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 as a growth consultant doesn't come from a course or a case study he read about — it comes from having built, scaled, and eventually restructured his own agency, at a young age, in real time. The interesting part of his story isn't the revenue number. It's what that number cost him, and what he changed once he noticed.
From $40 to a $600K agency
Leo's first business was online fitness coaching. He ran it for roughly six to seven months and made about $40. A close friend introduced him to GoHighLevel, and he spent three to four months learning the platform — about a month of that just learning how to build his first funnel.
From there he launched a B2B marketing agency. After roughly a year and a half of intensive work, he reports scaling it to approximately $600,000 in annual revenue at 19 years old, without outside funding.
The hidden cost of growth
The agency worked. It also became demanding in a way that's easy to romanticize from the outside and much harder to live through. By Leo's account, the business he'd built for freedom had started taking his freedom instead — his social life, family time, mental health, and personal time all took the hit. It was fully done-for-you, with limited leverage and a real ceiling on what one founder could carry.
The pivot toward leverage
Leo's response wasn't to walk away from agency work — it was to rebuild how it operated. He transitioned 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 operates at roughly 93% profit margins. Today he helps other agency owners scale using the same acquisition, sales, fulfillment, and retention systems he had to build for himself the hard way.
How Leo approaches agency growth
Leo's framework treats acquisition, fulfillment, retention, and sales as one connected system rather than separate problems to solve independently. In practice, that spans 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 determines client lifetime value.
His stated benchmark for a healthy system: consistently closing and retaining 3–10 clients a week, with an average client lifetime value of 4–12 months. In his view, an agency signing fewer than two or three clients a week, or losing clients inside of three months, has a systems problem — not a luck problem.
Sales psychology and objection handling
Leo studied Psychology at Oxford Brookes, and it shows up directly in how he talks about sales conversations. His take on objection handling runs against the instinct most new salespeople have: avoid pushing back, don't risk looking pushy. Leo reframes the whole interaction — done well, objection handling isn't pressure. It's helping a prospect examine beliefs that might be keeping them from a decision that's actually good for them.
His approach: listen carefully to what the prospect already said they wanted, hold them respectfully accountable to that stated goal, put the decision in perspective, and contrast the future they say they want against the predictable outcome of staying the same. The line he draws is clear — challenge comfort-zone thinking, but never cross into rude, manipulative, or aggressive territory. Frame it clearly, and communicate with empathy.
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, in short: build the system before you need it, not after it's already cost you something. Scaling fast is the easy part to romanticize. Building a business that scales without eating the founder alive is the actual work — and it's the part Leo now spends his time teaching other agency owners to get right the first time.
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