tokens, and if you're not building that muscle now, you're falling behind.
Our new "After Hours" segment dives into hooks as the DNA of creative performance, why brand teams are increasingly disconnected from the direct response engine that actually drives revenue, and how creative strategists are becoming the real mini-CMOs of DTC companies. 
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
What if your only job is being an allocator of AI tokens?
Are you still thinking of AI as a chatbot instead of a workforce?
Is your creative strategist actually a mini-CMO?
Why hooks are the DNA of your entire creative system.
Is your brand team holding back your direct response engine?
What would you do if you had to spend $2,000 in AI credits this week?
Can two minutes of footage actually produce 50 unique ads?
 Is this the year under-hyped AI products of 2025 actually work?
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To learn more about Rezza and Motion you can follow him on https://x.com/rezakhadjavi, https://x.com/motionapp_ or head to https://motionapp.com/
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
 To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
 To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
 Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
 Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com