Bri Skiffington

I dropped out of high school. I had a chip on my shoulder about it for a long time and I still kind of do. I didn’t have a degree or a network or anyone vouching for me, so anything I wanted I had to prove I could do first. That’s probably why I ended up in the trades. It’s an industry full of people who had everything to prove and didn’t care what anyone thought about how they got there, and nobody cares how you got in the room as long as you can do the job.

I spent seven years at a performance agency doing Google Ads for contractors. I was good at it, and the reason was pretty simple: I kept the data clean. Specifically, I split brand from prospecting and never let them blend. Brand search is people who already know you. Prospecting is people who don’t. If you mix them into one ROAS number it looks great and tells you nothing, and most agencies mix them because the blended number is easier to sell. Once I started separating them every decision got easier, and eventually I realized the same thing was true in every channel. Google was just where I saw it first. That’s the foundation of Moneyball Marketing™, and it came from seven years of staring at search terms reports.

The other thing I figured out in those years is that contractors were never the problem. They know their numbers. They can read a P&L, they know their booking rate, they know their average ticket. What they couldn’t read was our reporting, because agency reporting isn’t written to be read, it’s written to keep the account. Instead of fixing the reporting, the industry decided the contractor was the one who didn’t get it. That’s the reason Free Agency exists.

What I actually do day to day is the software and the performance behind it. I’m in client performance constantly, across every account, checking whether what we’re doing is worthy of the reputation we’re asking people to trust. When something works I figure out why, and it becomes a process, part of the CMO certification, or a feature. When something doesn’t work I figure that out too. I measure the CMOs in aggregate and I measure the software the same way, so I know whether either one is making an impact.

I still recruit every CMO myself. I don’t post jobs, I find people who are already great and go get them. I write Free Advice Fridays every week and answer every reply myself. I published the Moneyball Marketing™ Model so anyone can check their own numbers against it without paying us. And I built Mr. Moneyball because the owners we can’t take as clients deserve the same math as the ones we can.

Long term, the service side of Free Agency is going to be owned by the CMOs who run it. That’s the part I’m proudest of, and it hasn’t even happened yet.