Episode Summary
In this episode of Agency in Motion, host Tristan Pelligrino sits down with Kris Yankov, Founder of Above Apex, to unpack the decision that transformed his agency from a struggling generalist SEO shop into a focused, specialized link building partner for SaaS and B2B companies. Kris walks through what he calls "generalist hell" — the early days of taking on bad-fit clients on Upwork — and how a deliberate six-month obsession with link building turned his weakest service into his core offering.
The conversation moves through the operational realities of niching down: building SOPs from scratch through hundreds of iterations, treating customer communication "like a boyfriend and girlfriend," and making the hard call to turn away expansion opportunities from enterprise clients in order to protect focus. Kris reflects honestly on the trade-offs of bringing on his first team member during a high-pressure client engagement, the patience required to teach others what came naturally to him and his co-founder Deyan, and how perspective — not just hustle — became his most valuable mindset shift.
The episode closes with Kris's current inflection point: a deliberate pivot toward brand awareness and visibility across AI search platforms, and a candid admission that he wishes he'd started building Above Apex's brand two years earlier. It's a peer-to-peer conversation about the compounding cost of waiting, the discipline of focus, and what three years of agency ownership teaches you about yourself.
Guest-at-a-Glance
Name: Kris Yankov Role: Founder Company: Above Apex Context: Kris co-founded Above Apex with his business partner Deyan after transitioning out of generalist SEO freelancing. The agency specializes in link building and off-page SEO for SaaS and B2B companies, with Upwork serving as their initial client acquisition channel. In under three years, they've scaled the team, built a repeatable delivery model, and are now expanding into multi-layered search visibility (including GEO and AI search platforms).
Find Kris:
- Website: aboveapex.com
- LinkedIn: Active five days a week with founder-level content
Key Insights
Niching Down Is a Trade-Off Decision, Not a Marketing Tactic
One of the most clarifying moments in the conversation comes when Kris describes the framework he and Deyan use to evaluate expansion opportunities — even when a large enterprise client asks them to take on more work. Rather than chasing short-term revenue, they explicitly measure the upside against the downside of breaking focus. As Kris puts it, taking on adjacent services means stepping into "another field" where the team can't be as efficient, can't predict outcomes from past reps, and can't deliver with the same confidence. For agency founders wrestling with whether to expand their service menu, the insight is sharp: focus isn't a positioning exercise — it's an operational moat that compounds the longer you protect it.
The First Hire Doesn't Reduce Your Workload — It Doubles It
Kris is refreshingly honest about what happens when you bring on your first team member. The expectation that a hire takes work off your plate is, in his experience, completely wrong — at least in the short term. When Above Apex landed a major client, he and Deyan onboarded their first hire within two days, which meant simultaneously delivering for a high-stakes account and training someone from scratch. Kris frames this through Alex Hormozi's trade-off lens: the upside is a future growth lever, the cost is months of working twice as hard. For founders romanticizing their first hire, this is a useful corrective — the ROI is real, but it lives on the other side of a brutal onboarding period.
Customer Communication Is a Retention Engine, Not a Courtesy
Kris repeatedly returns to the idea that proactive, almost-daily communication with clients is one of the highest-leverage activities an agency can invest in. He compares it to maintaining a romantic relationship — small, consistent updates compound over time into a feeling of partnership and trust. The strategic insight: it's far easier (and cheaper) to maintain a good client relationship than to repair a soured one. For agencies operating in commoditized service categories where churn is the silent killer, treating communication as a deliverable in itself — with its own SOPs, cadences, and exit interview process — can be the difference between a 6-month engagement and a 2-year one.
Brand-Building Compounds — and Waiting Costs More Than You Think
The most reflective moment in the episode is Kris's admission that, if he could go back two years, he would have started investing in Above Apex's brand authority from day one. He watches competitors who started earlier dominate the conversation and acknowledges the painful math of compounding: the brand you build today won't pay off for 12-24 months, which is exactly why most founders never start. This is particularly urgent in 2025, as search shifts toward AI-driven discovery (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews), where brand mentions, citations, and authority signals directly determine visibility. The lesson for any agency founder still operating purely on outbound: every quarter you delay brand-building is a quarter your competitors widen the gap.
Episode Highlights
The "Generalist Hell" Origin Story [00:01:08]
Kris opens up about the early days of his SEO agency, when he and Deyan were stuck taking on bad-fit clients as freelancers. Link building — the service that would eventually become their entire business — was their weakest area. Their decision to obsess over fixing that weakness for six months is what ultimately defined the agency.
"It's when I was in generalist hell, basically — when we were SEO freelancers getting bad-fit clients trying to improve their work… link building was something that was extremely hard for us, something that we didn't know how to do properly, efficiently, at scale." — Kris Yankov
The "One Avatar, One Service" Turning Point [00:02:46]
Kris credits an Alex Hormozi-inspired conversation with Deyan as the moment Above Apex truly took shape. The decision to commit to one specific buyer with one specific service opened doors they hadn't anticipated and gave the agency a level of operational clarity that powered everything that followed.
"It was the turning point. It was like, we're gonna do this service for this person… super specific niche down, which by itself opens a lot of doors and provides a lot of opportunity." — Kris Yankov
Onboarding the First Hire Under Pressure [00:19:12]
Kris recounts the moment Above Apex landed a major client that exceeded what he and Deyan could deliver alone. Within two days, they brought on their first team member — and Kris is candid about the long hours, the pressure, and the trade-off of working twice as hard to build a growth lever for the future.
"We were handling the client internally, me and Deyan, and at the same time we were onboarding the first person… it was really long hours and a lot of pressure, but this one client allowed us to extremely efficiently develop our service in the span of probably something like 16 months." — Kris Yankov
The Exit Interview Practice [00:17:14]
Kris shares a practice that came out of a previous conversation with Tristan — implementing structured exit interviews when clients pause or end the engagement. The discipline of asking five or six honest, fundamental questions provides immediate, actionable feedback that the team can apply the next day.
"Whenever someone decides to stop working with us or pause working with us… we decided we would really push into having five or six really important fundamental questions… so we can reflect on what is happening and get their two cents." — Kris Yankov
The Regret of Not Building the Brand Sooner [00:31:23]
In one of the most reflective moments of the conversation, Kris admits that brand awareness is the lever he most underestimated — and that starting two years earlier would have positioned Above Apex as one of the dominant names in the category by now. It's a candid lesson for any founder still treating brand as a "later" investment.
"If we started doing this two years ago, now we would probably be one of the main names within the industry, just because it compounds so much and so fast." — Kris Yankov