The best community for marketers on the internet: https://www.columbusmarketing.org

Hans Skillrud went from Groupon employee #100 to agency owner to acquiring a competitor to co-founding Termageddon, a privacy compliance SaaS he runs with his wife Donata. In this episode, Hans breaks down how niching down and buying out struggling competitors built his agency's growth, why he sold it to focus on Termageddon full-time, and why most website owners have no idea how much data their site is quietly collecting and sharing. He also lays out exactly what he'd do if he were starting a web agency today, from acquisitions to one-day builds.

CONNECT WITH HANS
🌐 Website: https://termageddon.com/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hans-skillrud/

CONNECT WITH ANDY
🌐 Website: https://www.mmgdesign.net/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmgdesign/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulmilligan/

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Intro
00:00 - The Groupon job that started it all
02:19 - The cold call that accidentally launched a web design career
04:30 - 37 services down to one: the niche that changed everything
06:24 - How buying a struggling competitor fell into his lap
08:04 - Turning an acquisition into a six-figure pipeline with cold calls
12:26 - How he met his wife and co-founder, Donata
15:28 - Why he sold his agency to go all-in on Termageddon
18:50 - The data your website is sharing without you knowing it
21:15 - Inside the $30,000 SIPA demand letters hitting site owners
27:15 - His playbook to buy agencies with zero money down
33:10 - Why your current customers are your best growth channel
35:51 - What's next for Hans, and the move to Lithuania

TEAM
🎙 Host // Andy Milligan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmgdesign/
🎥 Production // MMG Design: https://www.mmgdesign.net/

⚡️ Join the Columbus Marketing Organization: https://www.columbusmarketing.org

In this solo episode, Andy Milligan opens the books on MMG Studio's August 2026 performance — $26K in revenue, a growing enterprise client concentration problem, the studio's first-ever in-person networking event, and the exact subscriptions he's cutting to trim $700 a month in software spend. This is Andy's monthly retro format, run with full transparency on profit, loss, wins, and losses.

CONNECT WITH ANDY

🌐 Website: https://www.mmgdesign.net/

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmgdesign/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulmilligan/

TOOLS I USE

💰 Monarch Money: https://monarch.com/referral/z41ilq6s8l?r_source=copy

📇 Folk CRM: https://try.folk.app/17t000urnxbb

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - The August retro nobody asked for (but you needed)

01:14 - Why I run these every month

02:30 - Opening the books: Monarch Money walkthrough

03:21 - $26K revenue, $378K lifetime, and where it's going

06:14 - The client concentration problem I created

12:14 - The $700 software bill I'm finally cutting

19:34 - My first in-person event: 21 people, 0 regrets

26:33 - The mistake costing me the most: mornings

30:27 - Goals for September and what's next

TEAM

🎙 Host // Andy Milligan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmgdesign/

🎥 Production // MMG Design: https://www.mmgdesign.net/

🔥 Learn, Connect, and Grow With Other Marketers: www.columbusmarketing.org
💎 Our agency (Web + SEO): www.mmg.studio

Angela Troccoli is the Head of Marketing at Revecore and an award-winning marketing executive with nearly two decades leading go-to-market strategy across supply chain, healthcare, and digital commerce. In this episode, she breaks down why marketing goes wrong so often (hint: it's rarely the tactics), what pushed her to write her new book "Signals: Common Marketing Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them," and why AI is accelerating bad strategy just as fast as good strategy for teams that skip the fundamentals. If you lead marketing, sit on a board, or just got asked to "do more with the same budget," this episode gives you language for what's actually going wrong and how to fix it.

CONNECT WITH ANGELA
🌐 Website: https://angelatroccoli.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela1morel/
📖 Book: https://www.amazon.com/Signals-Common-Marketing-Pitfalls-Avoid/dp/B0H4DV7GFD

CONNECT WITH ANDY
🌐 Website: https://www.mmgdesign.net/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmgdesign/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulmilligan/

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Intro
00:07 - Why marketing goes wrong more than people think
01:36 - Marketing is a science, not pixie dust
02:19 - Everyone has a social profile, so everyone thinks they can market
02:52 - The off-the-record story about what a "campaign" actually is
04:47 - Founder-led content isn't lazy, it's strategy
06:03 - The monthly review and quarterly pivot process
07:15 - Leaving 20-30% of bandwidth for reactive news-jacking
09:18 - Building content around three personas, matched by who's speaking
12:11 - The mentor conversation that started the book
15:55 - Twenty interviews, one question: what mistake do you keep repeating?
17:19 - Why "mistakes" became "signals" instead
18:57 - The budget trap every board asks and every marketer falls for
21:34 - Giving marketers a resource to point to when they're the unpopular voice
22:20 - The uncomfortable chapter on restructuring and layoffs
24:16 - Angela's career path from supply chain to global product marketing
27:32 - Even Google, Airbnb, and Instagram make these mistakes
29:18 - Customer advocacy: the most underinvested function in marketing
31:39 - Rewriting the exit strategy chapter for optionality over IPO hype
34:11 - AI is a tool, not a colleague
37:06 - Why QA still matters even when AI is faster
40:00 - Where to find Angela and the book

TEAM
🎙 Host // Andy Milligan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmgdesign/
🎥 Production // MMG Design: https://www.mmgdesign.net