Hans Skillrud on Agency Acquisition & Website Compliance

Hans Skillrud on Agency Acquisition & Website Compliance

I recorded a conversation last week that I have not been able to stop thinking about, and it is not because of anything flashy. It is because Hans Skillrud, co-founder of Termageddon, told a growth story that runs completely against the grain of how most agency owners think about scaling. He did not grind out more cold outbound. He did not throw money at ads. He bought his own competitor, called every single one of their clients personally, and turned that into a multi-six-figure pipeline before he ever built the software company he runs today.

If you run a service business, a web agency, or any kind of B2B marketing operation, there is a lot in Hans's story worth stealing. So let's get into it.

From Groupon to Cold Calling to a Website He Had No Idea How to Build

Hans started his career at Groupon, back when he was employee number one hundred out of a company that eventually grew to something like forty thousand people. He watched the flash sale model work on small businesses in real time, and it planted a seed. What if, instead of discounting a business fifty percent to get it in front of new customers, that business just did a better job of being found online in the first place.

That idea turned into Stick Out Social, an agency Hans started doing social media marketing for small businesses. He learned to cold call from his time at Groupon, and he used that skill relentlessly. One of those calls, to a bar in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, changed the entire trajectory of his career. The owner did not want social media help. He wanted a website. Hans said yes before he had any idea how to build one, searching "how to build a website" with the phone still against his shoulder.

He picked WordPress over Joomla on what he openly admits was a coin flip. That one decision built the foundation for an agency that would eventually complete dozens and dozens of projects, hire a team, and become something real.

The Unsexy Decision That Made Everything Else Possible

Here is the part of the story most people skip past too quickly. Before Hans ever considered acquiring another agency, he had to fix his own business first. At one point he counted up the services his agency was offering. Thirty-seven. Social media, web design, SEO, whatever a client asked for, he said yes.

That is not a niche. That is chaos with a logo.

So he cut it down to one thing: web design, hosting, and support. Nothing else. He told me that decision gave his team a north star for the first time. It also gave future buyers and sellers a much clearer signal of whether they were a fit. You cannot evaluate an acquisition target, or be evaluated as one, when your offering is a moving target.

This is the same principle behind why we niched into healthcare and B2B website work at MMG Studio. When you know exactly what you do and exactly what you do not do, everything downstream gets easier. Sales conversations get shorter. Referrals get more accurate. And in Hans's case, acquisitions get possible.

How a Competitor's Struggling Agency Landed in His Lap

Hans was not out there hunting for agencies to buy. He was interviewing someone for a project manager role, and the candidate turned out to be the owner of a competing agency. The business was not doing well, and the conversation shifted from a job interview to something bigger. Hans ended up acquiring the agency, bringing on some of the team, and inheriting a book of business he did not have to build from scratch.

What he did next is the part that actually matters for anyone thinking about acquisition as a growth strategy. He got on the phone and called every single client personally. He told them who he was, what was changing, and what was not. He gave a few of them quick wins right out of the gate, like fixing a broken Google Map embed on a contact page, just to build immediate trust.

Those calls did not just retain the accounts. They generated a flood of new project requests. Referrals. Upsells. One relationship alone turned into a multi-six-figure-a-year account. Hans was not selling. He was reassuring people who had already been burned by an unreliable agency relationship, and reassurance turned out to be the highest-leverage sales activity he could have done that month.

He also made an important point about how sellers experience this kind of deal. Being acquired lets an owner say "I sold my agency." Quietly shutting the doors means abandoning your customers with no story to tell. That difference matters more than most acquirers give it credit for, and it is part of why sellers are often more receptive to a conversation than you would expect.

Meeting Donata and the Real Origin Story of Termageddon

Hans met his wife, Donata, while she was working at the agency he acquired. She later became a business attorney and, over time, started handling more and more privacy policy work as clients started asking for it. Hans was doing the same thing every web designer has done at some point: grabbing a privacy policy off another website and hoping nobody noticed.

Neither of them liked what they were doing. Donata found the process of manually writing privacy policies repetitive and slow. Hans knew his clients could not afford a few thousand dollars for an attorney to draft one from scratch, and copying language off the internet felt like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Over dinner one night, the idea for Termageddon was born: software that asks the right questions and generates a compliant privacy policy based on which laws actually apply to that business.

Termageddon now serves over ten thousand agencies. Hans eventually made the difficult call to sell his own agency so he could run Termageddon full time with Donata, who is now president of the company. He told me flatly that he is not built to run two companies at once, and that decision has clearly paid off.

Your Website Is Sharing More Data Than You Think

This is the part of our conversation that I think every marketer needs to hear, especially if you manage a website you did not build.

Hans pointed out something most business owners get completely wrong: the belief that "my website does not collect any data." If you have a contact form and a visitor submits it, and you receive that submission in your Gmail or Outlook inbox, you have not just collected their data. You have shared it with a third-party vendor, whether that is Google, Microsoft, or whoever hosts your email. YouTube embeds share data with Google. A Facebook pixel shares visitor behavior with Meta. Heatmap tools share behavioral data with their own vendors. Almost every modern website is sharing data constantly, whether the business owner realizes it or not.

The other point that stuck with me is that privacy law does not care where your business is located. It protects the person whose data was collected, based on where they live. If your website gets traffic from California, Texas, the EU, or anywhere else with active privacy legislation, you may need to comply with laws in places you have never set foot.

We talked specifically about the California Invasion of Privacy Act, known as SIPA, a fifty-year-old law that predates Google itself and has recently been reinterpreted by a group of attorneys sending demand letters to website owners across the country. We had two clients at MMG get hit with SIPA violations this year over a tool called PostHog that was firing before visitor opt-in. It was fixable, but it was also a reminder that compliance is not optional anymore, and most marketers managing a website day to day have no realistic way of staying on top of every law that could apply to them. That is exactly the gap Termageddon exists to close.

What Hans Would Build if He Started an Agency Today

I asked Hans what he would focus on if he were starting from zero in today's environment, with AI reshaping the industry. His answer was not what I expected.

He would buy agencies. Specifically, he would go to sites like BizBuySell and look for agency owners who are burned out or scared of AI eating their business. Instead of paying an upfront acquisition fee, he would structure the deal as a revenue share, paying the seller a percentage of everything earned from that book of business over two to four years. No upfront risk, and a built-in incentive to grow the accounts rather than just hold them steady.

He would also revive something he used to run before AI existed: a one-day website service. Clients would come into the office, leave eight hours later with a finished site, and pay a flat rate for the speed and certainty. With AI now able to accelerate content and copy work, he thinks that model is more viable than ever for agencies willing to build a tight, repeatable process.

And he would niche down, hard. Working with over ten thousand agencies through Termageddon gave him a front row seat to which businesses scale efficiently and which ones stall out under too many service lines. The agencies with a clearly defined lane consistently outperform the generalists.

The Real Lesson Here

What struck me most about this conversation is how much of Hans's growth came from doubling down on the customers he already had, not chasing new ones. The acquisition worked because he picked up the phone and rebuilt trust one client at a time. Termageddon worked because he and Donata solved a problem they were both living through personally. None of it came from a growth hack.

If you are building a service business right now, there is a real lesson in that. Your existing relationships, whether that is a client base, a referral network, or a struggling competitor's book of business, are almost always a faster path to revenue than another round of cold outbound.

You can find Hans on LinkedIn or learn more about privacy compliance for your own website at Termageddon.

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