How Matt Lucero Scaled His Cold Email Agency From $40k/month to $2M/year
Two years after his first appearance on the channel, Matt Lucero is back. His cold email agency has gone from around $40,000 a month to a $2M a year run rate. He and Michael talk about what scaling really takes once the basics are in place: moving upmarket, paying for senior talent, running 10 to 15 thousand emails a day, and where AI and deliverability are going.
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Topics covered
- How the offer changed as the agency moved upmarket
- Which clients succeed with cold email, and why
- Hiring senior US and Canada based talent with profit share
- Internal client acquisition: cold email, YouTube and testing ads
- Volume versus personalization, and the full tech stack
- Practical AI uses: a company OS dashboard, reporting and list building
- Deliverability predictions and the road to $10M a year
Key takeaways
- Bigger clients with established budgets, an existing sales team and larger contract values tend to get the best results from an agency.
- Calling interested leads can almost double results. In July, 160 of the 300 meetings Matt's team booked for clients came from calls.
- To hire well, ask "would I work for me?" Then build a pay plan, including profit share, that would attract someone like you.
- Profit share turned account managers from people pushing back on new clients into people asking for more.
- Segment instead of over-personalizing: write templated copy for very narrow slices of the audience, each with the right case study.
- With sub-$100 blended cost per booked call, cold email can stay cheap compared with ads even with a big tool stack.
- Spam complaints will keep mattering, but Matt doesn't believe cold email is going away.
Show notes
📈 From $40k a month to a $2M run rate
Matt's core offer hasn't changed: clients pay the agency to get meetings. What has changed is who they work with. They've been maturing the business, going upmarket and charging more. Matt says the companies that are the best fit to pay an agency at all are usually the bigger ones.
The big addition is what Matt calls fractional SDR work, where the team schedules appointments and calls leads for clients. He says it has almost doubled results. In July they booked 300 meetings for clients, and around 160 of those came from calling. Those were mostly calls to leads who had already shown interest, not cold calls. LinkedIn helps with follow-up, but email is still the main engine.
“I still feel like email is the channel for like scale.”
Matt Lucero, 3:22
🎯 Who actually succeeds with cold email
The agency's marketing has used a $1M revenue floor, but Matt now thinks it's closer to $2 to $3M. The best clients have an established budget, understand that the gap between a meeting and a closed deal can be 30, 60 or 90 days, and ideally have run cold traffic like Meta ads before. Having a sales team and process in place matters too, because cold leads need to be sold to, not just taken orders from.
Michael adds his own observation: retention is often better when the person you work with every day isn't the one paying the invoice. Matt agrees and explains why. When a small founder treats the marketing budget as money out of their own pocket, every result gets watched with more anxiety.
🤝 Hiring a team that could run the business
Matt's whole team is US and Canada based. Account managers have six-figure base salaries plus profit share, and he expects a couple of senior people to earn more than $200k in the next year. His test for hiring is simple: would someone like him want to work for him?
Michael points out that a well-paid role inside a lean, growing company can be a better path than starting an agency for many people. Matt's career advice for anyone starting out: learn from someone first, or work at a funded startup or growing agency where you can take on responsibility quickly.
“would I work for me? That's the question I'm trying to answer.”
Matt Lucero, 9:57
📬 Getting clients, and the cold email machine behind it
Cold email is still the agency's number one source of meetings. Internal campaigns are run by two team "pods" that compete in quarterly challenges. YouTube brings the warmest meetings, though with less control over who comes through. Ads are next on the list to test.
Matt's team sends roughly 10 to 15 thousand emails a day and ran around 30 to 40 campaigns in a month. Instead of heavy AI personalization, they segment, with templated copy for very narrow slices of the audience and a relevant case study for each. He describes it as Alex Hormozi's "qualume" idea: volume plus the 80/20 of relevance.
The stack Matt describes:
- Domains: Porkbun, Dynadot and Spaceship.
- Inboxes: Google, through providers like Inbox Kit, Out Mail and Hypertype.
- Sending: Smartlead.
- Data: Apollo, Clay, Crunchbase and Claude Code for custom scraping.
- Verification: ListMint, with MillionVerifier for bulk jobs.
- Also: Disco Like.
He puts the blended cost per booked call at under $100. His point is that if a client is going to pay you tens of thousands of dollars, you can afford to spend thousands to win them.
🤖 Where AI actually helps
Matt shares three real uses. The first is a central company OS dashboard that holds client info, invoicing status, campaign stats, call recordings, a mini CRM of every lead generated, a knowledge base and project management. The second is automated weekly reporting that summarizes calls and campaign stats, which the team still checks by hand. The third is Claude Code as an agent for custom list building, such as scraping public licensing databases and then enriching the results.
He's careful not to overdo it, though. You still need campaigns, content, a sales process, a good offer and a good back end. AI just helps with all of that.
🔮 Deliverability and the long game
Matt's view is that Google and Microsoft want users to see what they want and to filter what they don't. That means spam complaints will keep mattering. But if the platforms wanted to kill cold email, they could have done it long ago. Like every channel, it will get more competitive, and the tools will keep getting better to offset that.
As for what's next, Matt still enjoys the work. His next goal is around $10M a year, and he wants the business to be built so it could be sold, even if he ends up keeping it.
“I still think cold email's always going to be around because good cold emails exist.”
Matt Lucero, 27:07
About Matt Lucero
Matt Lucero runs a cold email agency that now also does cold calling and LinkedIn outbound. In the episode he says the agency is at a $2 million a year run rate and has booked over 5,000 sales meetings for clients, getting close to 6,000.
This is Matt's second time on the channel. Michael first interviewed him two years earlier, when the agency was at around $40,000 a month. (That 2024 interview's description names the agency Anevo Marketing.) His team is US and Canada based, and he also makes YouTube content.
Episode links
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