How I Built a 7-Figure Email Marketing Agency While Still in School

Hey it’s Max from The Inbox Newsletter.

A bit of a different newsletter today.

I just took my college graduation pictures yesterday (I graduate college in 3 weeks).

So I’ve been reflecting and wanted to share some of the wins I’ve had in business over the last couple years.

I want to talk about How I Built a 7-Figure Email Marketing Agency While Still in School

Balancing 6 college classes, friend drama, finals, and a team of 50+ employees is not for the faint of heart.

I started Well Copy as a side hustle in a dorm room — and now it’s a 7-figure agency generating over $100M in client revenue.

Here are 7 of the biggest lessons that helped me grow my agency while still being a full-time student:

1. Win the first 3 hours of your day.
Nothing moves the business forward more than protecting my mornings. Before I check Slack, email, or respond to anyone, I spend the first three hours doing high-leverage work. UNDISTRACTED. For me, that’s usually content or strategy that brings in new clients. Most people waste their best mental energy reacting to noise — and that kills momentum. I guard that time like my business depends on it. Because it does.

2. Block your calendar or fall behind.
You can’t do real work in scattered one-hour gaps between calls. You can’t switch between tasks every 30 minutes and expect to move the needle. I learned to stack my meetings back-to-back and leave large blocks of uninterrupted time for deep work. This changed everything. We all have the same 24 hours in the day… You don’t need more hours, you need fewer interruptions.

3. Trust your team, or you’ll always be stuck.
The moment I started trusting my team, things started running without me. When you let go, people step up. They take ownership, make better decisions, and you stop being the bottleneck. Could I do 10% of what someone else does “better” in my eyes? Sure. But that mindset will keep you small forever. Empowering your team is what actually scales a business.

4. In email marketing, focus on the big levers.
Most brands overcomplicate email. We don’t. We focus on pop-ups, core flows, and sending 2–4 campaigns per week. That’s it. If you can do those three things well, consistently, you’ll outperform 95% of ecommerce brands. Forget the fluff — master the fundamentals. This has allowed us to stay focused while also generating killer results for our clients.

5. Always be hiring.
Even when we’re “not hiring,” I’m hiring. There’s always room for A-players. Some of our best team members came from random DMs or referrals we didn’t plan for. When someone exceptional comes along, we find a way to bring them in. Talent creates opportunity.

6. Always be laughing
We run a tight ship, but we laugh a lot. Our Slack is full of memes, inside jokes, and friendly roasting. That energy makes work fun — and when people enjoy working together, they do better work. The culture we’ve built is one of the things I’m most proud of. We get results, but we also genuinely enjoy the ride. A lot of our team members come from other agencies and they say working there vs here is night and day. At other agencies, they show up to their computer, grind all day, and barely crack a smile. With us, it’s the opposite.

7. Stay humble.
It’s easy to let success go to your head, especially when you’re doing something somewhat unique while a lot of people around you are still trying to figure out what they want to do with their future. I’ve had to remind myself constantly: in the grand scheme, I’m still a nobody. There’s always someone better, smarter, further along. I try to find those people, spend time with them, and let their presence remind me how far I have to go. That humility keeps me sharp and always pushing rather than getting comfortable.

There’s more I’ve learned, but these are the lessons that changed how I operate — and helped me build something real while still (sometimes) showing up to college classes.

Hope you had fun reading that.

Cheers,

Max

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