I ran an Amazon ads agency for years.
By George Barnett Reid 👀 · September 25, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I ran an Amazon ads agency for years.
Then US tariffs took $18k of MRR off us in 8 days.
Clients didn't leave because we were bad. They left because their margins got f*cked and we were the line item they could cut.
Eight days. That was it.
Then a $50M brand booked a call.
I had two options:
> Pitch the retainer. $6k a month. Part-time attention.
> Or hand them the exact same person, full time, for $3.2k.
I told them the truth about how agencies actually work. That we were permanently stuck choosing between putting more hours into an account, and protecting our own margin.
They took the full-time person.
18 months on, they've still got them.
So I talked myself out of a $6k retainer, in the worst month we'd ever had.
And accidentally found the business I actually wanted to run.