An agency owner who builds in public gets two things at once: a record of what is actually moving the business, and a steady stream of proof that buyers and peers can see. Andy Milligan does it every day on camera, and the habit that matters most is not the posting. It is the tracking.
Andy runs MMG Design, a web and SEO studio for healthcare, and founded the Columbus Marketing Organization. In this episode he opens with his numbers: his business generated $15,000 last month and $26,000 the month before. Then he walks through a normal day of business development, a few strategic decisions, and the growth stats he logs by hand. If you are still working on how to get clients on LinkedIn, this is what the daily routine behind it looks like once it becomes a business.
"There's this magical thing about human nature that when you start to track things, it automatically creates this awareness to where you want to optimize and grow them." Andy Milligan
What building in public looks like for an agency owner
Andy's daily format has three parts (1:01):
- Live lead gen. He shows the outreach messages and the "moonshots" he is chasing.
- Building and strategizing in public. He talks through the decisions that will move the business in the coming days and weeks.
- Updates and growth stats. He logs the numbers for every channel he is trying to grow.
The third part is the one most agency owners skip. Andy calls it awareness tracking, and he credits it directly: "Just creating that awareness has been one of the biggest things that moved my own business forward."
Building in public also does something for lead flow. In research summarized by LinkedIn, 73% of decision-makers said an organization's thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials. Showing your real work, including the days that go wrong, is a form of that proof. This episode had plenty of those: a failing internet connection forced Andy to move his desk and shrink the day's plan, and he kept the promise to show up anyway.
The small business KPIs Andy tracks by hand
Andy logs his stats manually rather than relying on a dashboard. Here is what he recorded at the end of this episode (12:26):
- Secondary YouTube channel: 64 subscribers, up one.
- Main YouTube channel: 428 subscribers, up one.
- LinkedIn: just over 8,000 followers, a milestone he reached that day.
- Newsletter: 261 subscribers, up one.
None of these numbers is dramatic, and that is the point. Small business KPIs only work if you look at them often enough to notice the trend. Andy pairs these daily channel stats with a monthly look at revenue and expenses, which is the same habit behind a monthly business review.
If you are a solo business owner who is not ready to film anything, you can still copy the core of this. Pick the four or five channels you are actively trying to grow, write the numbers down at the same time every day, and watch what the attention does to your behavior.
Where the leads come from on an ordinary day
The routine is unglamorous on purpose. Before any strategy, Andy handles the lowest-hanging fruit.
Connection requests. His rule for anyone using LinkedIn for business development is to send 20 to 30 connection requests a day to your ideal client profile. He uses an AI assistant to research people who match that profile. LinkedIn does not allow third-party tools that automate activity on its website, so keep the research automated and send the requests yourself.
Communities. Andy checks in every day on the Slack communities he belongs to, including a referral community of other solo marketers and a mastermind (4:08). Most have a channel for needs and leads. "We have gotten a few referrals from these channels," he says. That matches how buyers decide: in a 2026 SurveyMonkey and Reddit study of business decision-makers, 73% named peer recommendations as their most trusted source when evaluating vendors.
Moonshots. Andy added a new pipeline in his CRM for "moonshot" podcast guests (6:41). Naming them, he explains, is the first step toward actually booking them.
If you want the full outreach system behind these habits, start with our playbook on lead generation for marketing agencies. For ideas on what to post once you start sharing your work, see these LinkedIn post ideas.
Building systems, not just content
The other half of building in public is showing the operational work. In this episode Andy shares two internal tools his team built for client fulfillment: a data dashboard that flags SEO issues such as indexing problems across client sites, and a visual feedback tool that lets clients leave comments directly on a website preview and notifies the team in Slack. Neither is a lead generation tactic on its own, but both make the business easier to run as it grows past one person, and both make good material to share.
Where Columbus agency owners compare notes
Columbus Marketing Organization is a peer community for marketers, freelancers, and service providers in Columbus, Ohio, founded by Andy Milligan. Members share leads, introductions, and job opportunities, including the weekly Columbus Marketing Jobs newsletter.
Building in public is easier when you have a room of people at your stage who will tell you what they see in your numbers. Meet them at an upcoming Columbus marketing event, or join the Columbus Marketing Organization community on Skool.
The takeaway for agency owners
The most useful thing an agency owner can borrow from Andy's routine is not the camera. It is the habit of writing down your numbers every day, doing the boring outreach before anything else, and staying close to the communities where referrals actually come from. Track it, share it, and let the awareness do its work.
There's this magical thing about human nature that when you start to track things, it automatically creates this awareness to where you want to optimize and grow them.
Frequently asked questions
What does building in public mean for an agency owner?
It means sharing your real work as you do it: outreach, decisions, and numbers, including the days that go wrong. Andy Milligan films a daily routine of live lead gen, strategy, and manually logged growth stats, which both keeps him accountable and gives buyers visible proof of how he works.
Which small business KPIs should a solo agency owner track daily?
Track the few channels you are actively trying to grow. Andy logs subscribers on two YouTube channels, LinkedIn followers, and newsletter subscribers by hand each day, and reviews revenue and expenses monthly. The value comes from looking often enough to notice trends, not from a complicated dashboard.
How many LinkedIn connection requests should I send a day?
Andy's rule is 20 to 30 connection requests a day to people who match your ideal client profile. He uses AI to research matching people, but LinkedIn prohibits third-party tools that automate activity on its site, so send the requests yourself and keep the messages personal.
Where do agency owners in Columbus find referrals?
Peer communities are a reliable source. Andy checks his Slack referral and mastermind communities daily and has gotten referrals from them. In Columbus, Columbus Marketing Organization, founded by Andy Milligan, brings marketers, freelancers, and service providers together in person and online to share leads and introductions.
Read the video transcript
Kind: captions Language: en Hey, my name is Andy. I run a solo marketing business that last month generated 15,000. The month before 26,000 and in his lifetime has done just over under 400. And this is my daily marketing channel. This is where I build and strategize in public and teach you what's working in live time as I build a boutique marketing business on how you can copy the things that are working and also being transparent and sharing with you the things that are not, which you'll see a lot has gone wrong today, which I'm about to share with you guys. But if this is your first time here, uh, I run a web and SEO studio for healthcare called MMG Design. I have a community and events business called the Columbus Marketing Organization, which is where other high performing marketers in Columbus, Ohio come together and learn from each other. And what I actually normally do for these videos is we do a little bit of live lead genen. So I take you over my shoulder, share with you the outreach messages, the you know the moonshots that I'm taking in order to do business development and how you can do the same. Then we do some building and strategizing in public where I will talk about the decisions that I'm making in the coming days and weeks that will impact and move the business forward. And now we close with updates and growth stats where I do this thing called awareness tracking and I manually log the stats of the platforms and channels that I'm focused on growing such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and my products, all my content channels, also my podcast because there's this magical thing about human nature that when you start to track things, it automatically creates this awareness to where you want to optimize and grow them. And just creating that awareness has been one of the biggest things that moved my own business forward. So today has been an absolute shiit show uh for lack of better terms and pardon my French with the Wi-Fi and you know you guys may notice my background is slightly changed. Got to pivot my desk in order to move my router. All this I discovered at the bright and early hours of this morning. So I'm going to I had precommitted to showing up here every day and delivering you guys all the value in the world. Um so I'm going to continue to do that but I'm going to compromise on scope slightly. So, what I'm going to do is we're going to do a little bit of a co-working session. I'm going to uh do a little bit of bisdev on LinkedIn to start with and make sure that I kind of speedrun that a little bit and then go into my schedule because I do have several meetings planned here shortly that I need to prepare for today. Um, namely on my calendar, I have a customer meeting at uh 1:30 and uh a meeting, a networking call here at 3 over in um over in Westerville, which is about a 20-minute drive. So, I have to go and prepare for that. And yeah, I just got a lot of small things that I need to get done for today. What I'm going to do is I'm going to head into my friend Quad here and make sure that we get our daily connection request sent. We might even make this a little bit of a co-working session here. So, um, we'll start by sending our connection requests. Make sure lowest hanging fruit if you are doing business development or using LinkedIn as a channel to grow weeds is to send 20 to 30 connection requests daily. 30 more to our ICP. If it helps you, it what I highly recommend is that you give Quad, it's in our shared folder here that I have on my system. It will give Claude a list of uh a persona for your ICP and it will then reference those and then have a running log and search for things like job title, industry, um you know, things like that that will help trace back to that ICP. And this is something that has I found to be very effective uh just in terms of saving my own time. And it's pretty much just clicking a button at this point in terms of sending a connection request. And then obviously you take the ground to hit the ball running uh on actual communications and the sending of the outreach itself. So I also want to do something I always do every day is our editor did a great job of finally are getting through our podcast backlog which is just incredible to me and I'm so stoked. I try and make sure that I check in on these communities every single day that I'm in. I'm in several Slack communities. Um, we also have one for each of our customers and um, making sure that I am proactive on checking in on these. Some of them are referral communities, other of them are just, you know, uh, one of them is a mastermind. This one's a referral community of other solo marketers, etc. So, I make sure that I check in on these. We have gotten a few referrals from these channels. So, I just try and kind of check in. There's always a needs and leads channel. I'm trying to make sure that I check in on quite often resources GMS promo. That's usually just a bunch of pitches wins. Try and always check in on these. Make sure we're supporting all of our friends. Shout out to Melbell. Shout out to Melbell. She's really cool. Make sure you guys follow her on LinkedIn. She's awesome. That's kind of intrusive. Okay. Not sure what that is. Press particular really cool. also kind of just chime me in at times we can be helpful making sure morning buddy exclamation point just wanted to check in to see that all workflow comments are up to date period I saw that one was left yesterday about a CTA some sage here what I also do is I go to my network tab make sure that I am connected to all the ones who recently accepted requests we also did get two inbound requests for event attendance Um, so we might have two attendees here coming up soon. Also did a lot of my travel and logistics planning. Dude, if you guys have not used Claude for just travel planning, you are really missing the boat. Like, I can't say enough in terms of how awesome it was and how I used it to help me plan for this uh the travel logistics. I literally it found the cheapest rooms and flights and it did it all in just a couple with like different options and everything. And now the next steps I'll just click on the links and go and pay for them. I'm actually meeting with Christian who I'll be flying flying out with. Shout out to Christian tomorrow to go and do those things to actually book these. But we managed to get in at the startup rate for tickets which was awesome. Uh what I want to focus on this morning in terms of outreach is I created a new by the way I've been following a guy named Greg Wbecia on YouTube and just studying him kind of as an entrepreneur but he has these things that are called moonshots and I highly encourage you guys to adopt or take some lessons from this philosophy. Moonshots are big basically like big hairy audacious goals is another way that people have heard it described. But I have added a new uh pipeline to my CRM uh in folk that I tag certain guests as being moonshots. Um one of them is James Clear, one of them was Greg Veia, another one was Chris Williamson. But just putting that taking that first step until where I can acknowledge like, hey, this is someone that I could realistically get on my podcast and acknowledging like, hey, this is a goal, putting it into fruition. I have them right here tagged him as moonshots. That would be super dope. And I'm uniquely inspired to continue doing this and getting the show to a place. I'm now going to have Adrian uh our editor start to basically to start to edit a new edit a new trailer for the podcast and um get some like ex more external signals of validation like ranking factors um number of episodes and stuff like that reviews is one thing but like awards you know things like that that actually get us credibility I should start to be more proactive on submitting things for that submitting uh thanks for that and making it just the highest social proof um thing that I possibly can and I I have it within me to do that. So um like more testimonials, more sections like this showing the inerson nature of the podcast as well. I also want to make sure that I add on some more um out some more of these SEO optimized pages and making sure that they're indexed. Also, I've been checking in on our data software. Um, I named it Pulse. Um, just kind of to have a name for it, but it's basically all of our client data that's being tracked here. And what it allows me to do is it literally makes a gentic, it searches and makes a gentic recommendations based on sitemap uh indexing issues and small things like that that would have taken so much awareness and I can actually oneclick add them to um as like a nice search overview. We can update these and uh refresh them in live time for all of our uh SEO terms. and I'm really focused on getting systems into place on the client fulfillment side of things. So, building out this software, we also added a custom feedback tool to where it's literally like a markup.io or a workflow tool where you can literally it just literally Claude literally built this and it's tied into the system where we'll get notified and Slack will get notified every time there's a new um a new comment made. You can switch between comment and browse modes just like workflow. It'll load the site in this preview here. takes a second to load, but um can literally leave comments on the site just like a like a visual feedback tool would allow you to do. Um again, Wi-Fi problems still persisting here, which is inevitable and fantastic. But yeah, those are the things that I'm excited about in the business. I'm going to move directly on to um looks like 26 uh connection requests sent. [snorts] Good stuff there. Checking on our notifications one last time. I'm going to do some Amazon shopping here soon also to get some uh bookshelves and also a better white. I need a better a softer down light here and I can have a a key light or a key light and a fill light on this side, but I can get some blackout curtains to make sure that that situation is filled. I just I like the way the background in this looks a lot better. Um there's a lot more room behind me now to add in a bookshelf and do some of those small design things as well that I'm excited to do. So, that's looking good. I literally have to put the Wi-Fi router on my desk. So, shout out to T-Mobile. I would give you the finger right now if I could. You absolutely suck. Um, another life updates front. We have two potential tenants that are interested in renting the room downstairs. So, both of those close. I will now have a cash flowing property at 25 years old here in Columbus, Ohio, which is amazing. Um, obviously still lots of work to do. We thought about adding a couple things that I want to do is add a potentially not set in stone, adding some kind of small workout gym to the garage and maybe in the living room being able to add a golf simulator, which I've seen several videos on how you can make one for under $1,000. Getting like a a lightweight simulator. We already have a net at home. Uh we have some turf that I could put in. That would be really cool. Would be an excuse to get back into golf and start working on the swing a little bit. And this is my it's set and now this is my house. One of the biggest reasons I've been struggling for probably the past couple of months or so since I moved into this house is that I just um it's not furnished and I just feel like I'm always bouncing around. I don't feel at home yet and I haven't taken the time to furnish it or really invest the time. Obviously, I've been doing repairs with the exterior of the property and things like that, but I really want to make the inside feel nice and warm, and we've got about a month before the weather starts making that impossible. So, been scanning Facebook Marketplace, things like that, and really prioritizing the side of the life. And I think, you know, investing into that side of myself will have will manifest positive impact on the business as well. But aside from that, getting ready to plan for health conference in Las Vegas next month. Getting all that stuff booked like I talk about. And I want to close out the video here by uh doing some updates and growth stats uh to close out the video like we do normally. So secondary channel we have 64 subscribers. So up one here. Main channel we are at count 428. So up one more uh LinkedIn we should be at over 8K now. We were just short yesterday. I think we are all set now 8,13. Let's go. I would celebrate that but it's um a little bit insignificant. Not insignificant. It's just it wasn't a goal that I was reaching for but it's a it's a cool little milestone. Beehive. We did get several new beehive. We also yesterday pitched our first partnership or collaboration on the newsletter front to a business called Career Sandwich, which I'll update you guys more on later. Why do you do this to me? I know. I was literally just logged in earlier today. Um, hang on. Walk into Beehive. Okay. Oh, hang on. Perfect. Perfect. Okay, we're all set for three o'clock this afternoon for a meeting. Check in on Beehive. Sorry, guys. Let me just check out beehive so I can log this. We are at 261 anticlimactic one new subscriber. Okay. Yeah, slight increases. Biggest highlight 8K LinkedIn followers. That's a big milestone. But I'm going to cut it off here. Um I appreciate you guys watching. I've got a lot to get to today. Amazed amongst all the stress and fantastic things that we deal with as business owners. If you're a business owner and you're stressed out, um I feel you. Thank you for hanging with me and I'll see you guys here tomorrow with a much more action-packed video. Cheers.