He Launches a New Agency Every 90 Days

He built and sold an 8-figure agency, "retired" at 40, then got bored after six months.

Now, Hampton member, John Ghiorso, is seeking his next challenge: creating a new agency every 90 days through his venture studio, VantaFive. While most agency founders spend years trying to bootstrap to $1M a year, John has systematized the entire process.

In our candid Hampton interview, John breaks down:

• How he discovered that agencies in completely different niches all solve the same core problems
• The AI tools and systems that let him compress years of agency growth into months
• His counter-intuitive "comet theory" for spotting massive agency opportunities
• The $100M SaaS opportunity he's shocked no one has built yet

From nearly losing $1M in a quarter to building an agency assembly line, John reveals how he's breaking the traditional agency model to build multiple seven-figure businesses simultaneously.

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Yeah, so I am John and I've started two companies.

My last company was called Orca Pacific and it was an Amazon and E-commerce agency. I built that, bootstrapped it over about 10 years, built it up to kind of one of the premier Amazon agencies globally. We had about 100 people... eight figure business. I sold it to a global marketing services firm in 2020. I stayed on for a couple years, did the earn out integration as the VP of commerce globally and then I retired. And I mean that literally. I left and intended on never working again.

That lasted about six months and then I started the company I own now which is a company called VantaFive - a venture studio that is starting multiple agencies (so marketing services firms). And it's kind of early days, but we've launched two and we're actively in the process of launching number three. And the goal now is to do one of those a quarter going forward.

How did you come up with the idea for VantaFive?

When I built Orca, I had to invent everything—client systems, go-to-market strategies etc.—through trial and error. Then I sold the company to a firm that had acquired 32 agencies in three years. Talking to those founders, I realized we were all reinventing the same things.

That was my big aha moment. Around that time, I connected with Garret Caudle (founder of Influent) who had been thinking about these same challenges. We realized agencies, regardless of their niche—SEO, no-code, social media—have more in common than not. There are plenty of wrong ways to do things and a few right ways, but the core operating model is basically the same. That insight led us to start VantaFive together.

Take us through the process of building and launching the first version of your product…

The first agency we built from scratch was Longbow. It’s an AI RevOps shop that helps companies unify their outbound marketing and sales processes to drive real pipeline growth. Before that, we launched Influent—but that one already existed, and I just helped scale it.

We started by building outbound processes inside Influent as an in-house service for our own sales. It worked so well that we realized there was a bigger opportunity to offer it as a service.

Next, we recruited a CEO. We hired a recruiter, ran a structured hiring process—pipeline, intro calls, interviews, reference checks—narrowed it down to two or three candidates, made a final decision, and brought them on. From there, I worked closely with them to quickly build out the website, pitch decks, and back-office systems.

We now have a platform that handles accounting, payroll, AR, and legal, so the CEO can focus on building V1 of delivery, driving growth, and signing initial clients before hiring the first full-time employee.

Each new agency scales faster. The third agency we’re launching now will use Longbow for go-to-market, compressing a process that usually takes months into 30 days. By the fourth and fifth, we’ll have even more resources to streamline the launch.

So you know, agencies have these cold start problems because they're bootstrapped businesses. Like the CEO can't really get out of the weeds of the business because he can't afford to deploy resources into getting more people and resources. But then the business doesn't really grow because he's too stuck in the weeds. For most agencies it takes a couple years of just grinding through this to get to like a million bucks in revenue and then you can kind of start to like get some real resources and scale from there.

My goal is to short circuit that and do that first two year grind in six months.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Yeah, I think agencies need multiple growth levers that are both scalable and capital efficient. I'll tell you how agencies typically do this and what they get wrong. When agencies are small or just launching—even up to five or six million a year—they primarily rely on referrals and their network. That’s not a bad thing. It’s absolutely where every agency should start. It’s capital efficient but not scalable.

For agencies looking to grow to seven or eight figures, LinkedIn is the go-to platform. X can be useful too, but 80% of the impact happens on LinkedIn. Founders, executives, and even other key employees leveraging personal brands can take time to build, but it's scalable. If you get 10,000 followers, you can get 20k, 50k, 100k—it’s effort-based, not pay-to-play.

The second key strategy is building outbound systems—simulating BDRs and SDRs through AI and automation. It’s not easy, but it’s capital efficient. Whether you send 5,000 cold emails or 50,000, five LinkedIn DMs or 500, the cost doesn’t scale linearly. Once the system is built, you can run more volume through it.

A third approach is building community around your industry. This is a longer-term play, similar to personal branding, but it creates a two-way conversation where you’re the facilitator. This can happen through newsletters, podcasts, Slack groups, Discord, in-person or virtual events. It’s fundamentally a branding exercise. It takes effort and some cost, but doubling results doesn’t mean doubling input. If done right, it’s both capital efficient and scalable.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

The first two agencies are already up and running—one is a full-service LinkedIn agency, and the second builds outbound systems that replicate human salespeople with AI and automation. The third will focus on TikTok Shop and social commerce. We’re also exploring ideas for the fourth and fifth.

I have a very specific worldview when it comes to agencies. Technology drives most of the change in the world. The change we see happening is driven by technological progress. That technological progress creates pretty rapid buyer behavior changes. Like everyone’s using TikTok today, no one used TikTok three years ago. Consumers and buyers adopt pretty quickly. But most of the businesses that serve those buyers and consumers don’t adopt as quickly. So that creates a gap in the market.

You have a gap and it lasts for two or three years. So there’s like a comet going through space and there’s this wake. It’s like market misalignment and its wake. And that market misalignment between supply and demand for domain-specific level of expertise is best addressed by an agency because companies can’t build out an internal team to do this fast enough. So they have to just go: "we got to figure this out like tomorrow, just go hire those guys. They’re the best in the world."

So we're still finalizing what the fourth and fifth agencies will be, but there are a few areas we're really interested in exploring. We’re interested in building communities. I’m interested in Reddit, I’m interested in Roblox. There’s a bunch of stuff swirling around both on B2B and consumer.

Did you ever have an “oh shit” moment where you thought it wouldn’t work?

I haven’t had one yet with this new venture, but I had several at my last agency.

We went through a massive growth period and overhired—three to four people a month. I was in my 20s, and we had no infrastructure, no HR team, no training. It got out of hand. We scaled from 30 to 70 people in a year. Luckily, we had variable revenue and some big wins that year, so revenue was much higher than projected. If it hadn’t been, we would have been in serious trouble.

I remember late one night looking at our (very hacky) financial projections, realizing we could lose a million dollars that quarter. It was that bad. But we got lucky—some clients turned out to be bigger than expected, new deals closed, and we immediately froze hiring. We never had to do layoffs, which I was really happy about, but luck played a big role.

The key lesson was that we were totally flying blind financially. Any mature company would have projected this months ahead. We didn’t. We had no budget, no real reporting, no pro formas—just seat-of-the-pants operations. After that, we built proper financial systems: reporting, budgeting, projections. Nothing groundbreaking, just the fundamentals we had ignored.

What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?

We use the standard stack—QuickBooks, Slack, Fireflies. But we also have a lot of custom GPT and Claude-based tools, plus a robust internal prompt library. Some are baked into custom AI models, while others are used as needed. AI is a big part of our workflow.

Clay is one I just throw out there as being like this kind of Swiss army knife. It's an outbound tool, but their goal is to become a tool that automates human communication in general. I think that's a really fascinating one for anyone in marketing to be playing with.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I’m a big reader. The two most practical books for starting a company are:

• Traction (Gino Wickman) – The bible for EOS, which I swear by.
• Who (Geoff Smart) – A system for hiring. In an agency, success depends on talent, so this is crucial.

Other books I love:

• Extreme Ownership (Jocko Willink) – A leadership mindset book from a Navy SEAL. Great read.
• The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss) – Still holds up, not for the “4 hours” idea, but for system-building and leverage.
• Getting Naked (Patrick Lencioni) – A fantastic book on client service. Funny title, great insights.
• Linchpin (Seth Godin) – An older book, but still highly relevant for agency service mindset.

Where do you see untapped opportunity in the market? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?

A SaaS product that generates UGC content for products using AI avatars. It’s a billion-dollar opportunity. Some companies are trying, but they’re all stuck in the uncanny valley. Maybe it’s a technical limitation that will improve over time, but no one has nailed it yet.

A similar concept: AI-driven product photography. Imagine feeding in a 3D model of a speaker and generating high-quality, realistic images—next to a waterfall, in a living room, etc. Generative AI should be able to do this at scale, but no one has perfected it.

Another idea: AI-generated Loom videos. Right now, cold outreach still requires a human recording a Loom. But what if you could type a script, and AI would generate a personalized video using your likeness? The script is easy—ChatGPT can write that. The analysis is easy. But the human still has to sit there and record. That’s outdated. A tool that automates this could be a $100M SaaS product.

Where can we go to learn more?

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnghiorso/
• VantaFive website: https://www.vantafive.com/