The Agency Growth Podcast

We stress the importance of niching down when it comes to creating your own marketing or consulting agency, especially in such a crowded industry, but we've never gone into how to pick your niche. Granted, niching down isn't for everyone -- but if it is for you, then you'll want to hear what we have to say regarding picking your niche. Too often we see people default to the same few niches (real-e...

A few episodes back we dropped episode 35 on how to get published in a niche magazine -- the problem with that is figuring out what to write for that magazine that resonates with that audience. This is something everyone who produces content asks themselves. "Should I publish this content on my own site or should I give it to a publication?" The default answer is to usually give the least impactfu...

We read a listener's question regarding how they can turn their graphic design skills into a service where they can work for themselves rather than someone else. In the past, we've mentioned how it's really hard to turn graphic design services into something that people want to buy every month multiple times. In other words, it's a service you have to keep selling over and over again which makes i...

This week, Jake and Cody talk about the different digital agency roles at an agency and how each of them can break off into their own freelancing gig. Not all roles are created equally. Some can transition smoothly into freelance work like SEO, PPC, and Social Media Management. But what about other roles like graphic design, content writing, or account management? How can these roles at existing a...

There is clearly a different mindset between successful and unsuccessful agency owners. The main difference is you don't typically hear a lot coming from successful owners. The unsuccessful ones tend to share "Mindset" status updates and project to the world everything they're doing in what seems like a call for attention. If this is you, that's okay. Jake was like this when he first started his a...

We've said it before, but getting published in magazines and other industry publications has been one of the biggest game changers for our agency in terms of leads we've received, sales we've closed, and authority we've built. It's been the single most important thing that has set our brand apart from other agencies in the space. It's a topic we've considered doing for a while. Getting articles pu...

Reporting to you from Cartagena, Colombia!  In this episode, we host our first-ever recording in person while on our trip to Colombia! With that in mind, we did want to let you know the audio quality isn't great. However, there is a wealth of knowledge and insight into exactly how big or small we are and how we're able to accomplish the things we do at our size. We'll go over exactly what our 2022...

Productizing and packaging services isn't a business model for everyone. For us, it is. It's been very fruitful and scalable and clients seem to love it. But just because you package a service together doesn't mean it will sell or even be successful. We found a few of our productized services failing to meet expectations or just outright sucking. We've since learned from those mistakes and even re...

In our... somewhat Christmas episode, we got in the spirit of giving in which this week we give you some of the biggest game changes for our agencies that really impacted our growth, the value we offer to our clients, and our overall well-being. If you want to get to the meat of the episode, skip to 8:30. There are countless things we've implemented in our agency that have helped us grow, but in t...

Everyone always says how important it is for you to document your processes, but rarely do they talk about how they do it or what the most efficient way to do it is. In this episode, we talk about how we found massive growth and process improvement after our processes were not only documented but defined as well as how we went about doing it in a way that really didn't take too much time from us....

This is a question we struggled with for the first couple of years of our business. Initially, we thought we wanted our first hire to be someone that would be good at performing the services we weren't adept at ourselves. We figured this would help grow the business as we could sell those services and then offload the work to them. However, we soon realized that the best thing to do would be to hi...

You either started or are starting your agency as a subject matter expert, that is, you are a self-proclaimed expert in whatever thing you're selling. But over time, the harsh reality is that as you grow, you will start to lose your subject matter expertise. As you document your processes and hire new people to replace the in-field work you're doing, you start to focus on things that aren't so fun...

In this episode, we discuss the main problem with most digital marketers and agency owners -- which is they don't really seem to want to learn anything new and they're stuck in their ways. This leads to antiquated practices still being utilized and a lack of testing things to see if they actually work. Most digital marketers in the industry read a case study performed by someone else and accept it...

We got a little off track right away in this episode and it turned into an episode of its own. Everyone has the same amount of time in a day yet some people always seem to get more work done than us. How do they do it? We talk about the sacrifices we've made in our daily lives to be able to focus on getting work done and scaling the agency. Jake set the Xbox controller down and Cody doesn't own a...

In this episode, Jake points out some fallacies when it comes to agency owners trying to find work and where they try to find it. There's a common belief that agency owners should be everywhere at all times (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc) in order to get in front of your potential clients, but that just isn't true. It's honestly a waste of your time. When you're first starting out, you...

Cody hates Thanksgiving, and it's only a week away. So I thought it'd be funny if we did a Thanksgiving episode just to annoy him. First, I get that Thanksgiving episodes are boring; That's why we decided to make an appropriately themed episode that actually provides value rather than get all sappy about what we're thankful for. The things we're thankful for range from having a partner to take the...

DISCLAIMER: #1: If you don't want to hear about Jake's engagement story then skip to the 9:45 mark to get to the meat of the content (you're welcome)! DISCLAIMER #2: Cody is recovering from the flu and Jake is running on 2hrs and 47 minutes of sleep after getting back from Mexico. Both of us sound like we're going to die in this episode. Today we talk about burnout and how it's inevitable for anyo...

Ever noticed how all of the gurus, competitors, or your peers only seem to brag about their revenue numbers? Does it have you feeling like you're not as successful or that you should be doing more? You might want to pay closer attention to what they're saying -- you might end up feeling better about yourself. Revenue is one of those numbers that are easy to inflate. If someone spends $1m in ads an...

We figured we'd hop on the topical train and today's topic is Halloween! In this episode, we'll share a few of our spooky agency stories. No ghosts or ghouls -- just genuinely scary moments for us while working in an agency setting whether that's at our agency or the ones we used to work at. These stories include: Arriving to work to learn that all of the founders are quitting Sending a mailer to...

We discuss how much they actually work as agency owners -- but more importantly, is the work-life balance worth it versus striving to make a 6+ figure income at a 9-5 working 60+ hours per week? When you start your own business, you're going to need to put more time and effort into it than a standard full-time job. However, it is yours and it has more potential. You get to decide when you work, fo...

You might think saying "yes" to more jobs and custom client requests may grow your business, but in reality, it can set you up for failure. One of the hardest things to do is to say "no" to a prospective client who is willing to give you their money for an ask or service that you either don't provide or haven't fleshed out yet. Jake and Cody go through a few examples of how saying "no" is a much b...

The whole point most of us even started our agencies was to make money; so how can anything be more important than that? Money doesn't mean anything if it isn't associated with the labor that's put into it. If you made $50,000 in one year, that doesn't seem like a lot -- that seems like a normal full-time salary. However, most people equate that to 40 labor hours per week. $50,000 starts to look a...

Whether or not you should have a business partner seems to be a hot topic lately both in our industry and in the industry we serve. It seems like the vote is heavily weighted towards not having a business partner. Obviously, we don't necessarily agree with that sentiment. We do, however, think there are situations where you probably should partner with someone -- and that includes: Friends Family...

We have a bit more fun during this episode and occasionally go down rabbit holes of rants regarding how there can be a misconception about how easy and laid-back remote work is. Working remotely for yourself and with your team has its perks but it also has its drawbacks as well. On one hand, you can celebrate things like being able to work wherever you want and sometimes (whenever you want). On th...

A recession is the hot topic today as we head into the end of Q3 looking at two consecutively "down" quarters. When recessions hit, people and businesses get tighter with their money and non-essential services are cut. As a marketing agency, we're often seen as a "non-essential" service (which is odd to us), but as much as we don't want it to be, it's the truth. However, not all businesses and ind...