At a glance
- Company: CLOSR Limited
- Industry: B2B agency growth consulting
- Education: BSc Psychology, Oxford Brookes University (2022–2025)
- Reported milestones: scaled three digital agencies beyond $50,000/month; advised more than 150 agency owners; prior work with Current Consulting Group and Noble Fitness; fractional strategy roles with AI-Clinics and Medspa CEO
Building fast and losing the thing you built it for
Leo Umanskiy's credibility doesn't come from a course, or a case study he read secondhand. It comes from having built, scaled, and then torn down and rebuilt his own agency — at a young age, in real time, with nobody softening the consequences for him. The revenue number isn't actually the interesting part of his story. What it cost him is. And what he changed once he noticed, is.
From $40 to a $600K agency
Leo's first business was online fitness coaching. Six or seven months of work. About $40 to show for it. A close friend introduced him to GoHighLevel, and he spent three or four months learning the platform — a full month of that on nothing but his first funnel.
Then came the B2B marketing agency. Roughly eighteen months of intensive, unrelenting work later, he reports scaling it to approximately $600,000 in annual revenue at 19 years old, with zero outside funding — a number most people twice his age never see, built without anyone's permission or capital but his own.
The hidden cost of growth
The agency worked. That was never the issue. It also became demanding in a way that's easy to romanticize from a distance and brutal to actually live inside. By Leo's account, the business he'd built specifically to buy freedom started taking it instead — social life, family time, mental health, personal time, all quietly drained to keep the machine running. It was fully done-for-you, which meant limited leverage and a hard ceiling on what one founder's hours could carry, no matter how good those hours were.
The pivot toward leverage
Leo didn't walk away. He rebuilt the machine instead. The shift went from an unstructured, fully done-for-you model into a structured done-with-you/done-for-you consulting company — CLOSR Limited, which he says now runs at roughly 93% profit margins. Today he teaches other agency owners the same acquisition, sales, fulfillment, and retention systems he had to build for himself, the hard way, with no one teaching him first.
How Leo approaches agency growth
His framework refuses to treat acquisition, fulfillment, retention, and sales as separate problems — they're one system, or they're nothing. In practice that means Meta advertising for client acquisition, LinkedIn and Instagram acquisition systems, cold outreach pipelines, sales training and objection handling, and the fulfillment and retention work that actually determines lifetime value.
His benchmark for a healthy system: consistently closing and retaining 3–10 clients a week, average client lifetime value of 4–12 months. Fall under two or three clients a week, or lose clients inside of three months, and in his view that's not bad luck. That's a systems problem, plain and diagnosable.
Sales psychology and objection handling
Leo studied Psychology at Oxford Brookes, and it surfaces directly in how he talks about sales conversations. His take on objection handling cuts against the instinct almost every new salesperson defaults to: avoid pushing back, don't risk looking pushy. Leo flips the entire frame — done right, objection handling isn't pressure. It's helping a prospect examine the beliefs quietly keeping them from a decision that's actually good for them.
The method: listen closely to what the prospect already said they wanted, hold them accountable to that stated goal with real respect, put the decision in perspective, and lay the future they say they want directly against the predictable cost of staying exactly where they are. The line he draws is non-negotiable — challenge comfort-zone thinking hard, but never tip into rude, manipulative, or aggressive territory. Frame it clearly. Communicate with empathy. Both, always, not one or the other.
Key lessons
Predictability before scale
Leo's biggest change in hindsight: installing acquisition and fulfillment systems earlier, instead of scaling on effort alone.
Retention matters as much as acquisition
A system that only wins new clients without keeping them isn't a growth system — it's a leak with good marketing.
Revenue without freedom can become another job
$600K a year meant nothing to the parts of his life it was quietly costing him.
Sales means respectfully challenging beliefs
Not pressure — accountability to what the person already said they wanted for themselves.
Systems should decrease founder dependence
If the business stops without you in it every day, it's not a system yet — it's just you, working harder.
The throughline
Leo's philosophy, stripped down: build the system before you need it, not after it's already taken something from you. Scaling fast is the part everyone romanticizes. Scaling without eating the founder alive is the actual work — the part almost nobody teaches, and the part Leo now spends his time making sure other agency owners get right the first time, instead of learning it the way he did.
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