From Operator to Owner: The Marketing Agency Blueprint for Freedom and Scale
Smart Agency Masterclass is the podcast for established digital marketing agency owners who want to stop being the bottleneck in their own business. Most agency founders built something profitable — and accidentally built themselves a job they can't leave. Each week, Jason Swenk interviews agency founders, operators, and industry leaders on the decisions that separate agencies that scale from agencies that stall. Not tactics. Not motivation. Structure, leadership, and the real conversations about what it takes to build an agency that grows without needing you in every room. 950+ episodes. 10M+ downloads. Listeners in 50+ countries. If you run an agency and you want margin, leverage, and a business you could actually sell someday, this is the show.
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The Secret to Running an Agency for 30 Years Without Ever Wanting to Walk Away with Arne Hurty | Ep #930
09/16/2026
The Secret to Running an Agency for 30 Years Without Ever Wanting to Walk Away with Arne Hurty | Ep #930
Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training Arne Hurty is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of , a San Francisco Bay Area B2B technology marketing agency he has been running for 30 years. What started as a $500 illustration job has grown into a full-service agency serving brands like Cisco and ServiceNow — with Arne's son and daughter now working alongside him. In this episode, Arne and Jason dig into what actually sustains an agency owner over three decades: two business partner buyouts, a full pivot to remote work, and a philosophy of building the agency around life rather than the other way around. Subscribe Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Key Takeaways: The pursuit of quality is a bottomless pit — and that's why it works.** Arne says he has never seriously wanted to walk away from the business in 30 years. His reason: improving communication is an endless craft. If work feels boring, he says, "you're just not looking at it enough." The pursuit itself keeps going. Design your agency around your life from the beginning.** Arne made deliberate choices to keep BayCreative at a size that fit how he wanted to live. When COVID hit, going fully virtual wasn't a crisis — it was a natural next step that also opened the door to more diverse talent. Plan every business partner transition before you need to.** Arne has bought out two business partners over 30 years. In both cases, the transitions were manageable because expectations were clear. If you have a business partner, get the valuation method and exit terms in writing before either of you ever considers leaving. Let family earn their seat — don't create one for them. Both Arne's son and daughter joined BayCreative casually while in college and needing money. Their work quality is what made them permanent. Arne didn't build a role to justify hiring them; their capability justified itself. Arne also shares how meeting someone in person at least once — even with a team that is otherwise fully remote — changes the texture of every Zoom call that follows. That first handshake, he says, carries more weight than any amount of video history. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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From Getting Fired to Running a Thriving SEO Agency with Leo Poitevin | Ep #929
09/09/2026
From Getting Fired to Running a Thriving SEO Agency with Leo Poitevin | Ep #929
Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth? Leo Poitevin is the founder of , a fast-growing SEO agency based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, specializing in the French-speaking market. In just a year and a half, Leo grew his team from one to ten people — a journey that started not with a bold entrepreneurial vision, but with getting let go from a job during his probation period. In this episode, Leo and Jason get into what it really takes to go from freelancer to agency owner, how to reclaim your time as you scale, and the hard lessons of hiring your first salesperson. Sponsors and ResourcesE2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Key Takeaways: Build for enterprise value, not freelance income.** The first year and a half of running an agency often means making less money than you would going solo. Leo reframed that trade-off by focusing on what he was actually building: a sellable company with real enterprise value, not just a higher hourly rate. Get your time back by compressing from the top down.** Leo's approach: start at maximum workload, then delegate piece by piece and block more time back into your schedule. If you start at 12 hours a day, there's only one direction to go. Every six months, something that used to live on his plate no longer does. Know what role you're actually hiring for before you post a job.** Leo discovered that "sales guy" isn't one job — it's a closer, an SDR, a full-cycle rep, and more. He and Jason break down why small agencies need someone who can do everything, and why matching your hire to your ICP matters more than industry experience. YouTube builds trust and leads even at small scale.** Without a large following or high-end production, Leo generates consistent inbound leads through long-form screen share videos. If you're struggling with lead generation, he says this is the most underused channel for agency owners. Leo also shares how he built his sales process from scratch using a $7 online course, competitor proposal decks, and conversations with other agency owners — and why he believes you can't survive this industry long-term if you don't genuinely like people. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our [Agency Blueprint](https://flatworm-caterpillar-3mha.squarespace.com/blueprint). Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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How to Remove Yourself as the Bottleneck and Build a Scalable Agency with John Jantsch | Ep #928
09/02/2026
How to Remove Yourself as the Bottleneck and Build a Scalable Agency with John Jantsch | Ep #928
Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth? John Jantsch is the founder of , a marketing agency he built over 30 years and the author of the bestselling book Duct Tape Marketing. He has since licensed his systematic marketing methodology to more than 400 agencies, consultants, and fractional CMOs around the world. In this episode, John joins Jason to talk about the hard lessons of removing yourself from the center of your agency, why smaller agencies have a real competitive edge when they lean into being human, and why the fundamentals of marketing haven't changed; even as AI reshapes the tools we use. Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Key Takeaways: The team is the result, not you. If clients believe you are the product, that's exactly what they'll demand. John shifted the dynamic by bringing team members into discovery calls early, showing clients they were getting a team — and a better outcome — not just one expert. Stop answering, start asking. John stopped giving his team the answers and started turning questions back on them. It felt uncomfortable at first, but over time it built a team that thinks independently and holds him accountable to staying in his lane. Scaling a methodology requires radical simplification. When John began licensing Duct Tape Marketing, he discovered that what lived in his head was 90% too complicated to transfer. It took 5 to 7 years of documentation, iteration, and simplification before the system was truly teachable by others. Marketing fundamentals don't change — delivery does. After 30 years, John's north star is the same: get someone who has a need to know, like, and trust you enough to buy. AI changes how you reach that outcome; it doesn't change what you're trying to accomplish. John and Jason also dig into why trying to look bigger is often the wrong play for smaller agencies, how John grew key team members internally over 10 to 13 years rather than through traditional hiring, and why agency owners need to own a leadership seat with their clients — not just a tactical one. Want a quick overview of John's system? Grab his free ebook at . Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Why Managing to Strengths Beats Managing to Tasks with Laura Lee Jones | Ep #927
08/26/2026
Why Managing to Strengths Beats Managing to Tasks with Laura Lee Jones | Ep #927
Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth ? What if your biggest growth bottleneck isn't your team—but how you're leading them? Laura Lee Jones built Lion Share Marketing into a 45-person healthcare agency with an extraordinary retention record by focusing on people before processes. Rather than forcing employees into predefined roles, she learned to build roles around their natural strengths, creating an environment where team members stay for decades, leaders stay in their zone of genius, and the business continues to grow profitably. In this episode, Laura shares how shifting from task management to strength-based leadership transformed her culture, why founder role clarity drives long-term growth, and why profit—not revenue—is the metric that ultimately matters. What You'll Learn Why treating employees the way you want to be treated creates long-term retention. How managing people around their strengths outperforms assigning work based on organizational charts. The leadership shift from directing every task to building complementary teams. Why founders should protect the work only they can do—and delegate everything else. How staying focused on profit instead of revenue leads to healthier decisions. The connection between founder role clarity, team stability, and sustainable agency growth. Key Takeaways Great retention isn't created through perks—it's built through consistent leadership and genuine care for your team. Stop trying to make people fit every role. Build roles around the strengths your people naturally bring. Founders become bottlenecks when they refuse to let go of work outside their highest-value contribution. Revenue growth means very little if profit, team health, and founder fulfillment are declining. Long-term agency success comes from designing a business where the right people are doing the right work—and the founder stays focused on the responsibilities only they can own. Have you been losing good people and telling yourself it is the market, the economy, or bad luck? Maybe you’ve been watching revenue numbers so closely that you forgot to ask whether the profit and the life underneath them were actually working. Today’s featured guest runs a 45-person data-driven healthcare marketing agency she starting building just four days after being fired from an agency job. She’ll get into why she intentionally built her agency thinking about employee happiness and fulfillment, how she evolved from drill sergeant to leader who plays to people's strengths, and what she has learned about staying profitable and mentally steady across three decades of business cycles. Laura Lee Jones is the CEO of , a Kansas City-based agency specializing in data-driven marketing for the healthcare industry. They build large patient and prospect databases, layers proprietary software on top of them, and uses front-end analytics and back-end ROI measurement to drive healthcare marketing decisions. Laura Lee started the agency in 1995 after being let go from a firm she had run for ten years. She has grown Lion Share to 45 people with a retention rate that is genuinely unusual: some team members have been with her for close to 30 years, and several who could not join immediately due to non-compete agreements came over as soon as they could. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The standard that makes people want to stay 30 years Pairing people with the work they want to do Why revenue is not the number that matters the most Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Why People Stay for 30 Years Laura Lee does not have . She built her agency around a standard she had for herself: treat people the way you want to be treated, and then actually do it rather than just saying it. When she wanted flexibility because she was going to be a mother, she built it into the culture for everyone. When she wanted to leave early on summer Fridays, she made two o'clock the standard. When she needed childcare, she added a daycare to the building so anyone on the team who needed it had access. The outcome of that consistency over 30 years is a team that has watched each other's children grow from birth to college graduation. That kind of tenure is not built through perks or compensation alone, but through a founder who did not treat the team differently than she wanted to be treated herself, and who kept that standard even when the business hit years that were harder than expected. People can tell when a policy is real and when it is marketing. Learning to Lead Instead of Just Direct As Laura Lee herself admits, her early leadership style looked like a drill sergeant with a checklist, trying to fit square people into round holes. The evolution away from that happened as she paid more attention to . Her agency’s standard now is pairing people with the work their natural strengths fit, not assigning tasks based on organizational convenience and hoping it works out. The specific example she gives is herself: she does not take detailed notes and never will. So she pairs herself with someone who does it well, gets the net summary she needs, and stays at the altitude where she is most useful. That same principle applies across the team. The grumpy programmer who is brilliant at the work does not need to be socially engineered into a different personality. They need to be left in the seat where the grumpiness does not matter and the brilliance does. That is a structural decision that keeps the right people doing the right work and reduces the friction that makes good people leave. Revenue Is Not the Number That Matters Laura Lee has grown her agency every year but one in thirty years and she believes this is because she stays in the relationship and business development role that only she can fill, and she does not let herself get pulled into operations. The moment she drifts from that job, the numbers move. That clarity of role is the structural discipline behind the growth consistency. For most founders, a revenue dip triggers alarm regardless of what is happening to margin. The more honest measure is whether the business is , whether the team has what it needs, and whether the founder is actually enjoying the work. Laura Lee frames it the same way: you are the one who picks what your life looks like, whether you are an owner or not, and you can always pick again. Thirty years in, she is still picking. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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They Ran the Same Agency for 8 Years Without Knowing Who Did What with John Scheer | Ep #926
08/19/2026
They Ran the Same Agency for 8 Years Without Knowing Who Did What with John Scheer | Ep #926
Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth ? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training What happens when two founders build a successful marketing agency without ever clearly defining who owns what? In this episode, John Scheer shares how eight years of overlapping responsibilities created hidden friction inside Herman-Scheer, and how a simple role clarification transformed the business. He explains why moving upmarket after the 2022 downturn required a completely different level of strategy, why bringing in a third partner accelerated growth instead of creating complexity, and how his agency is approaching AI as an amplifier of expertise rather than a replacement for it. If you're leading an agency that's outgrown founder improvisation, this conversation is a masterclass in evolving your leadership before it becomes your biggest bottleneck. What You'll Learn Why undefined founder roles create invisible bottlenecks, even when there's no conflict. How a 360° leadership review helped two co-founders finally divide ownership and improve decision-making. What it really takes to move a digital marketing agency from startup clients into Series A and enterprise engagements. Why adding a third partner succeeded after previous senior hires failed. How to evaluate executive talent beyond impressive resumes. Why AI should accelerate strategic thinking, not replace it. The 10-80-10 framework for using AI without sacrificing creativity or expertise. Key Takeaways Clear ownership creates leverage. When founders stop sharing every responsibility, the team gains clarity, decisions move faster, and each leader can operate at a higher level. Market changes often demand business model changes. Herman-Scheer's shift upmarket after 2022 wasn't just about larger clients; it required stronger strategy, operational discipline, and deeper industry expertise. The right partner fills capability gaps, not title gaps. Their third partner succeeded because she wanted to build alongside the digital agency team instead of managing from above. Great branding is driven by judgment, not just creativity. AI can accelerate execution, but differentiation still comes from human insight and strategic thinking. Founder evolution is less about doing more and more about creating the structure that allows others to lead with confidence. Have you and your co-founder been stepping on each other's toes for years, not because of conflict, but because nobody ever drew the line between your roles? Today’s featured guest moved across the country to Santa Monica after his current partner called him and asked him to take a chance on building something of their own instead of “working for the man”. It took eight years of figuring out what not to do, a 360 review that finally split their roles, a niche into healthcare and wellness, and eventually a third partner to unlock what the agency is today. He’ll walk through how the role division changed everything, why going upmarket after 2022 forced a more rigorous kind of work, and what he actually thinks AI is doing to branding. John Scheer is the co-founder and chief creative officer of , a branding agency based in Los Angeles focused on healthcare, self-care, and well-being. They work with clients at three inflection points: zero to one startups, high-growth companies around Series A and beyond, and enterprise legacy businesses looking to regain relevance. Two and a half years ago they brought on a third partner with 20 years of operational and insights experience, which shifted the agency's growth trajectory significantly. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Two founders. No defined roles. The decision to move upmarket as a response to a shifting market Why the third partner hire worked Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. The Two-Headed Monster Problem For eight years, John and Chapin ran Herman-Scheer without defined roles. Neither of them was trying to undermine the other. : sales, creative direction, project leadership, client management. Clients did not always know who to call. The internal team did not always know who to go to. And both founders kept stepping into the same spaces without realizing it was costing the agency something real. The shift came from an outside advisor who ran a 360 review and surfaced the pattern clearly. Chapin got voted in as chief executive and John got voted in as chief creative. The way John sees it, they both got promoted at their own agency. This way, clients knew who handled creative direction and who set operational direction. The internal team had a clear routing system. And for the first time, each founder could fully commit to a lane without the other one also running it. That kind of clarity is not just organizational tidiness. It is what makes both roles more effective and makes the agency feel less like two people doing the same job. Why Going Upmarket After 2022 Required a Different Kind of Agency John’s agency spent several years focused primarily on zero-to-one startups, building deep roots in the Los Angeles venture capital and entrepreneurial community. It worked well until 2022, when the economic environment shifted and early-stage funding dried up. Founders who had been raising millions to launch consumer products suddenly could not. The client base Herman-Scheer had depended on was no longer buying at the same rate. The response was a deliberate move upmarket toward Series A and beyond, and eventually toward enterprise legacy brands looking to regain relevance. That shift required closing the gap between brand strategy and execution, getting closer to conversion rather than staying in the lofty world of brand identity alone, and integrating more rigorous insights work into the process. The outcome is that Herman-Scheer no longer competes on portfolio or personal chemistry alone. is a decision to work with people who understand the healthcare and wellness consumer, the mechanics of those businesses, and what brand actually has to do at each stage of growth. The Third Partner Hire and What Made It Work John and Chapin hit another plateau several years after the reset. Revenue was solid. Growth had stalled and they both knew they did not have what it took internally to push through it. At this point, their advisor introduced them to Allison Servey, who had been head of strategy and insights at a major agency and had reached the point where her job was managing people and traveling rather than doing the work she was good at. They’d already tried with big-company hires and failed, but hiring a senior person who wanted to roll up her sleeves again was the filter. People who come from large organizations where 10 people supported a single role often struggle in lean agency environments. Allison came in wanting to be close to the work, not above it. Within two and a half years she had helped , brought in strong people from her network, and shifted the agency's operational foundation in ways that made the growth trajectory possible. What AI Is Actually Doing to Branding John is confident enough in his work to know that AI is not a replacement for creative thinking. What it has done is allow people to get ideas out more efficiently, which is genuinely valuable when used correctly. The problem is what happens when junior people or clients start treating the output as the finished work rather than as a starting point. Herman-Scheer now includes language in their contracts preventing clients from submitting AI-generated onboarding forms. This means clients were doing it, submitting AI-filled questionnaires without reading them, and expecting the agency to build a strategy from questions answered by a chatbot with no real context about the business. He makes sure AI usage at his agency complies with the 10-80-10 framework: 10% great thinking and prompting going in, 80% of the lifting done by AI, and 10% refinement and judgment coming out. That ratio requires real expertise at both ends. Without it, the middle 80% produces the average of everything the model has seen, which is not a brand strategy. It is a synthesis of other people's brand strategies. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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What Happens When You Build a Team Around Projects Instead of a Vision with Victor Huynh | Ep #925
08/12/2026
What Happens When You Build a Team Around Projects Instead of a Vision with Victor Huynh | Ep #925
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you been hiring people and growing your team without a real plan, only to find yourself with a bigger payroll and a business that still runs through you? Today’s featured guest and his partner started out as graphic designers doing packaging work and then pivoted to web when the real estate crash wiped out their client base overnight. After years of taking on everything, they’re still figuring out how to build the right team underneath them. He walks through what it looked like to grow to 25 people without a plan, how the co-founder dynamic actually works after two decades, and why he’s found that, in a partnership, the disagreements are actually the thing keeping the business alive. Victor Huynh is the co-founder of , a website-first industrial B2B digital marketing agency. He and his business partner Emily met in graphic design school and started freelancing together, with Victor handling sales and Emily anchoring production. Over 22 years, they pivoted from packaging design to web, grew to 25 people at peak, scaled back down, and have since committed fully to the industrial B2B niche. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Learning that clarity outperforms craft in sales The cost of growing without a plan Still dealing with imposter syndrome? Most owners are Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. The Black and White Sign That Rewrote Their Positioning Victor describes the Asian expo as a pivotal moment in his agency’s story and one where he and his partner learned what clarity actually does in a sales situation. Day one at the trade show was a day of fancy brochures, a computer with carousels running, and exactly zero sales. Nobody knew what the agency did, and Victor grew frustrated as he listened to people walk past saying they thought the booth was selling colored pencils. On day two, Emily did not come back. Victor taped a black and white letter-sized sheet of paper in the corner of the table that said "website design" in Chinese and sold five websites. The lesson is that . The brochures were beautiful. The carousels were impressive. Neither of those things told a prospective client what the agency did or why they should stop walking. A simple, specific statement of what you offer is not a failure of presentation. It is the presentation. Growing to 25 People Without a Plan and What It Cost After the trade show success, Victor’s agency grew fast. The strategy, if it can be called that, was reactive: someone needed something, they hired for it. E-commerce, lead gen, social media: they said yes to all of it because the projects were coming in and the team needed to grow to fulfill them. At 25 people, Victor describes feeling like they were selling a specific number of projects every month just to make payroll, and the agency had become something neither of them had designed. The peak headcount created a structure where Victor never fully stepped out of sales. He had a sales team, but it functioned more like a support team. The was not there, and without it the team defaulted to managing up. When the direction is not clear and the founder is always available to fill the gap, the team learns to route everything upward rather than developing the capability to own outcomes independently. What a 22-Year Co-Founder Partnership Actually Requires In their agency partner dynamic, Victor’s partner Emily is the efficient executor. She makes sure things get done quickly, decisions get made, and production hums. He is the visionary and the sales front, in charge of new ideas, new opportunities, and new directions. The gas and the brake. Those complementary traits are also the source of real friction. Victor gets impatient when things do not move fast enough. Emily resists new directions until someone answers who is going to do the work. What keeps the rather than let resentment build. Partnerships where disagreement goes unspoken long enough become toxic. Two decades in, he and Emily still go at it. The difference is that they work through it instead of around it. For solo founders, that sounding board does not exist inside the business, which is one of the clearest arguments for finding a peer room where the same kind of honest conversation can happen without the stakes of a co-founder relationship. Imposter Syndrome Does Not Disappear With Experience Victor names imposter syndrome as one of the things he still works on 22 years in. Most agency owners do. You might feel it as you walk up on stage for a talk and wonder for a second if you should really be there. What we should all learn is that the feeling is not evidence of being unqualified. It is evidence of caring about doing the thing well. What imposter syndrome and delegation have in common is that both require the same underlying move: trusting that the outcome will be acceptable even when you are not the one controlling every detail. The practical principle that runs through this entire conversation is that agency owners should remove the things they should not be doing, one at a time, and do it before it feels urgent to. Victor's efficiency instinct is the same instinct that eventually produces real structural freedom. It does not come from working harder inside the current setup, but from spending the hour building the system that removes the five-minute task permanently. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Is AI Convincing Your Agency Clients They Don't Need You? with Devon MacDonald | Ep #924
08/05/2026
Is AI Convincing Your Agency Clients They Don't Need You? with Devon MacDonald | Ep #924
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Do your clients show up to calls with AI-generated strategies that are mostly wrong, and you then spend half the engagement correcting their assumptions instead of doing the work? Have you had clients who used to trust your expertise now question everything, armed with a chatbot and a YouTube video? Today’s featured guest is an agency owner who came up through programming, crossed into digital strategy, ran creative and media operations inside major holding company networks, and eventually went independent in search of the entrepreneurial freedom that corporate agency life could not offer. He goes into what AI is actually doing to the client relationship and what it means to train a team that can think rather than one that just produces faster. Devon MacDonald is the president of , a Canadian media agency serving clients across North America. His career began in computer programming in the 1990s, working in HTML and SQL for clients in sales and marketing before moving into digital strategy and eventually running a creative agency and then a media agency network inside major holding company structures. Five years ago, he went independent. He built a cross-functional AI team at his agency that includes both technical and non-technical members, operating from the belief that consumer insight and cultural understanding matter as much as data fluency in how AI gets applied. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Clients who have decided AI makes them the expert Is the funnel dead because of AI? Will this skill disappear once we’ve completely stopped using it? Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. The Problem With Clients Who Have Decided AI Makes Them the Expert Devon knows there was already an education deficit in marketing before AI arrived. A generation of performance marketers came into positions of influence having skipped foundational thinking around brand, audience, and strategy. AI compounded that gap by giving them the ability to produce high volumes of output that look credible but are built on faulty premises. As a result, clients now show up with hundred-question emails generated by a chatbot, convinced they have done the strategic work when they have not done any of it. The agency response to this cannot be frustration alone. . Devon's approach is to build client literacy around an abductive strategy: start with the vision, align everything to it, and use that alignment as the filter for which AI-generated inputs are worth pursuing and which are distractions. That kind of structured thinking is precisely what a client who watched one YouTube video about replacing their agency does not have. And it is exactly what keeps the agency relationship valuable even when the client has access to the same tools. Why the Funnel Is Not Dead, It Has Just Accelerated Devon once heard at a conference that the funnel is dead because of AI. He pushes back on this claim saying that the path to purchase has changed. The speed of it has changed. The surfaces where awareness, attraction, and acquisition happen have shifted. But the underlying logic, that a buyer needs to become aware of something before they can want it, and want it before they can buy it, has not changed and will not. The practical implication for agencies is that , not future considerations. Devon describes seeing this in RFPs already: clients are asking explicitly about model optimization and how agencies will help them show up in AI-generated answers. The agencies that can answer that question with a coherent framework are in a different conversation than the ones still positioning around traditional search rankings alone. The Skill That Disappears When You Stop Using It Devon shows genuine concern about what happens when a team . For instance, nobody knows how to navigate without Google Maps anymore. The skill atrophied because the tool made it unnecessary. The same thing happens to strategic thinking inside an agency when AI handles every first-order question without the team being required to form their own answer first. Devon's response to this is to build the AI team cross-functionally, including people whose value is not technical. The consumer insight person, the culture reader, the account lead who understands what a client actually means when they say something: those perspectives shape how AI gets applied. Removing them from the process in favor of pure technical fluency produces faster output that misses the point. Let’s not forget that human judgment is embedded in the workflow, not bypassed by it. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Is Your Best Skill Actually Squashing Your Agency's Growth? with Brett Singer | Ep #923
07/29/2026
Is Your Best Skill Actually Squashing Your Agency's Growth? with Brett Singer | Ep #923
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you willing to give up the work you built the agency around in order to build the agency itself? Today’s featured guest recounts how he and his partner built their agency after a decade working together at the Oprah Winfrey Show. Fifteen years in, they are still figuring out what the founder job actually is versus what they have always been good at. He talks through how the transition from doing to leading actually happened, what it cost him creatively and personally to step out of directing, and what he means when he says that making the video was always the easy part. Brett Singer is a co-founder and principal at , a digital agency based in Chicago specializing in video production, motion graphics, SEO, paid media, and AI search optimization. He and his business partner Dan Fisher both worked at Harpo Studios on the Oprah Winfrey Show for over a decade before launching Bottle Rocket in 2011. The agency built its initial client base entirely from the network that came out of Harpo when the show ended, then invested heavily in their own SEO to shift from outbound to inbound. Brett is now focused on business development, vision, and team culture. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Letting go of the work you love for the future of the agency When the business no longer needs you The hardest part of running an agency Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. The Work You Love Is Not the Work the Business Needs From You Brett spent years at Harpo perfecting motion design and later started Bottle Rocket partly because he wanted to keep doing it. It was work he greatly enjoyed. Unfortunately, he realized that was the wrong job for him, not from a strategic decision but from simple math: when he was in the edit suite, no one was finding the next client. The business did not care how good he was with a camera. I. Letting go of the work he was trained for and genuinely good at did not happen cleanly. He describes it as kicking and screaming and slowly, and that is probably the most honest description of how most founders navigate this. In this case, the difference for him was having his partner, which meant there was always someone to hold the other accountable to the right job. Solo founders have to engineer that accountability differently. But the outcome is the same: the work you loved getting you here is eventually the work that stops the business from going further. The Identity Gap When the Business No Longer Needs You Stepping into the CEO role can feel like loss before it feels like freedom. When the business no longer needs you for the thing you spent a decade mastering, there is a real identity gap. The hours that used to be filled with something you were visibly good at are now filled with work that is harder to measure and slower to produce visible results. Brett went through his own version of this as he transitioned away from directing. He still goes to set occasionally and feels the pull. He made peace with it not by letting go of the creative part of himself, but by redirecting it: into the sales process, into how the agency presents itself, into the culture he is building. The creative instinct did not go away. It found a different channel. That reframe, from "I gave up my craft" to "I applied my craft differently," is instead of a sustained identity crisis. Making the Widget Was Always the Easy Part Brett is clear about something that sounds counterintuitive until you have run an agency for a few years: the actual service delivery, producing the video, building the campaign, running the edit, is the easiest part of running an agency. The hard part is everything surrounding it. Hiring. Culture. Vision. Business development. . None of that was taught. All of it had to be built from scratch by people whose entire prior training was in making the thing. This is the reason most agency founders stay stuck in the work longer than they should. It is the thing they know. Every hour in the edit bay is an hour that feels productive and measurable. Every hour in a hiring conversation or a strategy session feels less certain and harder to justify. The founders who scale are the ones who learn to value the less comfortable work, not because it becomes easier, but because they understand what it makes possible. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Stop Waiting for the Right Revenue to Start Living with Dobbin Buck | Ep #922
07/22/2026
Stop Waiting for the Right Revenue to Start Living with Dobbin Buck | Ep #922
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you been telling yourself that once the agency reaches the next level, you will finally take care of yourself? As an agency owner, you shouldn’t be fitting life into your work schedule; instead you should fit work into your life. Today’s featured guest is not the type of founder who ground his way to success and then learned to slow down. He built the life first and designed the agency around it from early on. He talks about how he built lead flow through SaaS partner ecosystems without ever asking for a referral, why he started charging $500 donations to his veterans nonprofit as the price of a meeting with him, and what it actually looks like to flip your calendar so life is the priority and work fills in the gaps. Dobbin Buck is the CEO of , a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in Dahlonega, Georgia. He came up through the museum world and found his way into the agency space out of necessity after a move to North Georgia. Over two decades, he evolved from Joomla websites to marketing automation to AI, building an agency alongside a team that includes his wife as COO. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Building strong relationships that don’t start with “send me business” Flipping the calendar Putting yourself first is not a reward Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Building Business Development Through SaaS Ecosystems Without Ever Asking for a Lead Dobbin's growth strategy runs counter to how most agencies approach partner programs. The default is to join a partner ecosystem, badge up as a certified provider, and wait for the platform to send over referrals. Dobbin's version starts from the opposite end: show up, bring value, make friends, and trust that reciprocity will follow. He did this first with Infusionsoft after building a vertical solution for a residential real estate client that became a template he could rinse and repeat across hundreds of buyers. Infusionsoft noticed, started sending him to other verticals, and opened doors to more ecosystems from there. The practical principle underneath this is worth naming. The agencies that get the most from partner ecosystems are rarely the ones that . They are the ones who spend long enough demonstrating capability that the referrals become inbound rather than requested. That takes longer. It also produces a different quality of relationship and a different quality of client. Dobbin's most interesting clients came from introductions he never anticipated. None of it came from leading with "send me business." What Charging $500 For Your Time Actually Signals When Dobbin started getting hammered by unsolicited outreach from salespeople and lead generation services, his response was more creative than an unsubscribe filter. Any vendor who wanted a 30-minute meeting with him had to make a $500 donation to his veterans fly fishing nonprofit first. If the business conversation was worth having, the cost per acquisition was already north of $500 anyway. If it was not worth $500, there was nothing to discuss. The filter worked on two levels. It stopped the low-intent outreach immediately. It also generated meaningful donations for a nonprofit he cared about. The lesson here is that your time has a real cost, and building a structure that reflects that cost is not arrogance. It is clarity. Most founders who feel overwhelmed by the wrong kind of attention have not yet made that cost visible. Dobbin did, and found that the people worth talking to were happy to pay it. Flipping the Calendar and What Changed When He Did Dobbin used to work twelve-hour days and fit the rest of life into the gaps his schedule allowed. His kids' soccer games, date nights, time outside: all of it was , which meant all of it was conditional. Every agency owner has experienced this and Dobbin knew it was time for a change, so he loaded his calendar first with everything he wanted to do for himself, and then filled work in around it. Two rounds of sauna and cold plunge, thirty minutes of meditation, one to three hours of reading daily: those go in first. Work finds its place in what remains. The move that tested this the most was taking Mondays off entirely to lead veterans fly fishing trips. His team's reaction was predictable: disbelief, concern about productivity, questions about how he would compensate. His answer was that he would not compensate. He would just take Mondays off. Nothing broke. The work that had taken five days fit into four, and he came into Tuesday sharper and more energized than he had been in years. The carrot he describes, the one that keeps moving no matter how fast you run toward it, stops being motivating the moment you realize it is never going to sit still. Taking Mondays off was how he stopped chasing it. Putting Yourself First Is Not a Reward for Reaching a Certain Revenue Most founders . When the agency reaches the next milestone, then I will take care of myself. The problem is that the milestone keeps moving. The agency gets bigger and the demands grow with it. The window does not open automatically. It has to be forced open deliberately, and waiting for the right time to do it means it rarely happens. Dobbin has been living the alternative version for long enough to see what it produces. He is 60 years old, energized, genuinely happy, and clear that none of it is correlated with a revenue number. The agency is the vehicle. It was never supposed to be the destination. The founders who figure that out early enough to actually act on it are the ones who end up looking back with something other than regret. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Is Low Agency Overhead Actually a Growth Ceiling? With Billy Scott | Ep #921
07/15/2026
Is Low Agency Overhead Actually a Growth Ceiling? With Billy Scott | Ep #921
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you still fixing every problem your team brings you because it feels faster than teaching them how to fix it themselves? Maybe you’re proud of how low your overhead is, but could that low overhead also be a growth ceiling? Today’s featured guest spent seven years knocking on doors selling dry cleaning before he ever thought about digital marketing. He built his agency to serve home service businesses, ran it solo for three years, and is now in the middle of the transition most agency founders dread: building the systems and the team that let the work happen without him in the room. In this conversation, he and Jason work through the Evolution Framework, what the door-to-door years gave him that no formal sales training could, and what the next move looks like from the manager stage. Billy Scott is the founder of , a digital marketing agency serving home service businesses. Before the agency, he spent seven years as a door-to-door salesman for a pickup and delivery dry cleaning service, growing the route to 1,500 customers and $25,000 a week in billings before realizing his ceiling was someone else's decision. He taught himself digital marketing through online courses, launched Grow Marketing six years ago, and ran it as a solo operation for the first three years. He is now building out his team and working toward the Architect stage, with a focus on getting his sales process documented well enough to hand off. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Lessons from seven years in door-to-door sales Is low overhead something to brag about? What the next move looks like for Billy Subscribe Sponsors and Resources Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. What Seven Years at the Door Actually Built Billy will tell you he would not trade the door-to-door years for anything, and for good reason. Standing at a stranger's door with a pitch they did not ask for and a credit card form to fill out on the spot before you leave: that is the highest-friction version of sales that exists. You learn rejection, you learn to read people in seconds, and that being liked is not the same as being trusted. Building that trust takes consistent, repeatable interaction, not a clever line. The psychology Billy took from those years mapped directly onto digital marketing. A website has the same window a door-to-door pitch does: seconds to earn enough interest for the person to keep going. That kind of pattern recognition, built through years of in-person rejection and course correction, is what makes Billy a strong founder-level salesperson. Now the next challenge is not closing more deals. It is instinctively so someone else can eventually do it without him in the room. The Low Overhead Trap For the first three years, Billy ran Grow Marketing alone and measured the health of the business by how little it cost to run. Five hundred dollars in monthly overhead felt like discipline. . He hit forty hours a week of capacity and had nowhere to go. He could not take on new clients or grow revenue. He had built a system that was perfectly designed to stay exactly where it was. The shift came when he and his wife had an honest conversation about what they actually valued, which was time. Low overhead is only an advantage when it does not limit what the business can become. The moment it becomes a point of pride rather than a strategic posture, it starts working against the founder instead of for them. Billy recognized it, made the hires, and has been working through the cost of that transition ever since. Where the Bottleneck Is Right Now and What the Next Move Looks Like Billy is clear about where he is: Manager stage, trying to reach Architect. The work in front of him is structural. Every sales call needs to be recorded. Every client interaction needs a documented process. Every time he solves a problem his team brings him, he is making himself indispensable in a way that compounds against the business rather than for it. He initially . However, this instinct is worth challenging: two visionaries in the same room produce ideas, not execution. What Billy actually needs is someone who can manage themselves, understands the outcome without needing every step handed to them, and who can learn the methodology from the stories rather than from being told what to do. The sales handoff system is the starting point: record every call, build a folder, use AI to extract the framework from what you already do naturally, then shadow and be shadowed until the system exists outside your head. The bottleneck does not move by working harder inside it. It moves when the work that only you can do becomes the work that almost anyone trained well enough can do. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Is the Digital Agency Model Broken, or Are We Just Calling It the Wrong Thing? With Brent Weaver | Ep #920
07/08/2026
Is the Digital Agency Model Broken, or Are We Just Calling It the Wrong Thing? With Brent Weaver | Ep #920
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you running an AI-first agency and telling yourself you have made the shift, when what you have actually done is give everyone on your team a faster version of the same job? After months of AI training, are you wondering why the team still works the same way it always did? Today’s featured guest currently serves a CEO of a white-label agency serving over 400 partner agencies worldwide. He came into the role specifically to go deep on AI, and what he found was not an upgrade to the existing model. It was a fundamentally different model. In this episode, he draws the line between an AI-first agency and an agentic agency, what that distinction actually means structurally, and what the parallel-build approach looks like inside a 400-person operation. Brent Weaver is the CEO of , a white-label digital agency with a team of over 400 people serving more than 400 partner agencies worldwide across web development, SEO, paid media, content, and AI services. Before E2M, Brent built and sold his own agency, UGURUS, where he spent years coaching agency owners on positioning, sales, and growth. He joined E2M deliberately, partly because it gave him a forcing function to go all-in on AI at scale rather than observe it from the outside. Brent has been on the podcast before, , and . In this episode, we’ll discuss: AI-first agencies vs agentic agencies Creating a separate AI services team What happens to thinking when you stop doing it? Subscribe Sponsors and Resources : Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. The Difference Between AI-First and Agentic, and Why It Matters Most agency owners who say they have adopted AI . What’s the difference? Everyone on the team has an assistant, things ship a little faster, and the org chart looks the same, yet the billable expectations have quietly gone up. That is not a transformation. That is acceleration inside an existing structure. An agentic agency is something different: The seats themselves are being replaced by agents. Front-end development: going to an agent. Standard WordPress builds: going to an agent. Content production: already 90 to 95 percent there. The humans remaining in those workflows are the ones responsible for the quality layer and the decisions that require genuine contextual judgment. When describing this structure, Brent is actually describing what E2M is already building inside its own teams, through dedicated agentic squads that operate separately from the traditional delivery team. Why Retrofitting Your Existing Team Is the Wrong Move E2M spent nine months doing what most agencies do: mandatory training, dedicated Fridays, internal incentives, and all-hands sessions. The team showed up, but the adoption did not follow. The problem was structural, not motivational. You cannot ask people who have spent years developing expertise in a specific workflow to simultaneously do that workflow at full speed and fundamentally question whether the workflow should exist. Those are incompatible demands. Brent uses the Blockbuster parallel: Netflix did not ask its DVD fulfillment team to build a streaming platform. It built a separate team for a separate business. . The incentive structures were different. What E2M found was identical: the AI services team they launched separately now approaches 100 people, and those people think about work in a way that the traditional web and SEO teams simply do not. The Two Pizza Team as the Starting Point For agencies that are not 400 people with the runway to build a parallel operation, Brent's practical starting point is the Jeff Bezos two pizza rule: a team small enough to feed with no more than two pizzas. Take the three or four people in your agency who are most curious about AI, most willing to experiment, and least burdened by how things have always been done. Give them a specific problem to solve. Isolate them from the expectation of full billable output and let them build. The reason isolation matters is the same reason the parallel builds at E2M matter. When an AI-native team is embedded in a traditional delivery team, the culture of the traditional team absorbs them. They get pulled into existing workflows to cover capacity. The experimental mandate loses to the billable mandate every time. A separate squad with a separate objective is not a luxury for large agencies. It is the structural condition that allows genuine new capability to develop without being smothered by what the business already needs today. What Happens to Thinking When You Stop Doing It Before AI, Brent recalls he used to write a thousand words a day. Clear writing, shaped by years of intentional practice including time inside Amazon's writing culture. He has noticed that skill is atrophying as he routes more cognitive work through AI. A New York Times study of 350,000 college admissions essays found the same pattern at scale: AI-assisted essays read as more polished and were rated higher by reviewers, but contained fewer novel ideas, fewer dynamic arguments, and less of the fringe thinking that produces genuinely new directions. Should we feel alarmed? Agency founders are creative, resourceful, fast-thinking problem solvers, and those traits make them the people best positioned to direct AI rather than be directed by it. The risk is for , as they will end up with polished output from borrowed ideas. The ones who stay in the seat as directors, using AI to build what they can envision rather than to do the envisioning for them, are the ones who will compound the fastest in an environment where the tools keep getting stronger. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Why These Agency Partners Did an Eight-Month Soft Launch Before the Real Partnership Started with Josh Hanosh & Kevin Howe | Ep #919
07/01/2026
Why These Agency Partners Did an Eight-Month Soft Launch Before the Real Partnership Started with Josh Hanosh & Kevin Howe | Ep #919
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you ever realized that the thing your agency needs most is the exact thing you are worst at? Have you been trying to hire your way to a leadership partner when the right one might already be someone you know? Today’s featured guest built a full-service agency by merging two separate agencies after years of running in the same professional circles. They’ll walk through how the merger actually happened, why they soft-launched it for eight months before making it legal, and how their complementary weaknesses turned out to be the most valuable thing either of them brought to the table. Josh Hanosh and Kevin Howe are the co-founders of , a full-service digital marketing agency. Kevin started his agency in 2010 after the web division at his employer shut down, building from a single client into a team over fifteen years. Josh left eight years of teaching math and computer science after a student asked him why he was not doing what he told them to do. They merged their two agencies after years of friendship and peer mentoring, soft-launching the partnership for eight months before combining finances and legal structure. Three29 has since built Visible, an AI-powered analytics and optimization platform, and is now positioning around GEO alongside traditional digital marketing services. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The partnership soft launch What the first twelve months looked like How a career in teaching made Josh a better manager Subscribe Sponsors and Resources : Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Why the Merger Happened and What Made It Different From a Hire Kevin had tried to solve his growth ceiling the usual way: salespeople, key employees, internal promotions. None of it held. The ceiling was not a skills gap that a hire could close. It was a leadership gap that required someone . That is not something you can interview for or create through a compensation structure. The conversation about merging with Josh happened almost by accident and moved quickly once it started, because both of them already knew what the other could do. What made the arrangement structurally different from other partnerships either had seen is how they entered it. Instead of signing papers and hope for the best, they worked together for eight months with shared clients but separate finances and a clear exit ramp if the working relationship did not hold. That trial period removed the pressure that tends to make founders commit to the wrong arrangement before they have enough information. By the time the legal structure was formalized, they already knew they worked well together and understood how their individual strengths fit without overlap. What the First Twelve Months After a Merger Actually Cost Kevin and Josh admit the first year was harder than expected and produced less than either of them had projected. Integrating two teams, two client bases, two financial structures, and two ways of doing things took nearly all of the bandwidth they had assumed would go toward growth. The things they wanted to build together, the new positioning, the new service lines, the platform they eventually launched: those did not start moving in any real way until the second year. This is a pattern worth understanding before any founder considers a merger as a growth strategy. creates a temporary period of higher complexity, not lower. The payoff is real. Josh describes having a partner with genuine ownership mentality as something no hire ever delivered. Kevin describes having Josh handle the strategy side as giving him back the work he is actually built for. But neither of those outcomes arrived on day one, and founders who go in expecting immediate lift will misread the first twelve months as evidence the merger was a mistake. How Teaching Prepared This Owner to Manage an Agency Team Not every agency owner is cut to be a manager, and many admit to being terrible at it. However, Josh's teaching background actually gave him just what he needed to succeed: The patience to rather than handing it to them The ability to explain complex concepts one level above where the other person is, not ten levels above The instinct to serve rather than impress These are not soft skills. They are the exact capabilities that determine whether clients stay, whether junior employees grow into senior ones, and whether a founder can eventually step back without the team falling apart. In fact, one Mastermind member hires former teachers specifically because they can onboard and train in a way that most founder-operators cannot. The person who makes clients feel smart instead of dumb, who can walk a prospect through the agency's entire process without fear that the prospect will go do it themselves, is the person who wins the relationship. Josh built that instinct over eight years before he ever had a client. The Trap of Too Many Good Ideas at Once Agency owners are often visionaries, which can be both a strength and a challenge. It can be a source of many distractions unless there's someone there to slow you down. When Three29 set out to build Visible, an AI-powered analytics and optimization platform, the opportunity was obvious. However, the execution challenge was equally obvious: building a software company while continuing to deliver exceptional client work. With two visionary founders, a team operating at full capacity, and enough ideas to fill the next three years, something had to give. The team pushed back, and they were right to do so. A healthy leadership team doesn't exist to say yes to every new idea. It exists to create the discipline that turns the right ideas into reality. Vision provides the acceleration, but execution requires brakes as much as a gas pedal. Founders should expect their teams to challenge priorities, question timing, and protect focus. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918
06/28/2026
The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you gotten mediocre output from AI and blamed the tool? Are you running a marketing team that is still activity-based when the clients who trust you need you to own outcomes? Today’s featured guest came up through the Navy, where he learned that calm in chaos comes from frameworks, not confidence. In this episode, Kevin walks through SMAC, the military-derived operating framework he uses with clients, employees, and his own agency. He also gets into the Iron Man model for AI usage, how he cut a two-day research process to eight minutes, and what his Red Lens tool does before any campaign goes out the door. Kevin McGrew is the founder and CEO of , a demand generation agency based in Southern California. He served in the Navy after high school, where he discovered that elite performance under pressure is a function of drilled frameworks, not natural ability. He went on to found and exit three businesses before launching Strategos, which started as a social media agency at the dawn of Facebook business pages and has since evolved into a full demand generation model. Kevin trains his team and his clients on the SMAC framework and has rebuilt his entire production model around what he calls human-led, AI-amplified operations. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Kevin’s SMAC Framework for successful campaigns The Iron Man model for human-AI relationships How to get a resistant team to use AI Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. Why Spray and Pray Is Still the Default and What SMAC Replaces It With In his time in the Navy, Kevin was impressed by how cool, calm, and collected the SEALs were when dealing with stressful situations. The reason for this was basically training and frameworks. This is something he applies to every aspect of his life, and it’s the tool he uses to train his team on how to build winning campaigns with the SMAC framework, which comes directly from military operation: Shoot: t with enough specificity that you are not wasting ammo. In marketing terms, that is ICP clarity before any campaign launches, understanding who you are looking for before you spend a dollar trying to reach them. Move: staying agile and not sitting still long enough for the competitive environment to get a clear bead on you. Adapt: this is the data discipline: running campaigns on real signals rather than assumptions, the way combat aircraft are identified friend or foe before anyone pulls a trigger. Communicate: this refers to preparation, having the right message built before you need it rather than scrambling to write copy mid-campaign. The reason most agencies default to activity-based marketing instead of this kind of disciplined execution is the same reason Kevin's early Navy self had no framework for anything: nobody built it for them. Spray and pray is what happens when the target package is unclear and the pressure to produce something is higher than the standard for producing the right thing. SMAC does not require a military background. It requires deciding, before the work starts, that clarity is worth more than speed. The Iron Man Model and What the Suit Cannot Do Without the Operator Kevin uses Iron Man to frame the human-AI relationship. Basically, the suit by itself is junk. Tony Stark is the variable that matters. AI handles research and synthesis, first draft production, and reporting narratives, the parts of the work where speed and information aggregation are the constraints. The human operator stays accountable to the client, owns the strategic direction, and runs everything through a quality check before it goes out. The practical output of this model is striking. A competitive landscape analysis that used to take two and a half days of dedicated people hours now takes eight minutes. Monthly client reports that required two hours of prep are now twenty minutes. That compression is coming from building the right AI infrastructure, training it on your frameworks and your quality standards, and having the discipline to . The agencies getting burned by AI right now are the ones treating the first draft as a finished output. The ones building leverage are the ones who figured out what the suit is actually for. The Red Lens: Why You Need a Skeptic Before Anything Ships AI is optimistic about its own output. It produces something impressive-looking and fast, and the human reviewing it gets pulled into the quality of the presentation rather than the quality of the thinking underneath it. This is why Kevin built an internal tool called Red Lens. Red Lens is an agent trained as a skeptic that reviews every campaign output before it launches. It runs Gary Klein's pre-mortem framework: instead of reviewing what went wrong after the fact, it anticipates what is going to fail before money gets spent. The results of running this tool on their own output have been instructive. The tool flags messaging aimed at the wrong stage of the buyer journey, audiences that do not match the campaign brief, and positioning claims that cannot hold up under scrutiny. It catches things the human team missed because they were too close to the work. Every agency that is shipping AI-assisted content without a systematic skeptic layer is doing the equivalent of proofing your own copy. You see what you intended to write, not what you actually wrote. Red Lens is the outside read that makes the inside work trustworthy. Crawl, Walk, Run: How to Get a Resistant Team Actually Using AI How do you get a team that thinks AI is cheating ? Kevin approached the solution at the operational level. The answer was not a training session or a mandate. It was engineering small, undeniable wins at the individual level before asking anyone to change how they work at the system level. Kevin calls them micro moments of awesomeness: twelve to fifteen small experiences where a team member feels the tool working for them rather than threatening them. Crawl, walk, run is the philosophy underneath it. You do not learn to sprint before you can stand. You master the foundation layer until it becomes the floor, and then you add the next layer on top of that. The agencies that have struggled most with AI adoption inside their teams are the ones that announced the new direction without engineering the experience of what it feels like to win with it. Giving someone a taste of the efficiency before asking them to commit to the change is not soft management. It is how behavioral adoption actually works. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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The 80% Rule That Frees Agency Founders from the Operator Seat with Mimi Banks | Ep #917
06/24/2026
The 80% Rule That Frees Agency Founders from the Operator Seat with Mimi Banks | Ep #917
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you still inside every client relationship because no one on your team has been given the room to own one? Have you hired people who look great on paper only to later discover the skills do not actually transfer? Today’s featured guest built her agency deliberately, one client at a time, carrying systems from her years at L'Oréal before anyone told her those systems would matter. She talks about how she structured accountability on her team from the beginning, how she filters out candidates who cannot think without AI holding their hand, and why she stopped caring about working with the sexiest beauty brands and started caring about working with the right ones. Mimi Banks is the founder and CEO of , a New York-based social media agency specializing in beauty. She spent years at L'Oréal, where she was among the first people to build social media infrastructure at the company, then moved to a Paris-based startup before eventually launching MB Social. Her team of 25 now handles social strategy, community management, and content for beauty brands across the market. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Starting off with a vision on accountable vs responsible Can your team do 80% of what you do? Then you’re set Why she stopped chasing the wrong clients Subscribe Sponsors and Resources : Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Building From the Beginning with Systems, Not Just Instinct Mimi came into agency ownership with something most founders spend years trying to build after the fact: . Her time creating social media infrastructure at L'Oréal gave her a process orientation before she had a team to apply it to. When she started bringing people on at MB Social, the systems came with her. The ways of working, the documentation, the clarity around who was responsible versus who was accountable: those were in place because she had already built them once somewhere else. For instance, she started off with clarity on the distinction between responsible and accountable. She positioned herself as accountable from day one while making sure there was always a specific person responsible for each piece of work. That structure kept her from becoming the default executor on everything, which is the trap most founders walk into when they hire without clarifying ownership. The 80 Percent Standard That Actually Frees You Mimi is far enough along in her evolution that she no longer reviews most of what her team produces. She trusts the people leading each department to . Getting there required learning to live with the gap between what she would do and what her team does, and deciding that gap was acceptable. This is a framing every mastermind member knows: if your team does 80 percent of what you would do, that is good enough. Because you cannot do a hundred percent of everything, and the cost of trying is that you stay in the operator role indefinitely. The coaching method Mimi asks her leadership team to apply is asking questions. Similar to the Mastermind’s 1-3-1 method, it’s basically about asking questions that will help your team come up with options they have already considered, which leads to them coming up with the solution on their own. Do that enough times and the team stops treating the founder as the answer key. Hiring for Beauty When Everyone Says They Know Social The challenge Mimi keeps running into in hiring is the gap between what candidates say they can do and what the work actually requires. Social media for enterprise beauty brands is not the same skill as posting on a personal Instagram. The strategy is more complex, the client demands are higher, and the responsiveness required is relentless. Candidates do not always know that going in, and some of them figure it out in ways that are expensive to the team. The hiring process she built with Hireflex added a video interview layer with no retry option that filters for candidates willing to do the uncomfortable thing even when it is not required. From there she takes the transcripts, runs them through AI against a scoring rubric tied to the job description, and uses that data alongside her own read to make decisions. What she is testing for is the ability to think, not just to produce a clean output with AI assistance. The perfect presentation that does not match the resume tells her nothing useful. The candidate who works through a problem imperfectly, in their own words, tells her a great deal. Designing the Agency Around the Clients You Actually Want Mimi stopped chasing the sexiest beauty brands. Not because she cannot get them, but because sexy and right are not the same thing. Payment terms that stretch to 120 days, clients who treat the team poorly, brands that want work done yesterday and deliver assets a month late: . She now runs the agency with a no bullshit attitude and is quick to address when a client's behavior affects her team. That boundary is what makes it possible to keep the team she has built. The version of client selectivity that actually holds is based on being clear enough on what you are building that you can recognize a client who does not fit before the contract is signed. After all, client relationships are like dating: you have to see if you get along before you commit, because the worst version of a client relationship looks a lot like a bad marriage, and the damage it does to a team is not undone when the contract ends. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916
06/21/2026
What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you trying to sell a service so specialized that closing new clients feels like it can only come from you? What do you think about how AI is reshaping your industry and where that leaves the human at the center of it? Today’s featured guest came up through luxury automotive, spent years learning how cultural nuance can derail a campaign that looks perfect on paper, and built a niche precise enough that she can spot from two miles away when someone writing about influencer marketing has never actually run a campaign. In this episode, she’ll discuss what makes international influencer work fundamentally different from domestic campaigns and what AI-generated influencers mean for an industry built on human authenticity. Jeanette Okwu is the founder and CEO of , an influencer marketing agency based in Berlin. Her background spans social media strategy, brand research, and influencer marketing across luxury automotive brands including Jaguar Land Rover and Mercedes-Benz. That global scope became the foundation for her agency’s core differentiation: running influencer campaigns that actually account for cultural nuance in each market rather than pushing a headquarters strategy downward and hoping it lands. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Building international campaigns understanding regional nuances How to overcome the expert-owner bottleneck problem Can AI influencers replace real ones? Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. Why International Campaigns Break When You Treat Every Market the Same Early in her career, Jeanette managed 24 markets at Jaguar Land Rover, which helped her understand that what works in one country does not translate by default. A TV spot that runs cleanly in Europe cannot air in the Middle East if it shows upper arms or alcohol. A campaign strategy built at headquarters and handed down to regional teams will get implemented, but it will not perform, because every market has cultural specifics that only someone operating inside that market will catch. The agency she built is the direct expression of that knowledge. Beyond Influence does not run German campaigns and call it international work. It builds campaigns from the ground up with an understanding of and what they expect from the creators they follow. That distinction is hard to replicate without the years of field experience behind it, and it is exactly the kind of institutional knowledge that becomes a real moat when the rest of the market is running generic global strategies. The Sales Bottleneck That Comes With Deep Expertise Jeanette is candid about where she is stuck: sales still runs through her. This is something she has tried to change, but influencer marketing is still a new enough discipline that clients want to hear from someone who demonstrably knows what they are talking about. She frames it as expertise selling and she is probably right that some of it is structural to the space. But she also hears herself in the answer, acknowledging a degree of control that she knows is not fully serving the agency's ability to grow. The necessary shift in cases like this doesn’t point toward finding a salesperson who already knows influencer marketing. The real solution will come from finding someone with the right consultative instincts and then giving them the success stories and methodology that let them carry the conversation. Such is the case of , who did not know what an agency was before joining the team. What he had was the ability to listen, qualify, and translate client pain into a path forward. That skill can be trained on the specifics. The instinct behind it cannot. What AI Influencers Actually Mean for the Industry Jeanette knows the question that is currently on every client's mind: will AI-generated influencers replace the real ones? Her answer is more nuanced than the headlines. AI avatars already perform comparably to human creators on certain content types. Brands are building owned avatars that show up on time, never gain weight, never create a scandal, and can post from six locations simultaneously without a travel budget. That part of the market is real and growing. What AI cannot replicate is the reason people follow a creator in the first place. The parasocial relationship that makes influencer marketing work is built on the sense that the person on screen is real and reachable. When a follower knows they will never be able to meet the creator, the connection breaks. That is the line Jeanette draws: AI content can perform well for product exposure, but for the kind of community trust that turns followers into buyers over time, . The agencies that understand where that line sits will be the ones helping brands draw it correctly rather than chasing the cost savings of going fully artificial before the audience has stopped caring about the difference. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Your Agency Partner Wants Out. Now What? with Tim Bouchard | Ep #915
06/17/2026
Your Agency Partner Wants Out. Now What? with Tim Bouchard | Ep #915
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you ever sensed that you and your business partner want different things, but neither of you has been willing to say it out loud yet? Today’s featured guest bought out his co-founder in 2020. During a pandemic and two months after his first child was born. In this episode, he walks through what that transition actually required, how a black widow client almost derailed the whole thing, why niching into healthcare unlocked a sales clarity he had never had before, and more. Tim Bouchard is the owner and CEO of , a healthcare marketing agency based in Buffalo, New York, that delivers optimized marketing campaigns that capture the imagination of their audience and successfully convert them to prospects. Tim started the agency in 2010 alongside a co-founder, having come up through web design and digital development. After 10 years in partnership, a difference in vision and personal direction led to a buyout in late 2020, which Tim financed through an SBA loan while managing a new baby, a pandemic, and a client that represented 38% of agency revenue. He is now five and a half years post-buyout, has a core team that has been with him through the transition, and has fully committed Luminus to the healthcare niche. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The first order of business post-buyout The black widow client problem Niching down into healthcare Subscribe Sponsors and Resources : Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. What Nobody Tells You About the First Six Months After a Buyout Tim's instinct after the papers were signed was that the agency would feel like his within a few months. The vision was clear. What he did not anticipate was that none of the work he actually wanted to do could happen yet. The first order of business was not building toward a new direction. It was . Client relationships had to be managed carefully, particularly with the black widow account that accounted for 38% of monthly billings. The team had to be reassured that the transition was amicable and not a signal that the agency was in trouble. Production gaps left by the departing partner had to be filled through promotion and new hires, all in the middle of COVID hiring conditions, with an SBA loan payment already running. As a result, the feeling that he had actually built the foundation he wanted did not arrive until roughly two and a half years after the buyout closed. The expectation that structural change happens quickly is one of the most expensive assumptions a founder can carry into a transition. The Black Widow Problem and What It Revealed About a year and a half after the buyout, the client representing 38% of Luminus’ revenue left. What that exit revealed was that the entire team structure had been built around servicing that client. Two account people for a sub-million-dollar agency made sense when a single client demanded that level of coverage. It made no sense for . The loss forced a cleaner look at which people, processes, and positions belonged in the agency Tim wanted to build versus the one he had inherited through the transition. Four core team members who had been with him for eight or more years remained. Positions that had been built around the black widow were eliminated. That kind of correction is painful, and it is also necessary. An agency that has never stress-tested its structure tends to discover what does not belong only when something large enough forces the question. What Niching Into Healthcare Actually Unlocked Tim resisted narrowing down for the same reason most agency owners do: it felt like reducing the addressable market and therefore reducing the chance of success. The shift into healthcare happened only after the post-buyout chaos had settled and he could see clearly what the agency was actually good at. . Sales conversations became easier because the problem was always the same. Content development became possible because the topics did not change from client to client. The sales message stopped being a generic positioning statement about branding and became something specific enough to open a door: a healthcare practice owner can hear "I might be able to help you with compliance" and immediately understand what is being offered. That kind of entry point does not exist for a generalist agency, because a generalist has no right to claim expertise in any single area. The niche gave Tim something specific to stand on, and that specificity is what allowed Luminus to sell nationally instead of depending on local referrals from Buffalo. Building a Team That Owns Its Own Processes Tim advocates for being transparent with your team as a way to create real ownership of the work. Quarterly financials are shared. Profit sharing is tied to net profit, and the team is updated on that number throughout the year. Client relationship status is visible. When people can see the whole picture, they make better decisions within their own roles without needing to ask. The same principle applies to how SOPs and technology choices get built at Luminus. Tim does not hand down a finished process and tell the team to follow it. He invites the relevant people into the build, acts as a guide and quality check, and then hands ownership back to the team. The process they build is theirs. They understand it because they made it. A process handed down from the founder gets followed when the founder is watching. A process built by the team becomes part of how they work. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Your Agency Does Great Work So Why Do Clients Choose Someone Else? with Bianca Beatty | Ep #914
06/14/2026
Your Agency Does Great Work So Why Do Clients Choose Someone Else? with Bianca Beatty | Ep #914
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you ever lost a pitch you were sure you had won on merit? Or if you did win the account, have you ended up with clients that only want to talk to you? Today’s featured guest came up through seven years as head of marketing at a lean e-commerce company, where wearing every hat was not optional. In this episode, she talks about how a story about sorting fish as a child became the deciding factor in a competitive pitch, why genuine connection is not a soft skill but a structural advantage, and what happens to your agency when you never learned to let clients connect with your team instead of just with you. Bianca Beatty is the founder of , a full-stack boutique agency based in San Francisco offering everything from events to go-to-market strategy, social media, and brand communications. Before launching the agency in 2018, she spent nearly seven years as head of marketing at the largest online marketplace for antiques and vintage, where she built her foundation in SEO, paid ads, email, product placement, and revenue-driven decision making inside a lean team. She is also a licensed realtor, a fly fisher, and a former child caviar industry worker. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The story that won Bianca an account over portfolio The double-edged sword of being the person clients want to talk to You do NOT have to work with everyone Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. A Story Can Win the Room Before the Work Does Bianca walked into a pitch for a caviar client with strong work and solid positioning. She almost did not mention that as a child, she spent a summer on her father's commercial fish house on the water in Florida, separating fish by sex for roe sold to China. She mentioned it. She won the pitch. The client told her afterward that . The reason that moment is worth examining is not that personal stories win pitches. It is what the story actually communicated. It showed the client that Bianca understood the product from a level most marketers never will, that she had genuine curiosity about the industry, and that she was someone the client wanted to spend time around. A competitor with equally strong work and no story was indistinguishable. Bianca was not. Proof of capability opens the door. The story is what makes the client hold it open. When Your Personality Becomes the Bottleneck Bianca is honest about the double edge of being the kind of person clients want to talk to for two hours. The connection that wins the pitch is the same connection that makes clients want to route everything through you. Calls that run long, decisions that wait for your availability,: these are not signs that you are doing something right. They are early symptoms of a founder dependency problem that compounds as the agency grows. When the founder is most connected person in their agency, they’re also the most trapped. Every client relationship that runs through him is a ceiling on how much the business could grow without him. The structural fix is not to become less personable. It is to build a team that is also personable, to hire for the same quality of human warmth and genuine curiosity that wins clients in the first place, and to let those people develop their own relationships. The goal is a team that holds the relationships well enough that the clients stop thinking about whether you are in the room. Picking Clients Before Clients Pick You Bianca is clear on something that most agency founders only learn after absorbing a nightmare client or two: you do not have to work with everyone. Early on, the answer is yes to almost everything because the pipeline is thin and the pressure to cover costs is real. As the agency develops a track record and a clearer sense of its own values, the ability to be selective is not a luxury. It is a structural protection for the team. The version of this that holds up over time is not just about avoiding difficult clients but about actively going after the clients you want, pitching yourself to companies that interest you even when they are not publicly looking, and staying honest about fit before contracts are signed rather than after scope has been blown. When , the work is better, the relationships last longer, and the agency does not spend the Monday morning meeting talking about which client made last week miserable. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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The Storytelling Framework That Makes Agencies Impossible to Ignore with Park Howell | Ep #913
06/10/2026
The Storytelling Framework That Makes Agencies Impossible to Ignore with Park Howell | Ep #913
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you ever pitched a client and led with everything your agency does well, only to watch their eyes glaze over halfway through? What you’re missing is positioning copy that actually moves people. Today’s featured guest has spent 40 years in the advertising and branding world, the last 20 of them devoted entirely to one question: why do some messages land and others disappear? In this episode, he’ll walk through the storytelling frameworks he pulled from Hollywood screenwriting, evolutionary biology, and 12 years of podcasting, and then apply one of them live to Agency Mastery in real time. Park Howell is the founder of an agency he opened in Phoenix in 1995 and grew from a one-man operation to a team of 20 and beyond. He is now a full-time consultant, speaker, and coach on the business of story, and the host of , which he has been running for 12 years. Park has been on the podcast previously , how agencies fail to use it, and how, used, correctly it can help you connect with clients. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Is your agency telling the wrong story? The And-But-Therefore Framework How learning about Hollywood screenwriting can help you improve your proposals Three Forces of Trust Your Story Needs to Build Subscribe Sponsors and Resources : Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Why Agencies Are Telling the Wrong Story The default agency pitch goes something like this: we have the best people, the best process, and a portfolio you will love. We are customer-centric, we care more, and we will be a true partner. And simply put, if every agency in the room is saying the same thing, none of it creates separation, none of it creates trust, and none of it gives a prospect a reason to remember you when the meeting ends. The root problem is that from the inside out. They start with what they offer and work backward toward why a client should care. The structure that actually works is the opposite: start with the audience, name what they want, name what is standing between them and that outcome, and only then introduce how you help close that gap. The story is not about the agency. The agency is the guide. The client is the hero. The moment that inversion happens in how an agency frames its pitch, its content, and its proposals, the entire communication dynamic shifts. The And-But-Therefore Framework, Applied Live Park gave a live example of using Agency Mastery as the subject. The structure is deceptively simple: agreement, contradiction, consequence. You establish something the audience knows to be true about themselves. You introduce the contradiction, the reason they do not yet have what they want. Then the therefore: what becomes possible when that contradiction is resolved and how you help resolve it. The exercise surfaces something worth paying attention to. When Park asked for the one-word theme of Agency Mastery's story, he pushed back on it being focus. Why? It’s a verb, a mechanism. The emotional outcome is actually freedom. You want freedom, but you do not have freedom, therefore here is how to get it. The distinction is not semantic. Copy that leads with a mechanism asks the reader to do intellectual work. Copy that leads with an emotional outcome pulls them forward before logic enters the picture. The and-but-therefore framework makes that difference visible and correctable in under five minutes. What Hollywood Screenwriting Has to Do With Your Next Proposal Park's Story Cycle System draws directly from the hero's journey and Blake Snyder's 15 beats, the frameworks professional screenwriters use to structure everything from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz. The parallel between those two films is genuinely worth sitting with: same structure, same emotional beats, same character archetypes, separated by four decades and completely different settings. The reason the pattern keeps appearing is not coincidence. It is the way human beings have organized meaning since the first stories were carved into clay tablets. A practical application for agency pitches. Before the next proposal goes out, write an and-but-therefore for the prospect. A single focused statement that demonstrates you understand what they want, why they do not have it yet, and what changes when they work with you. Bring that into the room instead of a feature list. The agencies that win consistently do not win on credentials. They win because they showed up having already done the work of understanding the client, and the and-but-therefore is how that understanding gets made visible from the first sentence. The Three Forces of Trust Your Story Needs to Build When the and-but-therefore is executed well, it does not just clarify a message. It builds trust across three dimensions simultaneously. : you know what they are trying to achieve. They feel appreciated: you recognize why that outcome matters to them. And they feel that their current struggle is real and acknowledged: you are not glossing over the gap between where they are and where they want to be. Most agency communication fails on the third dimension. It jumps too quickly to the solution without spending enough time in the problem. When a prospect does not feel that their frustration has been fully seen, the solution that follows lands as a pitch rather than as a read. The difference between a founder who says "I just want more freedom" and a message that reflects back "you started this business for freedom and the business owns you instead" is in how heard the person on the other side of that message feels. That is what separates the story everyone remembers from the one nobody does. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Built a 200-Person Agency, Why Cut It in Half? With Hope Horner | Ep #912
06/07/2026
Built a 200-Person Agency, Why Cut It in Half? With Hope Horner | Ep #912
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you ever hired your way into a problem? Have you promoted your best people into management roles and watched them struggle, not because they lacked talent, but because nobody asked whether that was actually the job they wanted? Today’s featured guest grew her agency team to nearly 200 people before making the deliberate decision to scale back to around 75. She did it not because the business was failing, but because she had learned the hard way that headcount is not leverage. In this episode, she walks through what each stage of that growth actually cost, how she thinks about the difference between a manager and an executive, and why going all in on one service in 2017 was the scariest and most important decision she made for her agency. Hope Horner is the co-founder and CEO of , a video content agency based in California that produces commercials and primarily works with enterprise clients. She started the company in 2014 in her bedroom with two co-founders, betting that affordable, accessible video content would become essential for brands who had been priced out of the market. She was right. Lemonlight grew to nearly 200 employees before a deliberate rightsizing brought the team to around 75. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The difference that going all in on one niche made The mistake fast-growing agencies make Distinction between manager and executive Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. Why Going All In on One Thing Was the Decision That Changed Everything In 2017, Lemonlight was doing what a lot of agencies do: offering paid advertising, web design, social media, and video production, because saying yes to everything felt safer than narrowing down. Hope and her co-founders made the call to turn all of that off almost overnight and go all in on video. This decision cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue at the time. It also , what it was building toward, and who it should be talking to. The downstream effects of that decision compounded over years. As the agency focused exclusively on video, the quality of the work got sharper. The quality of the work attracted better clients. Better clients required more sophisticated production. More sophisticated production required higher-end talent and systems. By the time COVID hit and enterprise clients started investing heavily in video, Lemonlight had the positioning, the craft, and the infrastructure to capture that demand at a level a generalist agency never could have. The decision that felt like contraction was the one that made real scale possible. What 200 Employees Actually Taught Her About Headcount The path to nearly 200 people was not a strategic choice. It was a response to demand. When clients flooded in during 2021 and 2022, they did what fast-growing agencies do: they threw bodies at the problem. The result was a team where tasks were fragmented across too many people, ownership was unclear, and productivity per person was low precisely because the work was so divided. It looked like growth, but operationally, it was expensive redundancy. The rightsizing that followed was a. Technology replaced a significant portion of the work that had been distributed across dozens of roles. Many employees who had been promoted into management discovered they preferred the individual contributor track and, given the option to step back, they performed better in it. Some of what felt like a painful downturn was actually the agency becoming the shape it should have been earlier. As Hope says: not better, just different. The problems at 75 people are real. They are just different problems than the ones at 200. The Manager Versus Executive Distinction Most Founders Miss Until Too Late Hope has a framework for telling a manager apart from an executive. A manager is built for evolution: improving existing processes incrementally, guiding people through what already works, making the current system run better. An executive is built for revolution: seeing where a fundamentally different process or product line needs to exist and building the case for it before anyone else has named the problem. Most founders who hire senior people for the first time discover, sometimes expensively, that a great manager at a large company is not the same as an executive who can function in a resource-constrained environment. The person who ran a function at a hundred-million-dollar company and wants a team of fifteen behind them to make them look good is not the same as the resourceful operator a growing agency actually needs. Recognizing the difference before the hire, not six months after, is the thing that separates founders who build strong leadership teams from founders who cycle through senior hires and wonder why nothing sticks. The Support Group Nobody Told You That You Needed Every agency owner knows that the loneliness of building an agency is real, it is underreported, and most founders make it worse by surrounding themselves with other founders who are performing confidence rather than telling the truth. The bravado of how many employees, how much revenue, how many awards is not just useless. It actively misleads founders into thinking their own internal chaos is unique to them when it is almost universally shared. What actually helps is . Where a founder who is eight figures and structurally broken can say that out loud and find that everyone in the room recognizes the pattern. That kind of peer truth-telling is not therapy. It is the fastest way to close the gap between where a founder is and where they need to be, because the person across the table has already lived through the version of the problem that is still invisible to the person describing it. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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What If Your Podcast Was Closing Deals While You Slept? with Doug Sandler | Ep #911
06/03/2026
What If Your Podcast Was Closing Deals While You Slept? with Doug Sandler | Ep #911
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you treating your podcast as one more thing on an already impossible schedule? Are you running a sales process that creates friction at every step when the alternative has been sitting right in front of you? Today’s featured guest has been podcasting for over 11 years and nearly 1,800 episodes. In this conversation, he’ll make the case that a podcast, run correctly, removes the sales cycle almost entirely. He also has a lot to say about what it took to step back from working 100-hour weeks in an entertainment agency and into a business that earns a healthy six-figure income on 15 hours a week. Doug Sandler is the founder of , a podcast production agency, and the host of , a show he has been running for over 11 years and nearly 1,800 episodes with more than 6 million downloads. Before podcasting, Doug spent 30 years as a Bar Mitzvah MC and entertainment agency owner, running an operation that handled between 700 and 900 events per year. He also wrote the book Nice Guys Finish First, which became the original vehicle for the podcast. Nowadays, he works roughly 15 hours a week and spends the rest of his time restoring classic cars and trucks. In this episode, we’ll discuss: A podcast as a hub of the business The decision to stop being the founder who works 80-hour weeks Removing the friction from the sale Subscribe Sponsors and Rees E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. The Podcast as a Sales Tool, Not a Content Schedule Agency owners who consider starting a podcast tend to frame it as a content commitment: another thing to produce, another distribution channel to manage, another task to fall behind on. Doug's framing is different. He calls the podcast , not a spoke. Marketing, lead generation, business development, sales, and relationship building are all running through the same conversation. Instead of adding to those functions, the podcast replaces most of the friction those functions create. The mechanics of how he uses it to sell without selling are worth understanding in detail. Doug does not cold pitch podcast production services. He reaches out to a prospect, says he hosts a show and likes their message, and asks if they would come on. The answer is nearly always yes. The interview becomes a 30 to 45 minute relationship-building session. By the end of it, he knows whether they are a fit, they know who he is and what he does, and the question "have you ever considered podcasting as a marketing tool?" lands entirely differently than it would in a cold email. The wall that normally exists between a prospect and a vendor does not go up because the conversation never started as a sales call. What 15 Hours a Week Actually Requires Doug works 15 hours a week and earns a healthy six-figure income. That sentence tends to provoke two reactions: skepticism and envy. The skepticism usually comes from founders who have not yet identified what their zone of genius actually is, or who have identified it but have not yet hired out everything around it. Doug is direct about what made the shift possible: he and hired for everything else, including before he could comfortably afford it. The operations manager hire at Turnkey came when it was just Doug and one other person. They were paying her $40,000 a year before either founder was drawing a paycheck. That decision was possible because Doug had kept his entertainment agency running in parallel and was not dependent on the production company income yet. The broader principle holds regardless of the specific situation: the sooner a founder identifies what they should stop doing and puts someone qualified in that seat, the faster the business grows and the less the founder has to be inside it to make that happen. The Decision to Stop Being the Founder Who Misses the Kids' Doug spent 30 years working weekends as an entertainment agency owner. His children grew up with a father who was almost always working during the exact hours when they were doing the things that mattered. This was a wake-up call. The shift he made when he launched Turnkey was not about working less for its own sake. It was about not repeating the same trade-off. Revenue is not the thing you look back on. Some founders who tell themselves they are working hard now so they can be present later. We know how that story usually ends. The agency gets bigger, the demands grow with it, and the window closes before anyone decides to actually make the change. The structural path out of that loop is a hiring decision, a zone-of-genius identification, and a willingness to before you feel financially ready to do it. Live on Air: What Real Sales Confidence Looks Like Mid-interview, Doug openly asked about the possibility to explore what a partnership with his podcast production company could look like. He narrates the logic as he does it: not asking means leaving a potential opportunity on the table simply because it feels awkward. Asking directly, transparently, and without pressure is not pitching. It is just an honest question between two people who have been talking for 30 minutes and have clearly established that they like and respect each other. The lesson Doug draws from it is about what podcasting actually trains you to do. Every interview is a pre-qualified sales conversation with someone who already said yes to spending time with you. By the time the recording ends, the trust is built and the friction is gone. Asking whether there is an opportunity is the natural last step, not a hard close. That is a fundamentally different sales experience than any cold outreach can create, and it compounds across every episode, every guest, and every listener who has been tuning in long enough to already want to work with you before they ever reach out. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helpsrowth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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What Happens When Your Agency's SOPs Finally Have Teeth with Andy Janaitis | Ep #910
05/31/2026
What Happens When Your Agency's SOPs Finally Have Teeth with Andy Janaitis | Ep #910
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you ever written a process that nobody followed? Or built a folder of SOPs that your team politely ignored and you quietly stopped updating? That was a big struggle for today’s featured guest, but six weeks before this conversation, he and his team built something that solved a problem most agency owners have tried and failed to fix for years: an AI context engine that makes their operating procedures actually stick. In this episode, he walks through exactly how it works, how they structured shared and personal context layers, how to get your team started without overwhelming them, and why giving AI an outcome rather than a task is the thing most founders are still getting wrong. Andy Janaitis is the founder of, a boutique digital marketing agency focused on Google Ads and Meta Ads for small to medium businesses. His background is in industrial engineering, data science, software engineering, and product management. Throughout these different stages of his career, he always worked at agencies. So naturally, when it came to starting his own business that seemed like the obvious choice. He launched the agency in 2020 alongside a former colleague, the same week his first child was born and COVID hit. PPC Pitbulls' differentiator is measurement: every ad dollar is tracked, client behavior on-site is understood, and optimization follows the data rather than intuition. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Andy’s solution to the common owner SOP problem Shared context vs. personal context Get next-level results by providing outcomes, not tasks Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. The SOP Problem Most Agencies Have Given Up On Every agency owner knows the rhythm. . You put it in ClickUp or Notion or a shared drive. You announce it to the team. Three months later nobody is using it, and you are back to making every decision yourself because it is faster than watching the system fail in real time. Andy has run this loop and now, just six weeks before the recording, managed to use AI to create a tool that changed everything. It was an AI context engine that pulled from every client touchpoint, including meeting recordings, email, and Slack, and converted that information into living context files the team can query in real time. The key detail is what happens when someone wants to update a shared file. Every central skills file has an owner. Changes get queued for approval rather than overwriting existing rules. What used to be a static document that slowly went stale is now a system that learns, updates, and actually enforces how the agency operates. Shared Context vs. Personal Context: Why the Distinction Matters The context gathered in this way is structured across the team in two tiers: First tier: The central bank holds client context, agency-wide skills files, and general operating rules. That lives in a shared Google Drive folder that auto-syncs to every team member's desktop. Second tier: Personal context, meaning individual rules that only apply to a specific person's workflow, like filtering certain emails that have nothing to do with the agency. The reason this distinction matters is that most teams building shared AI context run into one of two problems: the files are so locked down nobody updates them, or they are so open that updates overwrite each other and nothing is reliable. The queue-and-approve structure Andy built threads that needle. Team members can flag a better way to do something. The file owner reviews it. If it makes sense, it gets merged into the main store. The agency gets smarter without the chaos of everyone editing the same file in real time. Start With One Specific Thing, Not the Whole System Most founders decide to and then make the mistake of trying to build everything at once, load too much context into a single document, and end up with a system so heavy it cannot function efficiently. Jason describes his own early version as trying to get every person in the company to approve a single letter change. The architecture was right but the structure was wrong. Andy's starting point recommendation is specific enough to actually follow: Pick one workflow. The one that creates the most friction or the most inconsistency. Open Claude desktop, describe what you want, identify the tool or source you want to pull from, and ask it to build a file structure that keeps client context organized and retrievable. The plan it generates is not perfect. That is fine. You approve, adjust, and run it. From that first working piece, everything else becomes an iteration. The common mistake is waiting for a complete vision before starting. The agencies making real progress right now started with something small six weeks ago and have been adding ever since. Give It an Outcome, Not a Task The tactical shift that runs through this entire conversation is the difference between . A task is "write me a sales proposal." An outcome is "we need to win this client, here is everything we know about them, here is our agency's positioning, here is what a strong proposal from us looks like, produce a first draft." The output from the second prompt is not in the same category as the output from the first. This is the same principle that makes or breaks the first few hires at a growing agency. Most founders who have struggled with underperforming team members can trace it back to the same root: they handed someone a task without ever communicating the outcome they were trying to reach. AI amplifies both good and bad briefing habits instantly. Give it strong context and a clear destination, and it operates well above expectations. Give it a vague instruction and ignore the output quality, and the tool looks broken when the real problem is the brief. Building the context engine is how you make that outcome-focused briefing the default rather than the exception. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Does Your Agency Sell Work That AI Does for Free? with Tom Lee | Ep #909
05/27/2026
Does Your Agency Sell Work That AI Does for Free? with Tom Lee | Ep #909
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you still optimizing your agency's content for Google while your clients are getting their answers from AI? Are you charging for the execution that AI is about to make obsolete, while giving away the strategy that commands real fees? Today’s featured guest works with agencies navigating the shift from traditional search to generative engine optimization. He’ll talk about what the Anthropic research actually says about how much of the work agencies do today can be automated, how AI reads content differently than Google does, and the practical steps any agency can take right now to show up in AI-generated answers before competitors figure it out. Tom Lee is an AI search and SEO specialist and co-founder of , a platform that helps agencies build the visibility and optimization layer for the AI search era. Tom and his team advise agencies on generative engine optimization, or GEO, and how to position their clients to show up in AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. His background includes working inside large enterprise companies including Apple and Walmart, where he managed SEO at scale. He now works directly with SEO and GEO agencies helping them build the strategic frameworks and content systems that translate traditional search authority into AI visibility. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Is your value proposition still execution? Why GEO does not replace SEO Repackaging existing content will get you nowhere Subscribe Sponsors and Rees E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. What the Anthropic Research Actually Says Tom referenced an Anthropic study published earlier this year that mapped out the theoretical automation potential across industries. For software development, AI can already handle around 35% of code generation, with a theoretical ceiling of 97%. For business and marketing functions including SEO, that ceiling is 94%. In his view, those numbers are not a reason to panic, but they are a reason to get clear on which part of the work you are actually selling. The agencies at risk are the ones whose value proposition is execution. Writing the content, building the links, pulling the reports: if that is what you are charging for, you are in the category that AI is actively compressing. The agencies that will hold their ground and grow their fees are the ones charging for judgment. Which topics to chase. Which content gaps matter. How to translate client expertise into something AI will actually cite. That is the 6% that automation cannot touch, and it is also the highest-margin work in the engagement. GEO Is Built on Top of SEO, Not Instead of It Something that gets lost in the noise . It extends it. Showing up in Google search results is still the foundation. What has changed is that showing up is no longer enough. AI reads content the way a human being reads it, evaluating whether the argument is convincing and whether the source is credible, not just whether the right keywords appear in the right density. That changes what good content has to do. The practical starting point Tom recommends is mapping what he calls the semantic space for a client: Identifying what topic areas people are actually raising in AI conversations that the client should be part of. From there, you translate that semantic space into specific prompts, run those prompts across the major AI platforms, and audit what comes back. Who is being cited? Where is the client showing up and where are they absent? What content is AI pulling from competitors that the client has not produced yet? That gap analysis is the strategic deliverable that commands real fees. It is also the work that no AI tool will do for you, because it requires knowing what the client actually wants to be known for. Why Repackaging Existing Content Gets You Nowhere Once you’re clear about the topics your audience is looking for, there’s something that will for sure not work the way many think it does. When you , you get repackaged information drawn from the same sources the AI already used to generate the gap. That content does not move anything forward. AI knows where it got the data from. Recycled information does not earn citations. What earns citations is new data, original perspective, and subject matter expertise that advances the conversation rather than summarizing what already exists. The 5 step system Tom uses with his clients: Identify the content gaps Build a specific set of questions tied to those gaps Send those questions to a subject matter expert at the client Have them record a Loom or voice memo answering freely Use AI to transcribe and chunk that recording into content The raw material is original. The expertise is real. The content that comes out earns its place in the semantic space rather than competing with what is already there. Your Clients Are Training AI. Are You Helping Them Do It Right? The broader point running through this conversation is one that matters . AI systems are being trained on open-source content: social media posts, forum conversations, podcast transcripts, FAQ pages, markdown-formatted content. Every piece of content a client publishes is either building their presence in that training data or failing to. Agencies that understand this and can show clients where they are absent, who is filling that space instead, and what it would take to reclaim it, are in a fundamentally different conversation than agencies still talking about keyword rankings. The founders who will build authority in this environment are the ones creating real content from real expertise, showing up broadly enough to be present in the long tail of AI conversations, and charging for the strategic thinking that makes all of it coherent. The execution is becoming a commodity. The strategy never was. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our nt. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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9 Years, Zero Churn: The Agency Positioning That Turns Clients Into Long-Term Partners with Brooke Sellas | Ep #908
05/24/2026
9 Years, Zero Churn: The Agency Positioning That Turns Clients Into Long-Term Partners with Brooke Sellas | Ep #908
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you still showing up for every function in your business after years because stepping back feels like abandoning what you built? Do you publish content consistently but wonder why it is not moving the needle? Today’s featured guest owns a social media agency and built her client roster by getting on stage before she was comfortable doing so. She wrote a book that got her on the stages she wanted, and carved out a niche so specific that it made content marketers uncomfortable. In this conversation, she’ll talk about how she landed enterprise clients with zero churn over nine years, what it actually takes to find a real differentiator, and much more. Brooke Sellas is the CEO and founder of , a Michigan-based agency offering social media management, paid media management, and social media customer care. Her social care practice works exclusively with enterprise brands at $5 billion and above in annual revenue, including long-term clients she originally closed nine years ago with zero churn since. She is the author of Conversations That Connect, a book built around the idea that social is a conversation channel, not a content channel. Brooke speaks at major marketing conferences, including Social Media Marketing World and now teaches AI at the University of California. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Why your differentiator must be an outcome Being stuck in the Founder Evolution Framework Why hesitation regarding AI will kill your agency Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. How She Built a Client List Enterprise Brands Still Have Not Left Brooke's first two major clients came from a speaking appearance she almost did not take. She hated being on stage but agreed anyway. She closed Brother International and Miele from that first talk, and immediately made speaking her . Nine years later, those clients are still with the agency. That zero churn across the social care practice is the result of a positioning decision made early: social is a revenue channel, not a content channel, and every client relationship is built around proving that. Getting on bigger stages required a longer game. Brooke spent years speaking for free, asked her network exactly how they were getting booked, and eventually took advice to write a book. The book cost around $25,000 to produce and self-publish. It opened stages that had been closed before. Social Media Marketing World followed because the book got in front of the right people and gave the organizer enough confidence to put her on stage. The ROI was not immediate. It compounded across years of bookings, consulting fees, and speaking revenue that now functions as a separate income stream while still generating agency leads. Your Differentiator Has to Be an Outcome, Not a Vibe Brooke is direct about what does not work as positioning. Saying your agency is a people-first agency, that you care more, that you have great culture: none of it separates you in . She spent years telling content marketers they were wrong, walking into rooms full of people who measured social by follower counts and publishing frequency, and saying the right metric is revenue from social. That took a stance. It made some people uncomfortable, and that discomfort was the signal she was in the right territory. The lesson she draws from her own experience is not that you need to be contrarian for its own sake. It is that your differentiator has to connect directly to a business outcome your client already cares about. Her agency’s tagline is Conversation Not Campaign. That is a positioning claim with a revenue argument underneath it. If you cannot articulate what outcome your positioning produces for the client, you do not have a differentiator yet. You have a personality. Where She Is in the Founder Evolution Framework and What It Costs Her Fourteen years into building B Squared, Brooke is somewhere between Architect and CEO and honest about what that means in practice. She still runs most things. She knows it is holding back growth. She also knows that the identity piece is real: when you have built something for over a decade and your name is synonymous with what the agency delivers, stepping out of that role is not just a structural decision. It requires a different relationship with your own sense of contribution. What she articulates clearly is the tension every founder at this stage knows. She does not want to be the bottleneck anymore. She also has not yet handed the systems over to someone who can own them at the level she would. The move at this stage is not to wait until someone earns total trust before stepping back. It is to build the systems, put the right person in charge of them, and let the fender benders happen so the team develops the capability to solve problems without routing everything through the founder. The alternative is staying indispensable in a way that caps everything the agency could become. Stop Hesitating and Treat AI with Curiosity Brooke runs social media and paid media services. She is clear-eyed about what AI is doing to both: content that used to take weeks to produce is now a matter of seconds, and ad copy that required real craft is being generated faster and often better than agency teams can match manually. That is the honest read. The response she chose is not to protect what exists but to figure out where AI creates opportunity she was not positioned to capture before. The Gartner stat she cites is worth repeating: than those who do not. Brooke is a speaker, a consultant, and a sales-driven founder. That number is an opening, not a threat. The agencies that are struggling right now are the ones that treated the last two years as a window to observe and decide. The window is closing. Curiosity and willingness to play with new tools before mastery arrives is not optional. It is the trait that has always separated the founders who build something lasting from the ones who stay comfortable until the market moves without them. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our . Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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What Does a 78% Close Rate Actually Tell You About Your Sales Process? With Jen Jurgens | Ep #907
05/20/2026
What Does a 78% Close Rate Actually Tell You About Your Sales Process? With Jen Jurgens | Ep #907
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you charging for execution when clients are about to stop paying for it? Are you building your sales process around your offer instead of around your prospect's trust? Today’s featured guest built a growth workshop that converts 78% of buyers into long-term retainer clients. In this episode, she’ll get into what that workshop actually contains, why the entry offer might be the thing keeping it from scaling, how to stop your CEO from chasing shiny quarters mid-engagement, and what happens when you position strategy as the product instead of execution. Jen Jurgens is the founder of , a revenue operations agency based in Michigan. Her background is in supply chain management, which is where she developed the belief she will die on: sales and marketing is a process, and processes can be measured, improved, and optimized. One Bold Step is a HubSpot partner and works primarily with B2B clients on pipeline growth, campaign optimization, and revenue systems. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Focusing on pipeline growth as a primary metric Creating a foot in the door for Jen’s growth workshop Selling the process, not the deliverable Subscribe Sponsors and Rees E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Toggl: Most agencies are losing 15–30% of their profit every year: lack of time tracking, messy manual timesheets, scope creep, untracked revisions, and all those “quick” client requests that never get billed. Toggl has created a fast, interactive way to uncover exactly where your margins are leaking. Start your investigation now at and use the code SMARTAGENCY10 at checkout for a 10% off annual plans. The Case for Charging for Strategy Before Execution Jen comes at pricing from a supply chain logic: if you can measure the outcome, . Her agency focuses on pipeline growth as its primary client metric because it is the number most directly connected to revenue and the one she can credibly influence within a defined timeframe. Monthly reports go out, and every quarter there is a two-hour retrospective with the client covering what was committed to, what actually happened, what worked, what did not, and what the next 90 days look like. The reason this cadence holds is that it makes the strategic layer of the engagement visible. Most agencies send reports that clients stop reading after the first month because the data is wrapped in jargon and disconnected from business outcomes. Jen's approach is the opposite: tie everything to pipeline, show up in person or on screen quarterly, and use an Agile sprint structure to keep the client's attention from jumping to whatever crossed their desk that morning. That level of structure is the thing clients are actually paying for, and most of them do not know it until it is explained to them directly. Why Your Entry Offer Might Be the Reason Deals Stall Jen's growth workshop has a 78% conversion rate from buyer to long-term retainer. That is a strong number. The problem is on the other side of the funnel: getting prospects to say yes to the workshop in the first place. The workshop is currently priced between $10,000 and $15,000, takes 100 to 120 hours of agency time to deliver, and goes deep enough that Jen describes it as showing clients not just what they want but what they actually need. It is comprehensive. It is also a significant ask before any trust has been established. The exists precisely for this situation. A $10,000 to $15,000 entry requires founder-level credibility to close and has no on-ramp for prospects who are not yet convinced. What it needs is a smaller version that a prospect can say yes to at low risk, that delivers a real insight in a short window, and that makes the full workshop the obvious next step rather than a leap of faith. The mechanics are straightforward: charge $1,000 to $2,000 for a focused diagnostic session, frame it as a mutual qualifier, and let the output do the selling. The trust the mini-session builds is what removes the friction from the larger close. Selling the Process, Not the Deliverable Jen describes what she actually does in the growth workshop as taking and replacing them with what is actually blocking their growth. Nine times out of ten, a CEO who says they need more leads is sitting on an unconverted database, a sales team sitting on two-year-old proposals, or five product lines with no prioritization. More leads into a leaky bucket is not a solution. The reason this framing is powerful is not just diagnostic accuracy. It is positioning. When Jen walks into a growth workshop, she is not selling marketing services. She is functioning as a strategic operator who knows how revenue systems work and is willing to tell the client something they did not ask to hear. That is a fundamentally different position than an agency responding to an RFP. The clients who pay $10,000 to $15,000 for that workshop are not buying a deliverable. They are buying the read, and the confidence that what comes next will be built on something real. Pricing for Strategy When AI Is Changing What Execution Costs The conversation landed on a reality every agency is navigating right now. Execution is getting cheaper and faster. Four websites in three hours is not hypothetical anymore. Clients who used to pay for time spent are starting to ask why the price has not moved if the time has. The answer is not to lower prices. The answer is to make the case clearly that what they are paying for was never the hours. It was the 20 or 30 years of judgment that knows which inputs to use, which levers to pull, and what not to build. Jen's framing for clients who push back on process costs is direct: you can manage this yourself and be the general contractor on your own build. But you will not, because you do not have the time, and if you did, you would not need us. Agencies that can hold that position without flinching are the ones that will not have their margins compressed by AI. The ones that cannot articulate what strategy is worth beyond hours delivered are already in trouble. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our t. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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Why Your Agency Grows Slower When You’re the Best Person on the Team with Olivier Bridgeman | Ep #906
05/17/2026
Why Your Agency Grows Slower When You’re the Best Person on the Team with Olivier Bridgeman | Ep #906
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Have you ever hired someone to free up your time and found yourself working more hours than before? Have you hit a point where your reputation for quality is actually the thing keeping you stuck in every project? Today’s featured guest and his wife have been building their agency for over 22 years. For most of that time, the business ran on referrals, no defined niche, and two founders doing most of the work. Six years ago, they got serious about building a real team. In this episode, he talks honestly about what that transition looked like, why his technical strengths became a liability as the agency grew, how a lack of sales infrastructure was quietly making their delivery problems worse, and what the shift to actually picking clients has done for their operations. Olivier Bridgeman is the co-founder of, a marketing and web agency serving businesses in residential construction, renovation, and maintenance—recognized as the builders of credibility. Although it has been operating for over two decades, Olivier and his wife made the decision to build a real team and install the infrastructure that would let the business grow beyond them just six years ago. The agency now has 11 people, and Olivier is in the process of evolving out of the operator role and into something closer to CEO, working through the mindset and structural challenges that come with that shift. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The expected cost of adding more people When your biggest strength turns you into a bottleneck Fixing sales to fix the delivery problem Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. Herringbone Digital: If you’re thinking about exiting now, planning a few years ahead, or just want to understand your options, you should know about Herringbone Digital. They’re not a typical financial buyer. They’re operators who actually understand what it takes to build and scale an agency because they’ve done it themselves. Their approach is simple: invest in great founders, protect what’s already working, and help agencies scale faster. Go to and start the conversation. Why Adding People Made the Work Harder Before It Got Easier After years of being the sole force behind the business, the motivation to build a team was simple: bring on people, hand off work, and get time back. The reality was that the first hires created more work, not less. Olivier and his wife had to deliver their own work, review and redo the team's work before it went to clients, manage schedules, clarify responsibilities, and absorb the cost of onboarding, all at the same time. This is the Manager stage in full effect, and it is the stage where most founders assume something is broken when it is actually just the expected cost of the transition. What Olivier describes is exactly what makes this stage so difficult: you used to know what you were doing every afternoon. Now you have to manage your own calendar and everyone else's. The invisible work of managing people, training them, setting expectations, and maintaining quality does not show up on any timesheet. It just accumulates. The goal is to move through this stage quickly, not to stay in it and hire more people on top of it. When Your Biggest Strength Becomes the Bottleneck Olivier’s programming ability, which was his edge at the start, became a trap as the team grew. When you are the best technical person in the room and there is a problem in front of you, the reflex is to fix it. It is faster. It is cleaner. And it quietly signals to the team that you do not trust them to solve it themselves. The pattern is common across founders who built their agencies around a specific skill. The capability that created the business eventually becomes the reason the founder cannot leave it. Every time Olivier jumped in to fix something, he was reinforcing the team's dependency on him rather than building their ability to handle it independently. . It is to raise the standard through coaching and systems rather than through personal intervention. The goal is a team that can hit 80 percent of what you would have done, on their own, then coach them to 82, then 85. Perfection is not the benchmark. Capability without you is. What Fixing Sales Did to Their Delivery Problem For most of Bridge Media's existence, new business came through referrals and local relationships. That felt safe. Working some local events and being known within their market was enough for a while. In practice, it meant every client was different, every project required a different set of skills, and the team was constantly starting from scratch. The founders had to stay deeply involved because the work never became repeatable enough for anyone else to own it. Two years ago, Olivier and his wife made a deliberate shift toward building an actual sales function. The downstream effect was not just more leads. It was better client fit, , and a team that could finally develop real expertise in a consistent area of work. When you build a pipeline, you get the ability to be selective. When you are selective, you take on clients your team can actually serve without the founders embedded in every deliverable. Referral dependency does not just create revenue risk. It creates a structural trap that keeps founders in the operator seat far longer than necessary. The Mindset Shift That Has to Happen Before the Role Can Change Olivier knows he needs to step back, and it is still hard. Not because the systems are not there, but because the identity is hard to separate from the work. When you have spent years building a culture of teamwork and being present for the team, stepping into a more removed role can feel like abandonment, both to the team and to yourself. The reframe that matters here is not about working less. It is about what the business actually needs from you at each stage. You may think that your biggest contribution to the agency is your time, but at the CEO level your job is: Setting the vision Communicating it consistently Protecting the culture through behavior rather than through presence Steering direction That work is roughly 20 hours a week when done correctly. The challenge is that most founders do not believe that until they have experienced it, and the discomfort of having fewer hours filled pushes them back into the operator role they just worked hard to leave. Recognizing the rubber band effect for what it is, significance-seeking disguised as contribution, is what makes it possible to stop pulling yourself back in. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our lueprint heler growth opportnd craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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How to Build an Account Management Team That Owns Client Outcomes with Michelle Keckler | Ep #905
05/13/2026
How to Build an Account Management Team That Owns Client Outcomes with Michelle Keckler | Ep #905
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are your account managers drowning because you never built the system around them? Are you still the one clients call when something goes sideways, even though you hired someone to handle that? In seven years, today’s featured guest and her co-founder built a team of six and developed an account management structure that worked well enough to earn a speaking slot at Elevate. She’ll break down the exact touchpoint cadence her agency uses to retain clients and grow accounts, what she looks for when hiring account managers, and what it took to actually get out of the way. She’ll also share what makes a co-founder partnership work when so many of them fail. Michelle Keckler is the co-founder of , a full-service digital marketing agency based in Nashville, Tennessee. She and her co-founder Danielle launched the agency after Danielle was laid off from a company they both worked at. Within two months they had enough clients for Michelle to leave her corporate job. Michelle spoke at Elevate and has been a member of the Agency Mastery Mastermind. Her focus inside the agency is on client relationships, account management structure, and building a team that can own outcomes without founder involvement. In this episode, we’ll discuss: How to set your account managers for success What to look for in an account manager Why letting go is not a one-time decision Subscribe Sponsors and Rees E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Toggl: Most agencies are losing 15–30% of their profit every year: lack of time tracking, messy manual timesheets, scope creep, untracked revisions, and all those “quick” client requests that never get billed. Toggl has created a fast, interactive way to uncover exactly where your margins are leaking. Start your investigation now at and use the code SMARTAGENCY10 at checkout for a 10% off annual plans. The Account Management System That Actually Retains Clients For Michelle, the first step to setting her account manager for success is to hand off ownership of that account to them right away and make that clear to the client. After that, they rely on a structured cadence built around three consistent touchpoints: weekly status updates so clients always know where things stand, monthly meetings to review campaign metrics and look at the next 30, 60, and 90 days, and quarterly business reviews that step above the day-to-day to assess overall direction and impact. What makes the cadence work is not the frequency. It is what happens inside each touchpoint. Michelle is specific about this: the monthly meeting is more than just a metrics review. It is an opportunity to ask the client what has changed in their business, whether they made a key hire, lost a team member, or landed a new account that shifts priorities. Often agencies get so focused on delivering the work that they stop asking questions that would . That gap is where accounts quietly go sideways before anyone notices. Who to Hire for Account Management (And What to Actually Look For) Account management is one of the for because it requires a combination of skills that rarely come packaged together. Michelle is direct about this: you are looking for someone who can sit in a room with a client, speak confidently about the work, handle a difficult pricing conversation, and bring enough business understanding back to the internal team to actually inform strategy. She calls it a unicorn role, and she means it. What she’s learned through experience is that marketing background matters less than business acumen and leadership mindset. Several of their best account managers came from strong business backgrounds with no formal marketing experience. They hired for values alignment and problem-solving ability, then trained the rest. The interview process shifted from culture-fit questions toward situational ones: how would you handle a frustrated client, tell me about a hard conversation you navigated. Knowledge can be taught. The instinct to lead a client relationship under pressure cannot. Getting Out of the Way Is a Decision You Have to Make More Than Once Michelle is honest about the fact that letting go of account management was not a one-time decision. It was a pattern she had to interrupt repeatedly. Early on she stayed involved because she knew her first hire personally. As the team grew, the justification changed but the behavior did not. advice from Darby, Agency Mastery's Agency Scale Specialist, to take the floaties off and let her people swim, stuck with her because it named the real problem: , the people were qualified, and she was still hovering. The practical shift that made the difference was removing a bottleneck in the operations structure. Danielle had been handling project management as an additional layer between account managers and the internal team. Moving project management back to the account management team eliminated a handoff, sped up delivery, and forced the account managers to own the full outcome of each client relationship. That structural change did more than any mindset shift could on its own. The role became clearer, the accountability became cleaner, and the team stepped into it. What Makes a Co-Founder Partnership Actually Work Michelle and Danielle are cousins who have built a seven-year agency together, which puts them in a small category. Michelle is candid about why she believes many partnerships fail and why theirs has not. The foundation is shared values and a shared goal for the business. The operating reality is that they have very different personalities, and that difference is a feature, not a bug. Danielle is the fast implementer. Michelle is the one who wants to think it through. One is the gas, one is the brake, and the business has avoided several train wrecks as a result. What she is clear about is that a partnership is not a shortcut. It requires the same kind of honest communication and tolerance for imperfection that any long-term relationship does. There will be stretches where one partner is carrying more than the other. There will be disagreements about pace, direction, and priorities. What matters is that both people want what is best for the business and the team, and can say the hard thing to each other when it needs to be said. Michelle is not selling the partnership model to everyone. She is saying that if you find someone with complementary strengths and the same core values, do not let the fear of conflict talk you out of it. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our ners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
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The Agency Incubator Model: How to Fund SaaS Products Through Clients Instead of Investors with David Carnes | Ep #904
05/10/2026
The Agency Incubator Model: How to Fund SaaS Products Through Clients Instead of Investors with David Carnes | Ep #904
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? Are you running multiple things at once and wondering why none of them are moving as fast as they should? Are you still the one every project, every client, and every decision routes through, no matter how many people you have on your team? Over nearly three decades, today’s featured guest didn’t just run an agency. He turned it into an incubator, spinning up multiple SaaS companies, a mobile app, and an accessibility tool, all funded and validated through a model most founders have never tried. In this episode, he’ll get into how he built products without outside investors, why the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle, and what it actually took to step out of the operator seat after 28 years in it. David Carnes is the co-founder of , a digital agency based in Minneapolis that has been operating since 1997. Over the course of his career, he has launched multiple companies from inside the agency, including a SaaS platform for associations built as early as 2000, a document management system called Wonderfile that was acquired by Blue Tie in New York, and NC, an accessibility scanning tool built initially for Arcstone's own quality assurance needs. His wife now runs Arcstone as CEO. David currently sits in the CFO seat, operating across all three businesses as an advisor and strategic layer rather than a day-to-day operator. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Creating the structure to run several businesses and not be in the middle of everything Why the founder bottleneck is a trap you can learn to avoid Understanding the importance of creating dedicated AI roles Subscribe Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. Herringbone Digital: If you’re thinking about exiting now, planning a few years ahead, or just want to understand your options, you should know about Herringbone Digital. They’re not a typical financial buyer. They’re operators who actually understand what it takes to build and scale an agency because they’ve done it themselves. Their approach is simple: invest in great founders, protect what’s already working, and help agencies scale faster. Go to and start the conversation. Funding Products Without Giving Up Equity One of the most practical lessons owners can take from David is how he funded multiple software products without investors. The model is straightforward: go to existing clients or a relevant group, identify a shared problem, and ask them to collectively fund the build in exchange for lifetime access. For AMO, six or seven associations each kicked in eight thousand dollars. For a later mobile event app, fifteen associations each contributed five thousand. In both cases, David had enough capital to build, immediate users providing real feedback, and zero equity given away. The reason this works is the same reason the Foot in the Door methodology works inside agency sales. A small, committed financial investment creates accountability on both sides. The customers who fund it show up with feedback because they have skin in the game. The builder ships something real instead of overbuilding in isolation. David was explicit that his own tendency to overcomplicate a product shrinks significantly when real users are in the room from day one. Too Many Plates, Not Enough Structure Building multiple companies inside one agency creates a specific kind of chaos. David called it too many plants in one pot. The companies start competing for the same resources, the same attention, and the same management bandwidth. , which meant every decision still ran through him. The shift did not come from a framework or a book. It came from maturity and, eventually, necessity. When his wife stepped into the CEO role at Arcstone and dedicated management teams formed at AMO and NC, David moved into the CFO seat and took on what he called a monster back role, someone who can move across the whole field without being anchored to any single function. That is not a role most founders reach quickly, and he is honest about the fact that he still gets pulled back in when a longtime client or friend asks for something. The trap is familiar: you step in, you mean well, and in doing so, you signal to your team that you do not trust them to handle it. Founder Bottleneck Is a Pattern, Not a Personality Flaw David does not pretend he solved the founder bottleneck problem cleanly. In reality, patterns of it showed up repeatedly. You build structure, you step back, something pulls you in, and you disrupt the system you built. David described it as . You see the same lesson again. You handle it a little better. You move on. What makes the pattern more manageable is having a framework that names it. When you can recognize "this is the trap I have fallen into before," you can course-correct faster. That is exactly the work the Founder Evolution Framework is built to do. Operator, Manager, Architect, CEO, Owner: each stage is a distinct role, not just a job title. Revenue does not move you up the ladder. Removing yourself from the critical path does. David is living proof that even experienced operators with 28 years in the seat have to be intentional about each stage of that progression. AI: Surf the Wave or Get Pummeled By It David does not treat AI as a theoretical topic. He attended a ten-thousand-dollar immersive course shortly after Claude introduced persistent context, specifically because he wanted to , not just what people were saying about it. His takeaway was concrete enough that he created two dedicated roles inside Arcstone: an AI Architect and an AI Operator. The distinction is worth understanding. The Architect builds the agents and workflows. The Operator runs them, keeps the human in the loop, and catches the errors. Because AI still makes mistakes, and the founder who knows that firsthand is the one who can train a team to work with it well, not just use it. The agencies that will benefit most are not the ones that hand AI to someone and walk away. They are the ones who build internal capability, document their models and prompts as assets, and treat the technology as a force multiplier on a team that already knows what it is doing. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our ners like you, our Agency Blueprint helpities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprgency's success.
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How One Bad Hire Turns a Marketing Agency Owner Into the Bottleneck with Scott Leff | Ep #903
05/06/2026
How One Bad Hire Turns a Marketing Agency Owner Into the Bottleneck with Scott Leff | Ep #903
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? What if hiring smart people and getting out of your way was not enough to build a self-managing agency? Today’s featured guest will talk through the decisions most agency owners get wrong: when to stay involved, when to let go, and how the absence of rigor compounds into structural problems you won't even notice until you're stuck. He’ll talk about how bad hiring decisions led him to become the bottleneck, how he’s trying to fix that, as well as why your "number" for how much your agency is worth is probably based on nothing, and the one financial habit that gives you genuine optionality. Scott Leff is the founder of , a B2B content marketing agency serving global professional services firms and nonprofits for over 16 years. His background spans business communications working as a managing director for a big brand, as well as a 22-month stint leading communications for Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. When the bid failed in the first round, he found himself in a period of reinvention. With the gig economy just taking off, he decided it was time to hang up his shingle. He started to take freelance work, which eventually led to hiring and forming his own business. This agency grew steadily, exploded during COVID, and is now navigating the reassessment most established agencies are facing in a shifting market. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Why becoming the bottleneck isn’t always about control The hiring rigor every owner should have Which metrics are you tracking? Why declining revenue doesn’t equal failure Subscribe Sponsors and Rees E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Toggl: Most agencies are losing 15–30% of their profit every year: lack of time tracking, messy manual timesheets, scope creep, untracked revisions, and all those “quick” client requests that never get billed. Toggl has created a fast, interactive way to uncover exactly where your margins are leaking. Start your investigation now at and use the code SMARTAGENCY10 at checkout for a 10% off annual plans. Knowing What You Should Never Have Delegated For the first ten-plus years of his agency business, or his business partner. That wasn't always a problem, but as the agency grew and decision-making had to push down through a management layer, cracks formed. Not because the team was incapable, but because they were being handed authority without the context, direction, or support to use it well. Hiring is the clearest example Scott points to. He gave department managers the autonomy to bring in their own people, which was a reasonable call on paper. But in a culture-driven organization like an agency, where your people are both your product and 80% of your overhead, that's the one decision you can't outsource and expect to get right. The fix wasn't micromanaging the process. It was figuring out the specific places where the founder's perspective is irreplaceable, and staying in the conversation there, even when it's uncomfortable to be involved. Hiring Rigor Is Not Optional and Most Agencies Are Winging It Scott attended a conference session led by someone who'd overseen hiring at Amazon and other large organizations. The biggest takeaway was a story about Jeff Bezos showing up to a debrief with three to four pages of handwritten notes on candidates, while everyone else showed up with nothing. . The real problem isn't that agency owners don't care about hiring. It's that they go in underprepared, unclear on exactly what they're looking for, leaning on gut instinct, and writing role descriptions that don't reflect the actual job. To ensure you’re getting applications from candidates that truly align with your agency and the required role, every part of the hiring process should be a test. Attention to detail? Bury the real application instructions at the bottom of the job post and see who finds them. Hiring a senior exec? Don't tell them much, give them a week and ask them to come back with a 90-day success plan. If they dive into answers before they ask a single question, that tells you everything. The point isn't the process for its own sake. It's that rigor on the front end reduces the cost of being wrong, and in an agency, being wrong on a hire is expensive for a long time. Watch Who You're Hiring From: Big Agency Talent Doesn't Always Travel Well There's a version of agency hiring that looks like a smart move: pull experienced people from larger, more established shops and let them install what's already working somewhere else. Here’s why that doesn’t work: You end up with talented people who are skilled at operating inside infrastructure, not building it. When there’s no large team to direct, no resource pool to draw from, no SOP baked in for the last decade, they stall. The answer when things aren't cut and dried can be "that's not my job." And then it’s nobody's job. Scott saw a version of this play out during the Olympic bid. Big consulting firms had seconded teams into the organization, and the ones who thrived were the ones who could operate in ambiguity. The ones who couldn't were waiting for a structure that was never going to show up. The lesson isn't that experienced people from large agencies are bad hires. It's that the ability to figure things out without a system to lean on is the filter. And you have to test for it explicitly, because someone's resume will not tell you whether they have it. Declining Revenue Doesn’t Equal Failure, but You Have to Know What You're Actually Measuring Your revenue may seem like the only metric that felt like it matters when it’s going up every year. However, a modest drop of five or ten percent, can be a big psychological blow even though profit improves and client impact is strong. That’s a vanity metric doing its job: making growth feel like identity. Scott hit a similar inflection point when a former client asked him a simple question, why are you growing? Scott didn't have a clean answer. He'd been operating on the assumption that growth was inherently the goal, not a means to something else. The conversation points to a structural reality: if revenue is the only number you track, you'll optimize for it even when it costs you margin, leverage, and time. The healthier question is whether the agency is building toward the outcome you actually want, more optionality, a sellable asset, or just more control over your calendar. Revenue is a lagging indicator of that. Not the scoreboard. The Decision to Sell Your Agency Has Nothing to Do With Your Number Most agency owners carry a number in their head of what they want to walk away with when they sell. , the market timing is unpredictable, and nobody warned them about the identity crisis that hits the week after closing. The right time to sell isn't a target revenue year or a specific EBITDA multiple. It's when you know exactly what you're walking toward and when the thought of running the agency has stopped feeling like a challenge and started feeling like a weight you've been carrying for six months straight. On the valuation side, Scott's question about what agency owners get wrong surfaced a hard truth: if your EBITDA is under a million dollars, your multiple takes a significant hit, and the buyer math looks very different than what you've been calculating off top-line revenue. Build the foundation like you intend to sell it. Get rid of what you hate. Make it structurally independent. Then you have real options, whether or not you ever actually sell. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our ners like you, our Agency Blueprint helpities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprgency's success.
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How AI Tools Helped a 24-Year SEO Agency Vet Scale 5x Faster Without Burnout with Navneet Kaushal | Ep #902
05/03/2026
How AI Tools Helped a 24-Year SEO Agency Vet Scale 5x Faster Without Burnout with Navneet Kaushal | Ep #902
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? What separates the agencies growing through the AI wave from the ones quietly shrinking? Do you think you are on the right side of that line? Today’s featured guest claims his agency has grown faster than ever in these recent years of AI ubiquity. He’ll break down how 24 years of process obsession set him up to capitalize on AI before his competitors even stopped panicking. We get into the real mechanics of building SOPs that survive scale, why founders keep sabotaging their own teams (and how to stop), and how personal branding turned his sales calls into qualification calls. If you're running a $1M+ agency and still feel like the bottleneck, this one is going to sting a little, in the right way. Navneet Kaushal is the founder and CEO of , a white label SEO agency he's been building since 2002. He's since navigated every major algorithm shift, scaled through multiple hiring cycles, and now uses AI to encode decades of institutional knowledge directly into his systems. He's also built a recognizable personal brand through conference speaking worldwide and a growing YouTube channel, a move he credits as one of the top three drivers of his agency's recent growth. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Building systems early on When founders undermine their teams Life after leaving the operator role: focusing on personal brand Subscribe | | Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you’re leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That’s why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to to get started. Herringbone Digital: If you’re thinking about exiting now, planning a few years ahead, or just want to understand your options, you should know about Herringbone Digital. They’re not a typical financial buyer. They’re operators who actually understand what it takes to build and scale an agency because they’ve done it themselves. Their approach is simple: invest in great founders, protect what’s already working, and help agencies scale faster. Go to and start the conversation. Building Systems That Outlast the Founder Navneet has been doing SEO since before Google Penguin existed, back when keyword stuffing and reciprocal link building were legitimate strategies. Back then, barely anyone knew what SEO was and training people took a long time, so Navneet started growing his team by investing in three-day training sessions and hiring only those who would, by the end, understand basic SEO concepts. This initial investment in training also led him to since 2002, with his first being a printed sheet for reciprocal link building. That early process obsession became the foundation everything else was built on. More recently, he develops new SOPs by explaining the process to someone sitting next to him while simultaneously recording a Loom video. That method forces clarity. If he can’t explain it simply enough for someone else to follow in real time, the SOP isn't ready. His onboarding process reflects the same rigor as Navneet’s agency has grown to a 120+ person team and is regarded as one of the largest dedicated SEO agencies in India. Every new hire goes through a minimum six-to-eight-week onboarding, and every training module ends with a 100/100 quiz requirement. No partial credit or exceptions. That standard has kept quality consistent as the team scaled. The system doesn't bend to accommodate shortcuts. The hire rises to meet the standard, or they don't make it through onboarding. The Rubber Band Effect: When Founders Undermine Their Own Teams Even after he had the systems, the team, and the leadership layer in place, Navneet still felt the pull to . Not because the team wasn't capable but because SEO has always been his hobby. He genuinely enjoys it. So he'd chime in, jump back into SOPs, insert himself where he no longer needed to be. That's the rubber band effect. Your identity is still attached to the version of you that built the thing. Even when your role has shifted to CEO, part of you still wants to be the architect. The problem isn't the instinct, it’s the impact. When a founder steps back into a team member's lane, it creates confusion about ownership, slows the team down, and signals that their work isn't trusted. Navneet's saving grace is that his longest-tenured employees have been with him for 17 to 20 years. They know his temperament and don't rattle. But for any founder with a younger team, this behavior hits harder. The goal isn't to never feel the pull, but to recognize it before you act on it. How AI Became a Force Multiplier, Not a Threat When most agencies were panicking about AI killing SEO, Page Traffic was using it to scale five times faster than before. The reason comes down to what Navneet had already built: two decades of documented processes that could now be packaged thanks to AI. He was able to transfer his entire knowledge base into software, so the institutional knowledge that used to live in his head (and required him to train people personally) is now embedded in the tools his team uses every day. New hires don't need Navneet in the room. They follow the process, and the process has his judgment baked in. This is the distinction matters because agencies panicking about AI are usually the ones that never systematized their knowledge in the first place. They're realizing that if AI can do what they do, they never had a real moat, just execution. Navneet had the moat. AI just made it easier to deploy. He's also building AI agents and automation services for clients, which created an entirely new revenue line. All because his agency already had the structure to absorb AI and deploy it fast. Personal Branding as a Pre-Sales Mechanism Navneet made a deliberate decision a few years ago to in parallel with his agency's brand. He started speaking at conferences around the world, doubled down on YouTube, and made sure that when people in his market searched for SEO expertise, they found both his company and his name. The result: he's now one of the only SEO leaders in India known both by agency name and by personal name. The business impact is direct. When a prospect reaches out to Page Traffic having already watched Navneet's content, heard him speak, or followed him online, they're not a cold lead, they're pre-sold. The qualification call replaces the sales call. You're not convincing them; you're deciding if they're a fit. That shift changes the entire dynamic of how deals get closed and what kind of clients come through the door. Founders who skip personal branding because it feels uncomfortable or "not their thing" are leaving their best pipeline tool on the table. People buy from people they already trust. The question is whether you're showing up in the places where that trust gets built. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our ners like you, our Agency Blueprint helpities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprgency's success.
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Your Agency Can’t Scale Past the Role You’re Stuck In with Dave Benton | Ep #901
04/29/2026
Your Agency Can’t Scale Past the Role You’re Stuck In with Dave Benton | Ep #901
Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? How can you build an agency that outlasts your involvement in it? And what happens to your identity when you finally make that shift? Over the course of 22 years, today's featured guest grew a one-person freelance operation into a full-service digital agency doing eight figures and then sold it. In this conversation, he'll unpack the real lessons from that journey: the painful transitions between operator, manager, and architect, the hiring decision that finally unlocked his ability to step back from the work he loved, and why the question isn't just who you need on your team — it's who you need to become. Dave Benton is the founder and former CEO of , a full-service digital agency specializing in complex digital products and platforms. With over two decades of experience, Dave built his agency from freelance beginnings into an eight-figure business, eventually leading to a successful exit. Today, Dave is focused on innovation, particularly in AI, and how agencies must evolve structurally to remain competitive in a rapidly shifting landscape. In this episode, we’ll discuss: Operator to owner evolution Recurring revenue as a growth lever AI as an operational requirement, not a competitive advantage Subscribe Sponsors and Rees E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Toggl: Most agencies are losing 15–30% of their profit every year: lack of time tracking, messy manual timesheets, scope creep, untracked revisions, and all those “quick” client requests that never get billed. Toggl has created a fast, interactive way to uncover exactly where your margins are leaking. Start your investigation now at and use the code SMARTAGENCY10 at checkout for a 10% off annual plans. When Freelancing Becomes a Business Building an agency wasn’t a single decision for Dave. It was an evolution that happened only after making several key decisions. It took him nearly eight years before the business truly felt like a company, not just a collection of projects and contractors. This delay wasn’t due to lack of opportunity, but rather the absence of structural clarity. Like many founders, he initially relied on freelancers and partnerships to extend capacity. It wasn’t until he introduced stability, through a small team and operational support, that the business began to compound. His experience reinforces a critical principle: agencies don’t become scalable when revenue increases, but when structure stabilizes. The key mistake many founders make at this stage is avoiding the discomfort of responsibility. Hiring a team introduces fixed obligations in a variable revenue model, which forces a shift in thinking. The Founder Evolution Problem (Operator → Architect) Dave candidly describes this transition as “slow and painful,” largely because he attempted to skip stages, trying to build a leadership team before the business could support it. This misalignment is common. Founders hear advice like “hire great people” or “get the right people on the bus,” . Without the revenue, clarity, or systems to support those hires, it leads to inefficiency and frustration. The business must earn the right to complexity. Dave also dealt with the challenge of redefining his identity within the agency. He deeply identified as a creative director, which made delegation difficult because of his personal attachment to the work. This is the hidden bottleneck in most agencies: the founder’s self-concept. The breakthrough came when he hired an exceptional executive creative director, someone good enough to replace him at a level he respected. This evolution required letting go of control, redefining his role, and shifting focus from output to system design. That transition, from doing the work to building the machine, is where real scale begins. Recurring Revenue and Stability as a Growth Multiplier Another critical unlock Dave shares is the role of recurring revenue in accelerating growth. His agency’s trajectory changed significantly when they secured a long-term relationship with a major enterprise client, embedding a dedicated team within that organization. This shift introduced predictability, which is often underestimated in agency growth. Project-based revenue creates constant volatility, forcing founders to stay involved in sales and delivery. Recurring revenue, on the other hand, creates operational breathing room, allowing leadership to focus on systems, talent, and long-term strategy. Stability reduces decision fatigue, smooths cash flow, and enables more strategic hiring. Without it, agencies remain reactive. With it, they can become intentional. AI Is the New Baseline Both Jason and Dave challenge the common narrative that AI is a competitive edge. Instead, they position it as a requirement, similar to the shift from traditional to digital agencies years ago. Dave shares several striking data points: a growing percentage of B2B buying journeys now begin with AI-driven platforms, and a majority of deals are effectively decided before human interaction even begins. This changes the game entirely. If your agency isn’t visible or credible within these AI ecosystems, you’re excluded before the sales process starts. Internally, AI adoption requires structural integration and must go beyond tools. Dave’s agency is experimenting with agents across functions, from development to QA to leadership coaching. The goal isn’t efficiency alone, but capability expansion: turning team members into . However, this transition introduces a leadership challenge. Founders must balance urgency with stability, pushing teams to adopt AI without creating fear around job security. The agencies that succeed will be those that reframe AI as an amplifier of talent, not a replacement for it. Building an AI-Enabled Organization (Not Just Using AI) Many founders are, but failing to distribute that capability across the organization. This creates a bottleneck, where the founder becomes even more central, not less. Dave is actively working to avoid this by equipping every department with tailored AI tools and training. Developers, designers, and producers each have different use cases, and the goal is to elevate the entire system, not just individual output. This aligns with a broader shift in agency structure: from teams of executors to teams of orchestrators. The future agency isn’t defined by how many people it employs, but by how effectively those people leverage systems and automation to produce outcomes. The long-term implication is that agencies that fail to operationalize AI will face margin compression and reduced competitiveness. Those that integrate it deeply will unlock new levels of scale without proportional increases in headcount. Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset? Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our ners like you, our Agency Blueprint helpities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprgency's success.
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