Victor Gonzalez has spent his career on both sides of the lead business, first as an insurance agent buying overworked leads, now as the founder of Clickrush, a full-service local marketing agency built to do it differently.
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"I've sat on both sides of the lead business — as the agent frustrated by bad leads, and as the founder building something better. That's the whole reason Clickrush exists."
Before Clickrush, Victor was teaching these systems from the inside. This is the keynote he led at the Rising Stars Workshop, breaking down how to win with internet leads — the same playbook he now builds for clients.
Workshop training led by Victor Gonzalez.
Victor played two seasons of professional baseball for the Newark Bears before a career-ending injury to his elbow and shoulder ended that chapter. While rehabbing in Florida, he was coaching a youth travel baseball team, and one of his players' fathers happened to be a State Farm agent. That agent recruited him to do sales in 2014.
He needed to pay bills during recovery, and the job paid better than coaching. It was supposed to be temporary. He never looked back.
Over the next several years, Victor worked his way up at the largest captive insurance agency in the country at the time, starting as an appointment setter, training every new hire's first 90 days, and eventually becoming Life and Retirement Director.
From there he moved to a roughly $20 million Allstate agency in Seattle to build their outbound sales team from scratch. Not long after, his son Max was born, and in October 2019 he opened his own independent agency, Brightway Insurance, which he sold in December 2021, in the middle of COVID.
Owning it taught him something managing never could: how to protect profitability when every dollar is his own. The agency was bootstrapped from day one. In the early years, no matter how much you sell, you're waiting on renewals to catch up with new business before real money starts flowing. He learned to run lean and keep the business productive long before it was comfortable.
The idea came from a frustration he lived through firsthand while building that outbound team in Seattle. He watched agencies buy internet leads sold to multiple agents at once, never exclusive and constantly overworked, while consumers on the other end got frustrated from being contacted by five different agencies about the same inquiry.
He realized he could run the same ads himself, but keep the leads exclusive, branded to him, with messaging he controlled. When he built that system into his own agency, he averaged $60,000–$80,000 in premium a month as a solo agent.
After he sold Brightway, several agents he'd coached wanted the same systems built into their agencies. A three-year non-compete kept him out of insurance, so selling the system as a service was the natural next step. That service became Clickrush, which has since grown from insurance-focused work into a full-service local marketing agency serving businesses across many industries.
Most agencies try to out-spend the lead vendors by buying in bulk and playing a numbers game they don't need to play. Victor's approach is to control the narrative, messaging, and branding instead. It can cost more per lead, but it wins on what actually matters: cost per sale, not cost per lead.
Clickrush works with businesses across many industries today, though insurance is where Victor's insider experience gives clients an edge no outside agency can fake. He's sat on both sides, as the agent frustrated by bad leads and as the consumer targeted by five agencies for the same quote. That dual view shapes every piece of copy, video, and imagery the team builds, grounded in knowing what a day in an agent's life actually looks like: what they spend on leads, what their close rates are, where their salespeople get stuck.
It's also behind one belief Victor holds that most of the industry pushes back on: local SEO (not traditional SEO, not AEO, not GEO) is the most important long-term investment a business owner can make. Most conversions happen in the top three spots of the Google Maps pack, and that's where consumers go first to check reviews before they ever call. It's not just lead generation. It's a brand's first impression.
A good client relationship, in Victor's view, meets people where they already are. Some want a call every other day; others want a quarterly report and nothing else. Clickrush starts with heavy communication early so clients are part of the process from day one, and most naturally want less of it over time, once the results build trust.
The one thing he won't do: chase a moving target. If a client wants to pivot their advertising focus every month (roofing this month, photography next, custom installs after that), there's no way to drive results, because there's no focus to aim at. It's not personal. It just wastes the client's money and the team's time, and Victor would rather not waste either.
The competitiveness from his playing days never left. Victor has had his teeth kicked in plenty of times in this business, but athletes don't accept losses, they study them. He runs Clickrush the same way: learn from the mistakes, learn from the competitors, keep moving.
Outside of work, he's still the kid who's been playing video games since age five, with Call of Duty, Resident Evil, and The Last of Us as regulars.
Clickrush is based in Fort Myers, FL, simply because that's where Victor landed after baseball, with no bigger strategy behind it. The team keeps a physical office for local clients who want to walk in and build a relationship in person, but the reality is 99% of the business happens over Zoom with clients across the country.
Over the next three to five years, Victor wants Clickrush to grow by acquiring other marketing agencies and building a team big enough to serve clients across even more verticals.
But if there's one thing to take from this page, it's this: Victor is here to build a relationship that's actually good for his clients, someone they can turn to for advice and mentorship, someone they can trust. Their success and his are the same thing.
