The Agency Growth Podcast

[Cold open [Best gift cards // Is ad blocker piracy?] ends at 12:52.] Cesar is back by popular demand for the 3rd time because we need updates! Last we spoke, everything was on fire at his agency. He was stressed and dealing with over 100 clients with a small team. Employees weren't working out, clients were churning, and to make matters more complicated, he had a baby on the way. Something had to...

We are big fans of the productized service model and equate our rate to a set hourly limitation and internal billable rate. This isn't a secret. We've had multiple episodes on why knowing your internal hourly rate is crucial. Then we received an email from Jonathan Stark's team wanting to tell us why hourly billing and fixation on hourly tracking is "nuts". For an hour and a half, Jonathan steps i...

Every big agency has a CFO but what does a CFO really do? When do you need one? We sit down with Jody Grunden, a virtual CFO for creative and marketing agencies to explain in detail. Jody has been a fractional CFO for business and agencies for over 20 years. We sit down and talk to him to learn why an agency might want a CFO and the difference between a fractional one versus an internal one. Jody...

Jason has the story almost every agency owner is after. He grew his first agency to $5m and sold it. Then started a second one and within 5 years, he was at $5m in revenue again. After another 5 years, his agency was at $20m. Jason sold his $20m law firm agency to a private equity firm and took a seat on the board yet still continues to lead his own agency. Some crazy facts about the legal space:...

If you're in the SEO industry, you know Darren Shaw and his company, Whitespark. If you're not... well you're still in for a good episode as we barely even talk about SEO! We go deep into how Darren is able to run a 7-figure agency and equally sized SaaS that is well recognized in the SEO industry. On top of that, we talk about he's still able to find the time to remain a subject matter expert in...

**Cold Open (Cloudflare Down Again and AI Stuff)** **Skip the Cold Open at 8:45** 6 Months ago we decided to dive into the world of email marketing. The problem was that we couldn't find a Email Service Provider (ESP) that catered to agencies. We needed subaccounts and a pricing structure that didn't absolutely drain our bank accounts. That's where we met Gyula from BlueFox. Gyula has designed an...

**Cold Open (Cody's Too Sexy for His Shirts)** **Skip the Cold Open at 6:41** As we've been diving into integrating AI into our agency, we've realized that everyone on the internet seems to be lying about how they're using AI. When we ask about specific operational applications outside of spamming prospects or scraping lists, we're met with a mix of content production applications and crickets. We...

**Cold Open (Colorado and Dream Crushers)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:57** Kinsta (a WordPress hosting solution) reached out to us to be an agency partner. We had to break the news to them that our agency is transitioning to the Wix Studio platform. Roger Willams from Kinsta challenged us on that decision and before we let him keep talking, we asked him to duke it out with us on the podcast in an...

Clients unable to access Google Drive because they don't have Gmail... Clients unable to send files because they don't have Dropbox... Responding to, organizing, and taking feed back from cluttered email responses and Google Docs... Knowing if clients and prospects actually viewed your pitch deck These are some of the inefficiencies we've been dealing with in our agency and just a few of the thing...

**Cold Open (Ninja Forms bugs, swag, and the great email fiasco)** **Skip the Cold Open at 14:13** This week, we dive into something every agency owner eventually faces: what happens when you and your clients grow, but not always in the same direction. We break down the difference between growing with clients versus growing apart, how productization sharpens those shifts, and why "but I’ve been wi...

Real estate, real estate, real estate... We see so many newer agency owners and freelancers trying to target or go after real estate agents. Thinking about this on our own... it doesn't seem that viable to us just off of our own basic knowledge of the industry. So we brought Matt Johnson with MicroFamous™ onto the podcast who has an extensive history in the agency space dealing specifically with r...

**Cold Open (The dentist and Jake's old man habits)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:00** We received an email from a client a few days ago that part asked and part dictated strategy. This didn't sit well with us and it led Jake to ask Cody if we should list our prices on our website. It sounds completely unrelated, but we position ourselves as a productized agency and not a boutique agency. That mean...

We have been deep into the AI ecosystem looking for solutions to operational problems both in our own agency and for our clients. We've also noticed other agency owners and SaaS businesses jumping on the AI bandwagon and building their own AI tools and reselling them wrapped as a service. Tony Small from HeyLibby joins us on this episode and gives us insight into why and how he started his AI call...

"Hey, I heard you guys don't like GoHighLevel. I got something you might like instead." That was the email Chris Willow with SPP sent us when he first reached out. Naturally, we were intrigued. After diving more into Service Provider Pro , we realized that Chris really understands the essence of the productized agency model and what tools actually need to do for productized agencies. Leave out all...

**Cold Open (Jake is mentoring high school kids in entrepreneurship)** **Skip the Cold Open at 18:43** This week, we tackle a topic we've kind of flipped on... the power of personal branding for agency owners. Previously we've advocated for “building the agency brand first,” now we share why the game has changed and why your personal brand could be your most valuable asset. Check out our thoughts...

**Cold Open (We're Switching to Invoice Billing with Google Ads)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:37** What if you could sip pina coladas on a beach without a multi-million dollar agency? It's possible when you stop chasing the wrong goals. This week, we talk about the difference between setting monetary milestones and building toward lifestyle goals. We explain why we think true agency success isn't...

We have talked extensively about optimal agency operations on this podcast because it's probably the most important thing in the profitability and scalability of your agency. Gray Mackenzie has been helping multi-million dollar agencies for the past 13 years find higher profitability in their operational procedures through his company, ZenPilot. Gray is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to agenc...

**Cold Open (Everyone gets swag wrong)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:28** We've been seeing a lot of new "agency owners" the last couple of months and the questions that are being asked are not ones we'd expect to see new business owners ask. They're ones that are fundamental in understanding how, not just an agency, but literally any business works. This episode transcends advice for just agency ow...

**Skip the Cold Open at 11:39** Most people will probably say that having fewer clients that pay more is clearly better. For over 6 years. we've thought the opposite. That having more clients is more stable and the loss of those clients impacts the business less. As we've grown the last (almost) 7 years, we've picked up on a few nuances where... yes, we're right... but to an extent we have to ackn...

**Cold Open (Jake's been travelling / Jake's internet issues)** **Skip the Cold Open at 3:51** Lately Jake has been getting some absolutely whacky sales calls and has had to deal with some... unique sales objections as well as some common red flags. In this episode, we break down our most common client red flags as well as go into some of the wild sales objections we've been getting lately. ------...

**Cold Open (Follow up on listener problem from Episode #165)** **Skip the Cold Open at 6:43** It's been a few years since we've talked about what we'd do differently if we were to start an agency over right now. However, the landscape has changed more in the last year than it has in the last 5 years. Additionally, we are not the same people we were in 2019. Over the last 6-7 years, we have learne...

We get tired of hearing about all the awful "setters and closers" out there. But one of our listeners put us up for the challenge of trying to find a legitimate appointment setting agency and grilling them on the podcast. So we did just that. We found Steve Fair from Sponge:NB who has been in the industry for over 2 decades. Steve not only explains how to do appointment setting right, but pulls th...

We've touched on our personal experiences with AI at our agency in this podcast as well as with other guests, but it's been a while since we've had a dedicated episode on the topic. Emily Thompson from CoSchedule joins us to go over their survey report on The State of AI in Marketing . We go over the various finding in this report and weigh in on each finding. Things like: Whether marketers feel t...

**Cold Open (Jake is training for a marathon)** **Skip to Cold Open at 11:10** Last week, we went over how we managed client projects and recurring monthly tasks inside of our ClickUp workspace. This week, we're going over how we use ClickUp internally to manage internal projects, team member time tracking, monitor labor efficiency, and how we manage our own workloads. We also go over how we use t...

**Cold Open (Cody is finally done moving)** **Skip to Cold Open at 6:20** A popular request of us is to walkthrough our entire ClickUp™ setup and how we use it as a productized service agency. In this episode, we go through specifically how we use it for client work and how we automate monthly, recurring task generation. We also go into other features we use such as scheduled emails to clients and...