The Agency Growth Podcast

We open this special, yearly episode with the announcement of Jake and the Agency Growth Podcast's acquisition of the r/agency subreddit. Head over to r/agency and start engaging with the agency community! This year we spend some time recapping our 2024 year with our agency. We talk about what our goals were and where we actually ended up. Jake also took some time and calculated month-over-month a...

**Cold Open (Jake is an idiot)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:07** Our clients have told us that when agencies say they can help them scale their business to (insert number), that is somewhat of a red flag. It tells the business owner that the agency doesn't really know a lot about business operations and that leads and marketing are only a small portion of being able to grow a business. Business ow...

Anik Singal was sued by the FTC for $15m all because of four simple words in his call script. We brought Anik on the podcast to talk about compliant marketing and how marketers, agencies, and coaches all over the world are violating FTC rules and are in danger of being sued. In preparation for this interview, Jake read Anik's book that he co-authored with his partner and compliance lawyer, Greg Ch...

We don't use sketchy SEO or cheap lead gen tactics at our agency. Our competitors and peers do these things. However, sooner or later, those tactics are going to stop working, and when they don't, will you be prepared? Maybe they will end up working forever, but we've been able to communicate our clean SEO and marketing approach to our clients and it turns out, that clients prefer to stay with us...

**Episode Start at 19:04** **Cold Open (How Was Christmas? / Weird SEO Agency Guy)** **Headlines without Context: 14:23** ---------------------------------- Be careful about which clients you choose to take on. Some clients are simply distractions from what you set out to build for your own agency. For us, it was an agency in the landscaping and lawn care niche. Any client that doesn't fit that de...

As data-oriented digital marketers, we often have little to say about brand strategy and graphic design agencies. That's where Lucy and Imogen from Lumo Design Studio jump in to tell us their story about how they went from freelance graphic designers to a full brand strategy agency busy enough to turn down work. Lucy and Imogen walk through what it was like when they first started trying to sell p...

**Cold Open (Travelling light as a business owner)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:04)** We answer the difficult question of "how many accounts can one person at your agency actually handle?" Answers are all over the place on the internet. Some people saying as little as 10 while other saying as many as 50 or even 100. Well, it depends on what that person's role is and how much time they dedicate on t...

Ever since we started our agency, we've been focused on generating leads for our clients because, ultimately, that's what they care about. We've preached this on this podcast as well over and over again. Today, Jeff Greenfield with Provalytics joins us to tell us that if we want to provide more leads, we should be focusing on mediums that can deliver high numbers of impressions vs clicks. That's a...

**Skip the Cold Open at 6:50** **Headlines with Some Context ("New Ways to Holiday Shop with Google Lense, Maps, and More")** The episode topic officially starts at the 12:53 mark. We wanted to talk about tech stacks. More importantly, why it's important for you as an agency to have a defined tech stack that you stick to. We've noticed a lot of agencies deciding to work in a lot of different websi...

In this episode, we discuss the main problem with using foreign contractors for lead gen efforts within the United States. Understanding US geography and local targeting. States, cities, and even zip codes are simple enough to teach. But we've run into issue with describing how county, neighborhoods, geographic colloquialisms, and "DMA" targeting works with foreign workers. If you employ foreign w...

Sarah Noel Block from Tiny Marketing joins us to give her step-by-step on how she generates qualified leads for her agency. It's important to remember that we don't do any sort of lead generation for our agency. Everything we get is organic so this is a whole new world for us. Sarah breaks down her foolproof strategy from generating cold leads and converting them into clients with her 4-step proce...

This episode breaks three records! The longest one we've had to date. Our first consultation episode! Our first returning guest! Cesar joins us on the podcast once again 5 months after his original episode ($25k MRR and I Have No Idea What I'm Doing | #108) seeking direct help from us. He has a list of issues his agency is dealing with at this size: Deliverables are being dropped. Quality isn't up...

How much money can you make as an agency owner? We've been seeing this question pop up a lot and not just online, but in person. It seems that people seem to think that the earning potential is unlimited and thought that may be true, what is mostly disagreed on is the timeframe it takes to earn a lot o money as an agency owner. There really are two fundamental ways to make a lot of money as an age...

**Cold Open (Our Advice to a Redditor // Google Local Service Ads are Changing)** **Skip the Cold Open at 16:15** Our agency has been working on two very big things that are fundamentally changing how digital marketing agencies operate. We talked about one of those things in episode 123. This time, we're tackling server-side tracking -- specifically with Google's "Enhanced Conversions". The days o...

Since the release of Chat GPT 2 years ago, we have seen a surge in AI-related tools and content. AI allowed creators to pump out content at 1000x the rate they were and at 1/1000th the cost. The content was good, too. Over time, it became detectable just by reading it. Jon Gillham from Originiality.ai joins us on this episode to talk about the efficacy of AI content detection, when it's applicable...

**Skip to the HighLevel discussion at 36:58** A listener of the podcast has a bone to pick with us (Jake) on our position with High Level. Josh Kimmes owns a digital marketing agency called Bear North Digital up in Superior, Wisconsin who uses High Level as his agency's primary tech stack. We grill Josh on his whole agency journey, his business model, and his agency's size. Meanwhile, Josh makes t...

**Cold Open (Someone told Cody our podcast was bad... to his face)** **Skip the Cold Open at 25:44** It's not looking good for the world's most widely used website builder. WordPress' founder, Matt Mullenweg, attacked WP Engine the other week and WP Engine sent Matt a cease and desist. If you're not in the website-building community or manage websites, that's okay -- we'll give you the backstory....

**Cold Open (AMAZON GIFT CARD CHALLENGE TO LISTENERS / Headlines without Context)** **Skip the Cold Open at 19:50** We've had to dive down the email rabbit hole. Exploring SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and SMTP solutions. Why? Because our job is to deliver leads to our clients. When someone fills out a form on our client's site, in order for us to properly get credit for that lead, the client needs to be aler...

**Cold Open (A listener and guest sent us a gift box -- we taste and rank everything in it)** **Skip the Cold Open at 13:08** If you don't have a lawyer and don't know how to write agreements for your agency, perhaps hearing how we write ours will help you craft yours. Because we need to say it, we're not lawyers. Our agreements are not airtight. But they work for us. We give practical advice for...

We talk to Andrew Jenkins at Catalyst RVA about his home service agency and how he was able to scale to $15k/mo in recurring profit in under a year. Does Andrew have a secret to his quick success that we don't know? How long can he sustain that? Does he plan to get any bigger... or can he? Find out more as we sit down and chat with Andrew over the next hour and a half. ----------------------------...

For the first time in over 2 years of doing this podcast, we're covering mental health. Specifically our own experiences with it as agency owners. We're covering both perspectives of coming into agency ownership with pre-existing mental health issues as well as developed ones from the natural stressors that come with operating an agency and business in general. We both deal with our own very separ...

**Skip the fun stuff and get to the meat of the episode at 21:26** The number one problem agencies seem to struggle with is getting clients. They often blame competition or not having a good enough value prop. But that's rarely actually the case. Lacking basic business, marketing, and sales fundamentals is what's killing agencies and causing them to spin their wheels. -----------------------------...

We're joined by Lindsay Halsey of Pathfinder SEO . Lindsay also owns her own SEO and PPC agency with her partner, Lori Calcott, called Webshine . Pathfinder SEO is a tool developed by Lindsay and Lori, to not only use in their own agency, but also help other agency owners learn the fundamentals of SEO as well as create standardized SEO processes and procedural SEO documentation. Get 30% off your f...

**Cold Open (Tea, Coffee, Reviews, Our YouTube Channel)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:52** Even if you're not an SEO or web design agency, you should know how to audit a website. The website is an asset that affects everything in digital marketing whether you're a social media agency, email marketing agency, or even video and design agency. If you're a design agency, you may want to consider adding...

**Cold Open (The Everbros YouTube Channel)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:38** Agency software comes in different pricing variations. Picking the right software for your agency shouldn't just be about the features it has, how it's billed should also be a major determining factor in the scalability of that software in your agency as your agency scales. We break down the different types of pricing mode...