Agency Forward

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Dustin Riechmann . Dustin runs Seven Figure Leap, where he helps agency owners, coaches, and consultants turn podcast guesting into an actual growth channel instead of a box to check. He's coached hundreds of people through the process of getting on the right shows, and he's also on the other side of the mic as a host himself, so he sees the good and bad pitches f...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Tom Lee . Tom is the CEO and co-founder of Visto , a VC-backed platform built specifically for agencies to track and improve their clients' visibility inside AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Tom came from product roles at Apple, Walmart, and Lockheed Martin before building Visto. I wanted Tom on because GEO is becoming a real s...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Roger Nairn . Roger is the founder of JAR , a branded podcast agency that has spent a decade helping enterprise brands like Amazon and Wharton create shows that actually do something. JAR recently rebranded from "JAR Audio" to "JAR Podcast Solutions" — a shift that reflects how much the industry has evolved.  I wanted Roger on because branded podcasts are having a...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Davidson Wicker . Davidson is a work management expert and the CEO of Ravetree , helping agencies and professional services firms get more out of their project management systems. He's seen the same patterns play out across hundreds of teams: the tool gets implemented, nobody adopts it properly, and the founder ends up back in spreadsheets within six months.  I wa...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Jon Morris . Jon is the founder of Rise Interactive, a digital marketing agency he grew to over $40M in revenue before selling. He now runs Fiscal Advocates Inc. and advises agency owners on the financial infrastructure they need to grow without burning out or breaking the business. Jon's work sits at the intersection of financial strategy and agency operations, a...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Jonathan Stark . Jonathan is an author, speaker, and consultant who has spent over 20 years helping agencies and consultants escape the trap of hourly billing. He hosts the Ditching Hourly podcast, has published over 500 episodes on the subject, and runs the Ditcherville community.  I wanted Jonathan on because pricing is one of the most underlevered moves in any...

Most agency owners think their problem is workload. It isn't. It's latency, the gap between the moment a question lands and the moment you have an answer good enough to act on. In this solocast, I break down a metric I've been optimizing my life around for two years: Speed to Informed. The fix has two arms, and most owners only ever build one. In this episode: Why workload isn't actually the probl...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Garrett Jestice . Garrett is a GTM consultant and advisor who helps agencies, solo consultants, and fractionals build the foundations that make marketing and sales actually work.  I wanted Garrett on because he's someone I talk to regularly, and every conversation surfaces something practical. His take on leverage levers for agencies goes well beyond the usual "ni...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Mike Grinberg . Mike is the founder of Proofpoint Marketing, a positioning consultancy that works primarily with boutique firms in regulated industries like life sciences, financial services, and med tech.  I wanted to have Mike on because, selfishly, we think about positioning very similarly. Mike's take on positioning is that he doesn't treat it as a messaging p...

Positioning that doesn't change how you hire, price, deliver, sell, and operate is just a writing exercise. In this solocast, Chris DuBois introduces the "So That Gap" — the distance between the sentence on your homepage and the operating decisions underneath it. You get a three-minute diagnostic you can run on yourself right now, a map of the five specific places this gap shows up in every agency...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Joseph Fioramonti . Joseph is the founder of Dark Square, a branding agency, and the creator of Constellations, a visual perception tool that replaces stakeholder guesswork with real audience data. He spent over a decade doing large corporate rebrands for tech companies before building Constellations internally to solve his own approval problem. The tool now has t...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Barrett King . Barrett has spent most of his career building agency-facing partnership programs at some of the biggest names in SaaS — HubSpot, Ramp, and now Close CRM, where he serves as Head of Partnerships. What drew me to Barrett is that he thinks about partnerships the way most agency owners never do: as a deeply intentional relationship that should be define...

Most agency pricing tiers are built wrong. They're based on scope. More deliverables. More hours. More stuff. But here's what your clients actually want: results, faster. In this solocast, I break down velocity pricing, a model where every tier delivers the same outcome but at different speeds and intensity levels. Instead of selling labor by the pound, you sell time-to-value. In this episode, I c...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Alex James — and this is a return visit. Alex is a positioning strategist who works with B2B agencies and founders to help them develop a clear, differentiated perspective that goes beyond just niching down. His core belief: your perspective is your product. I brought Alex back because the conversation we had last time sparked a ton of response, and I wanted to go...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Adam Weil , a partner at White Rabbit Group . White Rabbit Group partners with creative and branding agencies to handle the web development and technical work that those agencies can't — or shouldn't — do themselves. They've built a model around white-label dev partnerships that help agencies deliver more value without stretching beyond their strengths. I wanted t...

Hey everyone, welcome to Episode 100.  To celebrate, I wanted to hit 10 lead gen tips from working with dozens of agencies over the years.  These are the things that all my best clients are doing that I try to replicate across all clients so they can get the same results.  Enjoy. Hope to see you for the next 100.  ----------- Lead Gen is the hardest part of running an agency. For most, it's unpred...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Tim Kilroy — and this is a return visit. Tim is the founder of the WTF Agency Method and Build Your Agency Better. He's founded, scaled, and sold multiple agencies across 25+ years in digital marketing, and now coaches agency owners full-time. In his first appearance we dug into agency offers, discounts vs. value, and the sales process. This time, we're going deep...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Kris Rudeegraap . Kris is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sendoso, the leading gifting and direct mail platform for B2B sales and marketing teams. He spent a decade in sales before building Sendoso, pioneering the shift from email-only outreach to omnichannel strategies. And Sendoso now powers campaigns for thousands of companies with AI-driven gift recommendations and...

Hey, everyone. Solocast for you.  The agency world spent a decade telling you to stop doing execution and move up the value chain. Good advice — at the time. But the industry overcorrected, and now agencies are selling strategy to clients who have zero capacity to implement it. The result? A lot of agencies wondering why retention is so hard. In this episode: Why execution doesn't make you a vendo...

Hey everyone, today is another solocast for you. Every agency owner I talk to says the same thing: "We get clients from referrals, mostly. But we know we need to do more." The problem is that "do more" isn't a strategy — and nobody ever laid out the actual options. In this episode, I cover: Why referrals are great but terrible as a primary pipeline The seven GTM motions What each motion costs in t...

Hey everyone, today is another solocast for you. Most agencies pick a vertical and call it positioning. "We serve dentists." "We work with SaaS companies." But that's a filter, not a position — it tells people who you work with, not why they should hire you. In this episode, I break down the three layers of niching that most agencies collapse into one — and show you why leading with the problem ch...

Hey, everyone. Today, I've got a solocast coming your way.  Most agency owners trying to grow are doing one of two things: cold outreach or waiting for referrals. Both have the same problem. You're starting from zero every time. There's a third option that almost nobody talks about: finding the people who already have your future clients' attention, and getting in front of them. In this episode, I...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Sean Lang . Sean is an agency operations expert who helps founders remove themselves as the bottleneck in their business. Before entering the agency world, Sean managed an airport refueling operation—a role that gave him a healthy respect for process, compliance, and what happens when things go wrong. He's since applied those lessons to help agency owners stop hoa...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by David Hoos . David is a marketing consultant who specializes in helping dev agencies build and execute marketing strategies that actually resonate with technical founders. With a background that bridges both worlds—his mother an English teacher, his father a software engineer—David cut his teeth at a conversion optimization agency before advising dev shops on posi...

Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Jody Grunden . Jody is a virtual CFO and financial strategist for growing agencies. He’s the co-founder of Summit CPA Group (now part of Anders CPAs), where he’s helped scale hundreds of agencies with data-driven financial forecasting and CFO insights.  I wanted to have Jody on because too many agency owners fly blind with their finances and miss out on stable, sc...