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

Jason Swenk
  • 4.8 (130)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Biweekly

Growing an agency is very difficult, and you might feel unclear what to do next in order to grow and scale your agency. The Smart Agency Masterclass is a weekly podcast for agencies that are wanting to grow faster. We interview amazing guests from all over the world that have the experience of running successful businesses, and will provide you the insights you need. Our podcast is just over 3 years old, and have reached more than a half million listeners in 42 countries.

  1. 6d ago

    Stop Waiting for the Right Revenue to Start Living with Dobbin Buck | Ep #922

    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? 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.

  2. Jul 15

    Is Low Agency Overhead Actually a Growth Ceiling? With Billy Scott | Ep #921

    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.

  3. Jul 8

    Is the Digital Agency Model Broken, or Are We Just Calling It the Wrong Thing? With Brent Weaver | Ep #920

    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? 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.

  4. Jul 1

    Why These Agency Partners Did an Eight-Month Soft Launch Before the Real Partnership Started with Josh Hanosh & Kevin Howe | Ep #919

    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? 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.

  5. Jun 28

    The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918

    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? 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.

    The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918

  6. Jun 24

    The 80% Rule That Frees Agency Founders from the Operator Seat with Mimi Banks | Ep #917

    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? 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 b******t 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.

  7. Jun 21

    What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916

    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.

    What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916

  8. Jun 17

    Your Agency Partner Wants Out. Now What? with Tim Bouchard | Ep #915

    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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Growing an agency is very difficult, and you might feel unclear what to do next in order to grow and scale your agency. The Smart Agency Masterclass is a weekly podcast for agencies that are wanting to grow faster. We interview amazing guests from all over the world that have the experience of running successful businesses, and will provide you the insights you need. Our podcast is just over 3 years old, and have reached more than a half million listeners in 42 countries.

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