Ask Chris Nault how many agencies he's acquired over his twenty-plus year career, and he has to think about it.
"Just under ten," he says. "It's either eight or nine. I can't remember if one of them was two people, or if it was one org, two people, or two different orgs. They were just like best friends. I can't remember."
That kind of fuzziness would sound like a red flag from most operators. From Nault, it reads as exactly what it is: the byproduct of doing something enough times that the details blur together, and being comfortable enough in his own skin to admit it on a podcast.
Nault runs growth, a marketing and operations agency founded in its current form in 2017, though his agency career stretches back into the early 2000s. Today the team sits between 25 and 30 people, with a 95% client retention rate once someone works with them. A meaningful chunk of how growth got there wasn't organic hiring or a single splashy acquisition. It was a repeatable, informal pattern of absorbing small, founder-led shops, one relationship at a time.
The Business He Was Running Before This
Nault didn't set out with an M&A thesis. The first deal wasn't a deal at all, at least not in his head at the time.
"It was not a named strategy," he says. "It was: you're great, I want to help you. This seems like a win-win. Let's reduce the contractual burden."
The pattern started the way a lot of informal roll-ups do: Nault, a small agency owner himself, kept running into other small agency owners who were exceptional at the craft and exhausted by the business of running a business. A great designer who wasn't a great restaurateur, as he puts it. Someone who could deliver for a client but couldn't consistently generate new revenue once they stepped out of the spotlight.
"That's where a lot of founder-led small orgs kind of fail," he says. "As soon as they step out of that spotlight, the net new revenue drops."
Those conversations, part commiseration, part mentorship, kept surfacing the same opportunity. Nault liked leadership and the unglamorous parts of running a business: contracts, liability, structure. The people he kept meeting didn't. Eventually, joining forces stopped being hypothetical.
Why Agencies, and Why This Structure
An aqua-hire, in Nault's world, isn't a traditional acquisition. There's no purchase price for a system that generates independent profit, because most of these businesses don't have one. What he's really buying is a founder's time, relationships, and existing book of clients, and what he's offering in return is a salary plus a long-tail commission on any revenue that survives the transition.
Early on, Nault made an assumption that cost him: he took on the seller's existing client contracts as-is.
"The wording wasn't great," he says. "We didn't have the buffer where a client was like, 'Hey, I was promised these outcomes, I want my money back.'"
That mistake reshaped how Nault structures every deal since. Now, Growth draws a hard line: no assumption of the seller's EIN, and no assumption of existing contracts. Every client is re-interviewed and re-signed under a new agreement with Growth, one that explicitly states anything that happened before the start date isn't growth's problem.
"You take care of the client in a legally, fiscally responsible kind of way," Nault says. "That was my screw-up. I'm not making that mistake again."
The Deal Structure
Because clients have to individually opt in rather than transfer automatically, the founder joining Growth is taking on real uncertainty. Nault's answer to that uncertainty is a commission, typically in the 5 to 10 percent range of revenue, paid out over a long window, sometimes years, and tracked through HubSpot regardless of whether the founder is still employed.
"They're getting residual checks even if they were to exit the employment," he says, "as long as we use HubSpot as our CRM, we can track the lifecycle."
In the early days, without data or process to justify a number, Nault admits it was closer to "wheeling and dealing," and the mistakes tended to cost Growth money while benefiting the person being acquired. Over time the math tightened into something closer to paying a salesperson their commission on existing business, simple, defensible, and easy for both sides to understand.
What founders get in return isn't just a paycheck. It's a brand with a track record: low churn, an established HubSpot partnership, a marketing engine that will publicly celebrate the new hire. For a founder who's been quietly grinding alone, that visibility and structure can be worth more than the math on the spreadsheet.
The Diligence He Didn't Do at First
Nault is candid that he wasn't always as rigorous as he should have been about verifying what he was actually buying.
"I always assumed we were operating similarly, that there were contracts in place with their clients," he says. "Not just like ‘I met a guy at a bar six months ago and he's been paying me ever since.’ Which has happened."
If he were starting the process today, day one would look different: pulling recorded sales and service calls from tools like Fathom or Gong and running them through an AI tool to get an honest read on client sentiment, employee sentiment, and delivery quality, before any deal terms get discussed.
"That would be like a day-one must-have," he says.
Why Zero of Almost Ten Founders Are Still There, and Why That's Not the Failure It Sounds Like
Here's the number that reframes the whole conversation: out of ten founders Nault has aqua-hired, zero remain at Growth today. Client retention from those deals was similarly low. He can't point to a single client from those acquisitions still on the roster.
Most people would call that a losing track record. Nault doesn't.
"Just because something didn't work doesn't mean it does not work," he says. "There's just a lot of variables."
He frames the deals as "batting cage practice" for a playbook that's now sharper because of the losses. And in most cases, the founders who left Growth didn't leave on bad terms; they moved on to bigger opportunities, sometimes ones Nault actively pushed them toward.
"Four months later he's like, 'Dude, this company just offered me a huge number, please take that,'" Nault says. "I'll see you at my wedding. That's happened plenty of times."
Why He Doesn't Offer Equity
Founders have occasionally asked Nault about equity or a partnership stake. He's direct about why the answer is almost always no.
Nault had a 50/50 business partner for more than a decade, an experience he describes as leaving a permanent mark. He's owned Growth outright since. For him, equity isn't a recruiting tool for someone stepping into an operational role; it's a hard asset with a price that reflects everything already built into the business, brand, process, systems, team, that a new partner would benefit from without having contributed to.
"I have a hundred percent of the supply," he says. "If you're demanding it, that's a short conversation."
What He'd Tell Someone Trying This
Nault's advice for a founder considering aqua-hiring smaller shops starts with a warning about volume: for every deal that closes, expect several that don't.
"Somewhere between eight and nine closed, I've probably started the process with twenty to thirty," he says.
Beyond that: Keep expectations at zero going in, and let the due diligence period answer the real questions rather than assuming the best case. Keep the entire negotiation and diligence conversation in one running document, with recordings linked, so both sides can see how the deal evolved. Be deliberate about who you sign with. The relationship will outlast the transaction, for better or worse, and it's a genuinely personal commitment, not just a contract.
"It will affect you personally, for good and for bad," he says, "probably varying amounts of both."
What's Next
Nault sees the next three to five years shaped heavily by AI, both as a threat and an opportunity for agencies that don't adapt. He expects the value of expert time to rise for agencies willing to change how they work, and he expects a wave of smaller agency owners who don't want to make that shift to look for an exit.
"If now's the time to leave, this is a great time to talk to companies that are interested in owning that change," he says.
As for whether he'd ever sell Growth, he's more open to the idea than he expected to be, on very specific terms: staying on as CEO, an operating agreement that protects his ability to make mistakes, a seat in leadership decision-making, and the right to remove leadership that isn't working.
It's a mirror image of the deals he's offered his own aqua-hires for years, something he acknowledges the moment it's pointed out to him.
"That's a very good point," he laughs.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear Chris Nault walk through nearly a decade of small agency acquisitions, the mistakes, the commission structures, and why zero-for-nine isn't the failure rate it looks like, on the Agency Acquisitions & Exits Podcast.
