Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies

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  How 19 Years of Niche Focus Built an Agency Where Clients Compete to Work With You with Wendy Covey | Ep #932 30.09.2026 22мин

  Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training Wendy Covey is the co-founder and CEO of TREW Marketing, a strategy and content agency exclusively serving engineering and manufacturing companies. She started the agency in 2008 — during the Great Recession — as a generalist, and within a year or two of niching down, won a Wall Street Journal Small Business Innovation Award. Today, TREW Marketing is 19 years in, and Wendy has stepped fully into the owner role, with a president and leadership team running day-to-day operations. In this episode, Wendy and Jason dig into what it took to get there: the painful business partner buyout, the career path restructuring, and the niche positioning that now has clients convincing Wendy to take them on. Subscribe Apple  | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 [e2msolutions.com/smartagency](http://e2msolutions.com/smartagency) and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Key Takeaways: Niching down is the accelerant, not the limit. TREW Marketing chased anyone who'd pay in the early days — photo booths, nonprofits, product inventors. Once they committed to engineering and manufacturing companies, everything changed. Within a year or two they won a WSJ award, and today prospects come to them. Wendy's closing line: "It becomes them convincing me why they should be my next client." Your buy-sell agreement must include a valuation method. When Wendy's business partner left after 10 years, their agreement had no formula for valuing the business. Both sides got coaches, the negotiation was painful, and it strained a personal friendship. If you have a partner, get that language in writing before you need it. Build two documented career paths — individual contributor and manager — at the same salary band. TREW Marketing stopped the painful cycle of promoting great individual contributors into bad management seats by creating clear, documented tracks with defined behaviors for each. People can see where they fit before they take the wrong seat. Remove yourself from service delivery first, then tackle sales. Wendy's first move was getting fully out of client delivery. That freed her time to focus on sales and company growth. As sales grew, service delivery leaders naturally joined those conversations — and she found she was less effective in delivery minutiae anyway, making the transition feel inevitable rather than forced.   Wendy also shares how TREW Marketing's 19-year niche commitment is now paying off in the age of AI — their thought leadership content and deep expertise have made them highly visible in large language models, bringing in inbound leads without outbound effort. 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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  Stop Setting Goals Until You Ask This One Question with Phil Davis | Ep #931 23.09.2026 21мин

  Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training Phil Davis is the founder and CEO of Tungsten Branding , one of the world's top-ranked naming and branding agencies, and the man behind hundreds of company names including PODS, RallyHouse, and TeamLogicIT. Before Tungsten, Phil ran a full-service ad agency in Tampa Bay for 17 years before hitting an inflection point: he was succeeding by every external metric and miserable at the core of it. In this episode, Phil and Jason dig into the one question that cuts through all the noise of running an agency, why chasing revenue metrics is a trap, and what it actually means to build a business in alignment with what you want. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | [iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Key Takeaways: Ask "So I can what?" before you chase any goal. This is Phil's acid test: trace every goal back to what it actually gives you. Want a $20M agency? So I can what? Generational wealth? So I can what? Nearly every answer eventually bottoms out at peace of mind or freedom. If you know that upfront, you can stop building toward the wrong things. Chasing the wrong metric will hollow out your agency. Phil built a media-heavy agency that hit his revenue targets and left him wondering what the weather was like because he never stepped outside. The blur years, he calls them. The fix is not working harder; it is questioning which metric you are actually optimizing for, and whether it points toward a life you want. Marketing is a track team — sprinters and shot putters don't swap events. Trying to serve every client in every channel is the curse of early traction. Agencies that win pick their event. Phil pivoted from full-service to naming exclusively, and it became the thing that named PODS and landed Forbes Agency Council recognition. Right-sizing your team and mission is a relief, not a loss. When people get genuinely clear on what they want, the misaligned things fall away on their own. Phil shares the story of a Vistage member whose top salesperson quit after this exercise — and morale went up, not down. What looked like a disaster was the agency right-sizing around what it actually stood for.   Phil also shares why he named his agency Tungsten — the filament in the lightbulb — and how the concept of alignment, everything pointing the same direction to create flow, became the operating philosophy behind everything he does for clients.   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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  The Secret to Running an Agency for 30 Years Without Ever Wanting to Walk Away with Arne Hurty | Ep #930 16.09.2026 23мин

  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 BayCreative, 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 Apple Spotify iHeart Radio  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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 Agency 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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  From Getting Fired to Running a Thriving SEO Agency with Leo Poitevin | Ep #929 09.09.2026 23мин

  Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training Leo Poitevin is the founder of Astrak, 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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. 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 02.09.2026 22мин

  Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training John Jantsch is the founder of Duct Tape Marketing, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 dtm.world/7steps. 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. 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 26.08.2026 26мин

  Would you like to learn how to accelerate your agency growth ?  https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Lion Share Marketing, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Why People Stay for 30 Years Laura Lee does not have a complicated theory about retention. 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 what people were actually good at rather than what she needed done. 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 generating real profit, 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 ourAgency 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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  They Ran the Same Agency for 8 Years Without Knowing Who Did What with John Scheer | Ep #926 19.08.2026 28мин

  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 Herman-Scheer, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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. They just both did everything: 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. The decision to work with them 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 manage out the people who were not a fit, 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 Agency 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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  What Happens When You Build a Team Around Projects Instead of a Vision with Victor Huynh | Ep #925 12.08.2026 27мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Ready Artwork, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 clarity outperforms craft in every sales environment. 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 direction that would have made the department self-sustaining 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 partnership functional is the willingness to have the hard conversation 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 Agency 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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  Is AI Convincing Your Agency Clients They Don't Need You? with Devon MacDonald | Ep #924 05.08.2026 28мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Cairns Oneil, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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. It requires teaching. 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 LLM optimization and branded search strategy are now front-line service offerings, 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 stops doing the critical thinking and starts outsourcing it to AI. 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 Agency 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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  Is Your Best Skill Actually Squashing Your Agency's Growth? with Brett Singer | Ep #923 29.07.2026 28мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Bottle Rocket Media, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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. It needed someone holding the relationship and the vision. 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 what makes the CEO stage sustainable 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. Managing the people who manage the work. 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 Agency 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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  Stop Waiting for the Right Revenue to Start Living with Dobbin Buck | Ep #922 22.07.2026 34мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 GetUWired, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 join with the loudest ask. 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 scheduled around work, 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 structure their lives around a deferred promise. 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 Agency 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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  Is Low Agency Overhead Actually a Growth Ceiling? With Billy Scott | Ep #921 15.07.2026 27мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Grow Marketing, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 building a system around what he does 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. What it actually was: a ceiling. 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 thought he needed to hire "another him". 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 Agency 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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  Is the Digital Agency Model Broken, or Are We Just Calling It the Wrong Thing? With Brent Weaver | Ep #920 08.07.2026 34мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 E2M Solutions, 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, discussing the sale of UGURUS, and how he found his next path. 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 have adopted AI-first. 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 skills required were different. The mindset was different. 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 founders who hand over their thinking entirely, 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 Agency 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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  Why These Agency Partners Did an Eight-Month Soft Launch Before the Real Partnership Started with Josh Hanosh & Kevin Howe | Ep #919 01.07.2026 35мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Three29, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 with genuine ownership mentality. 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. The combination of two ongoing operations 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 let someone struggle toward an answer 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 Agency 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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  The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918 28.06.2026 30мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Strategos, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 wix.com/studio 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: knowing your target 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 keep humans in the accountability seat. 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 or that it will replace them to actually adopt it? 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 Agency 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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  The 80% Rule That Frees Agency Founders from the Operator Seat with Mimi Banks | Ep #917 24.06.2026 26мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 MB Social, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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: a working model for how things should get done. 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 make judgment calls without routing them upward. 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: those are not problems that prestige solves. 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 Agency 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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  What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916 21.06.2026 26мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Beyond Influence, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 wix.com/studio 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 how audiences in each target market actually consume content 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 Darby, our agency scale specialist, 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 human at the center still matters. 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 Agency 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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  Your Agency Partner Wants Out. Now What? with Tim Bouchard | Ep #915 17.06.2026 33мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Luminus, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 stabilizing what already existed. 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 what the agency actually needed to become. 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. The downstream effects were not subtle. 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 Agency 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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  Your Agency Does Great Work So Why Do Clients Choose Someone Else? with Bianca Beatty | Ep #914 14.06.2026 22мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Raven+Co, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 wix.com/studio 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 story, not the portfolio, was the deciding factor. 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, relationships that belong to you and not to your agency: 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 clients align with what the team genuinely cares about, 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 Agency 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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  The Storytelling Framework That Makes Agencies Impossible to Ignore with Park Howell | Ep #913 10.06.2026 33мин

  Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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 Park&Co, 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 The Business of Story podcast, which he has been running for 12 years. Park has been on the podcast previously talking about storytelling, 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 Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 e2msolutions.com/smartagency 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 agencies tell their story 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 the and-but-therefore framework 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. The audience feels understood: 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 Agency 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.