In this power-packed episode, marketing expert and author Corey Quinn reveals the proven strategy that helped scale Scorpion from $20 million to over $150 million in revenue. Quinn shares his deep specialization methodology - a trademarked approach that transforms generalist professional services firms into industry-dominant specialists.
Through compelling stories including a Tesla giveaway that generated 100+ franchise clients, Quinn demonstrates why saying "no" to everyone and "yes" to one vertical market creates the ultimate competitive advantage.
This episode is essential for agency owners, consultants, and professional services leaders stuck in the generalist trap and ready to break through to exponential growth.
What You'll Learn:
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Corey Quinn | Marketing Expert, Author & Business Growth Strategist at Corey Quinn, Inc. Corey Quinn helps agency founders escape founder-led sales, and scale fast. With over 18 years in the agency space, Corey served as CMO at Scorpion, where he helped scale the company’s revenue from $20M to $150M in just six years. He’s the author of the bestselling book Anyone, Not Everyone: A Proven System for Agencies to Escape Founder-Led Sales, endorsed by leaders like Aaron Ross, John Ruhlin, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and Marcel Petitpas. Today, Corey’s company guides digital agencies to dominate their niche using his Deep Specialization™ Methodology, helping them become the go-to choice in their vertical, close higher-value clients, and build a scalable sales system that doesn’t depend on the founder. |
Brendon Dennewill: Corey Quinn, thanks so much for being with me today on the podcast.
Corey Quinn: Brendon, I am super excited to be here.
Brendon Dennewill: One of the reasons I do this podcast is a selfish one: I believe that one of the best ways to learn is to teach. By inviting really smart people like you, who are experts in their space, I'm learning while having a conversation, and I hope the folks listening are learning too.
Ultimately, you are a marketing expert. You understand marketing better than most people on this planet. But even you, knowing that, had to specialize, which is kind of ironic because one of the things you're known for, and have trademarked, is deep specialization. You have a methodology built around it.
A lot of our clients are professional services businesses, and I know you have a lot of experience working with them. The most famous statistic our audience likely knows about you is the success you had at Scorpion, scaling a professional services firm from around $20 million in revenue to $150 million and beyond. Anyone who's been part of that kind of journey knows things they can share with folks who haven't yet achieved it.
You're also the author of Anyone, Not Everyone, which is all about your core passion around specialization and knowing when to say no. With that background, tell us quickly: how did you get from where you were before joining Scorpion to where you are now?
Corey Quinn: I have about 30 years of professional experience. About ten years in, I was an entrepreneur, and then I decided to go back and get my MBA from USC here in Los Angeles. When I graduated, all my classmates were going into commercial real estate. That was the cool place to go, but I decided to go back into the internet. My first startup was in that space.
I got a job at a digital agency called The Search Agency, and my role was business development manager, which effectively meant I was a salesperson. My job was to sell high-end PPC and SEO services to large retail brands. I was able to close deals with Lululemon, Hyundai, RE/MAX, and Men's Wearhouse, among others.
It turned out I actually love marketing and the sales process. I was the number one sales rep on the team for 19 consecutive quarters, then moved into sales management. Most recently, I was recruited by Scorpion to help out this amazing little agency that, as you mentioned, was at $20 million when I joined. By many people's definition, that's a successful company. However, it was run by a very ambitious founder and CEO who felt we had a wonderful product, great clients, and amazing impact, and he was driven to help so many more businesses.
I got the opportunity to come in at a time when the business had mostly been built by the founder, who had hired his best friends, neighbors, and colleagues. They were very successful getting to the $20 million mark, but struggling to get beyond it.
I stepped into this role at a company with a wonderful culture, a great product, and an amazing client retention rate of 93%, which is really hard to achieve for any agency, much less one that targets attorneys, who are of course other professional services providers. As you mentioned, we were able to scale from $20 million to $150 million and north of that. I learned a lot along the way. I was not as gray when I started. There were a lot of highs and a lot of lows, but we had some amazing impact on the business.
Brendon Dennewill: Let's unpack that. What do you credit the scaling from $20 million to $150 million to?
Corey Quinn: I inherited a company that had already mostly specialized. It wasn't pure specialization, but the focus was on attorneys, specifically personal injury attorneys. We would build websites, do local SEO, and run PPC. The benefit was that everyone who worked at Scorpion understood the business of running a law firm at a deep level. We could talk to it because we had a thousand clients and did it every day.
As a result, we were often able to coach our attorney clients on what to expect in the next phases of growth, on what was around the corner for them, because we had worked with some of the best law firms. I inherited the wonderful benefits of that specialization. The challenge was: how do we scale it?
Phase one was scaling the legal vertical. Phase two was taking what we built in legal and going to a new vertical market. We did that about three times, eventually reaching a total of about five vertical markets, which allowed us to get to $150 million.
Brendon Dennewill: I think personally and on behalf of our clients I'm very curious about this, because we, like so many other professional services firms, struggle with choosing a vertical or a niche. With your help, we actually narrowed ours down from five to three last year. We know that to get to that next level of $20 or $30 million in revenue, it will be a lot easier if we focus on one vertical.
Corey Quinn: We all have a very limited number of hours in a day, and limited resources, time, money, and people. Where you apply those really matters.
Brendon Dennewill: What caused you to move from legal to a second, third, and fourth vertical? Was growth stalling?
Corey Quinn: It was a very ambitious CEO. I'll be honest, I almost argued against it many times. I had internal discussions about why we shouldn't just build the entire business around legal and completely develop it out. The benefits of that vertical specialization are that you get repetition through serving the same client over and over, you build amazing processes and software, and there was enough opportunity within the legal market to build a $40 or $50 million professional services firm with amazing retention and margins.
But the founder wasn't satisfied with that. So while we continued building out legal with dedicated resources, we hired new resources and effectively built a separate business unit for each vertical we expanded into. That meant different salespeople, different account managers, different subject matter experts, each vertical headed by a president responsible for profit and loss.
Brendon Dennewill: So what I'm hearing is there's a certain critical mass you need to reach first. Once you have that leadership structure in place, it makes sense to duplicate it for a new vertical, but you have to do it separately.
Corey Quinn: Exactly. And when I arrived at Scorpion, they had been in business since 2001. I joined in 2015, so they had 14 years of figuring things out. By the time I arrived, the legal vertical had become a real cash cow for us. It produced amazing profits. Instead of pocketing those profits, the founder decided to do two things: double down on the legal vertical and use some of the margin to fund a new vertical. Critically, you're not squeezing more productivity out of existing resources. You're developing separate, dedicated resources for the new vertical.
Brendon Dennewill: As a percentage of your growth, how much was net new versus expanding existing clients?
Corey Quinn: I'd say 80 to 90 percent was net new.
Brendon Dennewill: When you're growing at that scale, there has to be a lot of net new.
Corey Quinn: We were closing 600 deals a quarter. It was very much a sales-led organization. Not to say we didn't have an amazing product, because we did. But we built around a strong sales culture, growing from a small team to a 100-person sales force with a lot of infrastructure, because that was the driver of our growth.
Brendon Dennewill: I want to come back to something. I called you a marketing expert, but I want you to explain the distinction you see between marketing and sales, given that you spent around 19 years in sales before taking the CMO title.
Corey Quinn: It's a great question. I went from a sales role into marketing, which was responsible for everything up to the sales conversation. The benefit I had from my sales background was that I knew exactly what it was like to be in that role. I knew how to talk to salespeople, I knew what they were looking for, and I knew how to align with their interests.
Without that background, the partnership with the sales team might have felt more foreign. Ultimately, my responsibility in the CMO role didn't come naturally in all areas. Lead gen and inbound strategies came naturally to me, but things like positioning, messaging, and product marketing developed over time. My marketing education was very much built from the ground up through a sales lens, moving toward upper funnel, branding, and positioning work over time.
Brendon Dennewill: I can see the value of someone with deep sales experience stepping into the marketing role, which ultimately exists to serve sales with better-qualified leads.
Corey Quinn: If I hadn't had that sales background, I probably would have been fired within six to twelve months. It was such a strong sales culture, and these were the CEO's closest friends. If they hadn't seen that I understood them and was actually helping them, not just spending the company's money, they would have gone directly to the CEO. My sales background gave me a runway to prove myself.
Brendon Dennewill: There's been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about the CMO being one of the hardest roles right now. Maybe part of the solution is bringing people with deep sales experience into that marketing leadership seat, because they understand what success looks like for salespeople.
Corey Quinn: One of the biggest lessons I learned the hard way was that as we grew, if I didn't actively promote internally what our team was doing to help the company grow, the natural reaction to corporate marketing was: "What are they doing? Why do they have this huge team?" That came back to bite us when we had a big groundbreaking celebration for a new building. The founder was on stage calling out every team by name and left out one department: mine.
My team was upset, and it was a pivotal moment for me. The job of marketing is not only to provide value to clients, but also to market what you're doing internally so that people can see and understand it.
Brendon Dennewill: A lot of companies call that internal communications, which always seemed like an old-fashioned name to me. But it's so true. The role of marketing isn't just about prospective and existing clients; it's about internal communication too. That's easy to forget.
Corey Quinn: And as we grew from 100 employees to 1,000, we had to get into employer branding as well. We had to figure out how to recruit A-players, which meant getting deep into the company story and how to find the best candidates.
Brendon Dennewill: We've experienced something similar. Before we focused on CRM implementations, back when HubSpot was primarily a marketing platform around 2018, we were so successful at driving inbound leads that a couple of clients approached us and asked why we couldn't apply the same approach to inbound recruiting. It's the same engine, just a different story. Several clients ended up using HubSpot with one funnel for customers and one for talent.
Corey Quinn: Funny enough, we adopted HubSpot's CRM right when they launched it, when we had about 25 sellers. At that time, the HubSpot Sales CRM was not built for a 25-person sales team. We had to bend the rules and make it do things it wasn't really built for. But we loved it, and they've since built it into a really powerful CRM. We were very early adopters.
Brendon Dennewill: Let's talk about the highs and lows and the hard lessons. I think everyone listening knows the biggest highs typically come right after the lowest lows. What are some of the hard lessons that propelled you forward?
Corey Quinn: One big lesson is probably most applicable to larger companies. I worked with a CEO who had huge charisma, big energy, and a very clear vision. Early on, I had an ego about it, and I had ideas about how things should be done. What I learned was that it's not my business and not my money. My job as a great corporate citizen was to find ways to influence my boss, to communicate with him so he understood what I was trying to do.
Early on, I would have what I thought was a better idea, and I'd argue or push my agenda in an environment where he really wanted to make the ultimate decisions. I lost a lot of those passive-aggressive battles. Instead, I learned to figure out what really drives him, which was things that are big and flashy: big campaigns, big splashes. I'll be honest, I'm something of an introvert, so that's not exactly my natural mode.
After losing a couple of small battles, I said to myself: what is something he would really respond to that would also help us meet a big goal? The context was we were trying to break into franchising, specifically selling to franchisors running large multi-location businesses. At the time, we had just one franchise client, but it was a huge market.
There's a major annual conference called IFA, where all the big franchise brands gather, typically in Las Vegas. I went into the boardroom with the founder, Jamie from the revenue team, and the CFO, and I pitched them: "Here's the market opportunity. Everyone will be at IFA. I suggest we spend $100,000 and give away a Tesla on the show floor."
I didn't know if I was going to be fired for asking for a $100,000 campaign, which actually ended up being much more than that by the end. But after thinking about it for about half a second, he said, and I quote with some creative paraphrasing: "I absolutely love this." He got the vision immediately.
What we did was bring a double-decker booth to IFA, which no one else was doing, to make sure we stood out. We brought the actual Tesla onto the exhibit floor. The deal was simple: visit the Scorpion booth, get your badge scanned, and you're entered to win. On day three of the conference, we would draw a name. If your name was called and you were present, you won the car. If you weren't present, we'd wait 30 seconds and draw again.
On day three, we had literally a thousand people surrounding our booth at the appointed time. We drew the name, a woman was there, her name was called. We had confetti cannons, music, and it was a real moment, because although we were giving away one car, everyone was there to experience that excitement together.
As a result, over the next three years we went from one franchise client to over a hundred franchise brands. It completely exploded that part of our business.
Brendon Dennewill: That story captures the tension between someone with lots of ideas and an entrepreneurial leader with even bigger ideas. It's important to know which type of environment you thrive in, whether that's entrepreneurial or corporate, because they are very different.
Corey Quinn: Very different.
Brendon Dennewill: And if you're working in an entrepreneurial business with a charismatic leader who thinks bigger than everyone else, your role is to support those bigger ideas, but also to channel them. With the Tesla idea, you suddenly aligned with that big vision.
Corey Quinn: Immediately. And we ended up giving away a car the following two years as well. The big realization was that I had learned how to speak his language. That was the real breakthrough for me.
Brendon Dennewill: That's just teamwork, right? How do we work together to make something bigger and better? It's never just one person who makes it real.
Corey Quinn: And if it hadn't been for the challenge of communicating with him, I never would have come up with the Tesla idea.
Brendon Dennewill: It actually pushed you to think differently in a way that could align, and produce something not only creative but extremely successful.
Brendon Dennewill: Anything else on the highs and lows front?
Corey Quinn: The overall culture of the company was work hard, play hard. There were moments of really big celebration, but the expectation, set by the visionary CEO, was that work is life: from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, not much vacation, not much balance. I was all in for many years. Then at a certain point, I no longer wanted to live that lifestyle. That's one of the reasons I ended up leaving. I recognized that I wasn't going to change the company's culture. What I could decide was whether I wanted to stay in that role, knowing what it was, knowing it no longer aligned with what I wanted.
Brendon Dennewill: I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision, but looking back now?
Corey Quinn: I'm good.
Brendon Dennewill: Let's talk about deep specialization. What does it really mean, and why is it an unlock for scaling and growth?
Corey Quinn: I'll start by talking about what it's not. I call it a negative flywheel: the generalist trap. That's when a business says yes to everyone. It's extremely common in professional services, almost a stepping stone in the lifecycle of a firm.
An entrepreneurial founder starts a business, attracts clients, over-delivers for those first clients, and gets referrals as a result. Referrals are great because they bring steady revenue. However, eventually the founder lifts their head up and realizes they've built a business full of context switching. One day you're working on an SEO strategy for a dentist, the next day you're building an e-commerce site for a furniture store, and the day after that you're doing a CRM implementation strategy for a manufacturing firm.
You have no way of creating true process. You have operational inefficiency because every client is slightly different from the last. Maybe you've written all the SOPs, but they just sit in a drawer collecting dust because they don't actually add value. That leads to bottlenecks throughout the business, and guess who the number one bottleneck is?
Brendon Dennewill: The person who hasn't yet made the hard decision to focus.
Corey Quinn: Exactly. The founder is typically fine with context switching; they can do it all day long. But they don't realize that the team around them can't operate that way as easily.
What happens then is scope creep. The quality of the product suffers because your team is doing something slightly different every time and never gets a chance to become truly excellent. Over time, that compounds. You become a commodity in the marketplace. Clients think: "We're paying a lot of money and not getting the best results. Maybe we should find a specialist, someone who really understands us." That leads to client churn.
When clients leave, you chase revenue. You have a mortgage, staff, rent, all of these obligations. So you go out and find more business, whatever keeps the dollars rolling in, and you say yes to everyone. It's a repeating cycle that professional services firms get stuck in. It leads to bottlenecks, burnout, and in today's world of AI, a race to the bottom.
The instinct of these firms is to try to escape by generating more leads, doing more sales and marketing. They think it's a revenue or sales problem. But think of the metaphor of an iceberg in Alaskan waters. You can see the icebergs floating on the surface, but only ten percent is above the waterline. The other 90 percent is beneath it.
When professional services firms try to solve this problem with sales and marketing, that's the shallow approach. What I've learned, and what we did at Scorpion, is to look beneath the waterline. What you find there is that 90 percent of the value in your growth comes from two things.
First, at the very base, the most powerful thing you can do to affect your sales and marketing is what I call strategic specialization: choosing one industry, one segment, one vertical to align your business around and dedicating yourself to becoming a true expert in it.
Second, once you've chosen that vertical market, you position and message your firm so that you can communicate simply that you understand that specific buyer. You communicate with empathy. You care about them, you know them, you understand their problems, and you've solved those problems for others.
Once you have the specialization and the positioning in place, that's when you go back to the top of the iceberg. That's when your sales and marketing become much more powerful, because you have a sharp message that speaks to a specific audience and the expertise to back it up.
Corey Quinn: This is the positive flywheel, the one that works for your benefit. Let's use an example: wealth management firms. Say I'm an agency that decides to focus on wealth management. I've positioned myself there, and I start attracting clients in that vertical. By working with five, ten, fifteen, twenty clients, you begin building expertise through repetition. You're solving the same problems over and over. It's like the Bruce Lee quote: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
Through that repetition, you build systems, processes, and frameworks that actually get used. They become the DNA of how you operate. You build leverage, because you're no longer solely dependent on A-players who can think on their feet. You can build more IP into your process, which results in more predictable and repeatable outcomes for your clients.
When you provide great value to a specific segment consistently, you build authority. You become the go-to solution. And when you're the go-to, you can become a premium offering. You can raise your prices.
The last step in the flywheel, and what makes it a flywheel, is that once you have operational leverage, authority, and increased margins, you reinvest that margin back into the vertical market. That's what we did at Scorpion. Instead of pocketing the margin, we hired more salespeople, better sales trainers, more HR staff, better software for our clients. We did a lot of really great things.
And here's a telling data point: personal injury attorneys would hire us for $5,000 to $20,000 a month and stay with us for about 30 months, close to three years. Our nearest competitor, a generalist agency, was being hired by those same PI firms for $2,000 a month, and the clients would leave after 12 months. Our revenue per client was north of $300,000. Our competitors were making $24,000 from the same client. We had all that profit, and we could hire better, train better, and do far more aggressive sales and marketing than our competitors could ever touch, because they didn't have those margins.
That's what makes it a flywheel. You reinvest into the vertical market and the cycle accelerates. That's what we did really well at Scorpion, and it's what I advise my clients to do now.
Brendon Dennewill: How much of this is covered in your book?
Corey Quinn: The book covers the five steps to escape what I call founder-led sales, where businesses are stuck in the generalist trap and the founder is the primary salesperson. That may or may not be you as a listener, but the principles are the same. There are five steps to get out of the generalist trap and become a vertical market specialist. It's all in there.
Brendon Dennewill: For folks who are past founder-led sales, the key takeaway is that specialization makes it much easier for the whole team to stop doing continuous context switching. And when you add bigger margins and a pipeline that works, it sounds pretty attractive.
Corey Quinn: I've also been getting more deeply into discussions around private equity and professional services firms. PE firms are typically looking for three things: revenue growth, profit margin, and retention. The beautiful thing about specialization, done the way we're describing, is that you have built-in growth, built-in profit margin, and great retention, all compared favorably to the alternatives in the market. That's why more and more PE firms are looking for specialized firms over generalists.
Brendon Dennewill: I want to go back to something that comes up early in the specialization conversation: the ideal client profile. When I think about identifying a hero target, one of the questions I ask is: who are the three to ten top clients you currently have that you'd love to work with for the next 25 years? But I'm starting to wonder if that becomes less relevant once your specialization is clear, since the vertical defines who you're serving.
Corey Quinn: I actually believe that even within a vertical, whether it's advisors, attorneys, or any other segment, there is a subset of businesses that are your hero clients, your dream clients: those who love working with you, value your service, pay a premium, and refer you to everyone they know. That exists even within a vertical context, and those clients are worth pursuing.
It's similar to the "dream 100" concept. These clients will leverage your systems and processes better than anyone else, and they'll love it because they're the perfect fit. One of the things I teach and practice with my clients is to identify those clients and then proactively go into the market to build relationships with them.
Brendon Dennewill: So from your perspective, you can find those ideal clients within virtually any vertical?
Corey Quinn: The existence of your ideal clients would actually be part of the criteria for choosing a vertical in the first place. Do the clients you want to work with live in this vertical market?
Brendon Dennewill: From a data and metrics perspective, you've alluded throughout our conversation to revenue, margin, churn, and LTV. Is lifetime value something you think about a lot?
Corey Quinn: Absolutely. For any business with a monthly retainer model, LTV is probably the most important metric you can have. It's like an annuity. You spend a lot of money and effort to acquire a client, and once you have them, every month they stay with you, they send you a check for $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. The longer you keep them, the longer that revenue keeps coming in.
Brendon Dennewill: I believe that too, but I'm looking for data points because in a lot of the industries we work with, including franchising and AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction), LTV isn't always treated as a primary metric. I keep trying to prove myself wrong, but I think it should be the ultimate metric.
Corey Quinn: It's tempting for businesses to focus heavily on driving more front-end revenue. But here's the metaphor: there's a hole in the boat. It doesn't matter how much revenue you bring in if it's just going to fall out the back. Philosophically, the best thing a business can do is maximize LTV, invest in fixing those leaks first, before going deep on sales and marketing strategy. That way, any new business you bring in will stay for the long run.
Brendon Dennewill: What you were just saying about what PE firms look for, revenue, margin, and retention, those are all components of LTV. If you want to increase lifetime value, you focus on those three levers. And your example of competitors charging $24,000 per client per year versus your $300,000 is a perfect illustration of which LTV you'd rather have.
Corey Quinn: And the higher your LTV relative to competitors gives you a structural competitive advantage, because you have more margin and more capability to be aggressive in the market in ways your competitors simply cannot match. They're limited to the cheapest channels, while you can do things like giving away Teslas.
Brendon Dennewill: Which brings up the second most important metric, at least in my view: customer acquisition cost. If your LTV is $300,000 versus $24,000, the math on what you can afford to spend to acquire a client is completely different.
Corey Quinn: Exactly. On a percentage basis, if you spend ten percent of LTV on acquisition, a generalist agency can spend $2,400, while we could spend $30,000, for the same client.
Brendon Dennewill: Which is why you could give away Teslas.
Corey Quinn: That's it. That's the marketing secret: just give away Teslas.
Brendon Dennewill: Teslas and icebergs. Let's keep those separate.
Brendon Dennewill: Corey, this has been super interesting and super fun. We could keep going, but we need to wrap up. What is one thing we haven't yet talked about that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Corey Quinn: If this conversation is resonating with you, I'd encourage you to explore the benefits of specialization. You don't have to follow my model exactly, but it is very powerful. In the world of AI, which is doing remarkable things but is also very disruptive, a lot of task-based work is becoming commoditized. Specialization positions you to add more profound value by going deeper into your clients' world, becoming the trusted advisor who gets paid for judgment, not just for hands-on work.
If any of this sounds interesting and you want to go deeper, I'd love to offer you a free copy of my book, Anyone, Not Everyone. It just hit 100 reviews on Amazon with an average rating of 5.0. You can go to anynoteveryone.com, and you'll get the full audio version, the same one sold on Amazon, absolutely free. You'll also receive a digital workbook with videos, templates, and worksheets. If this is resonating with you, go check it out.
Brendon Dennewill: That is a very generous offer, Corey. Thanks so much for making that available to our listeners, and thank you for sharing all your insights and experience today.
Corey Quinn: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.
Brendon Dennewill: I look forward to learning more from you in the coming months and years.
Corey Quinn: Sounds great. Thanks so much.
Brendon Dennewill: Take care, and we'll talk again soon.