The Agency Uplift Podcast

Summary: Your team is busy. Your systems are working. Your agency is making 80K–100K per month. But you're still the person everyone turns to when something goes wrong. That's not freedom. That's a business that has made you its most important employee. In this episode, I break down why agency founders get stuck at this stage and the practical management changes that helped us escap...

Summary: You're working harder than ever, but is your agency actually getting better? I spent years being the person who solved every problem, approved every decision, and kept everything moving. I thought that made me a great founder. In reality, I was getting better at the wrong job, and I see agency owners making the same mistake today. In this episode, I break down the six things every ag...

Summary: AI can save your agency hundreds of hours. But what if those hours are going straight back into low-value work? I believe most agency owners are approaching AI backward. They're chasing tools and automations instead of asking the one question that actually matters: How will this make my agency better? In this episode, I break down the philosophy I use at Agency Uplift to turn AI from...

Summary: Scaling an agency sounds great until the cracks start appearing. Projects go over budget, clients lose confidence, employees become disengaged, and suddenly you're spending more time fixing problems than growing the business. I sat down with Ian Petersen, partner at Newcombin, to unpack how he helped build an 80-person technology business and what agency owners need to get right befo...

Summary: What if your agency's most reliable clients are quietly costing you money? I learned the hard way that strong results, long relationships, and healthy revenue don't guarantee a profitable client. In this solo episode, I share how one long-term client went from a seemingly great account to a hidden drain on our agency and the simple process I wish we'd used years earlier to...

Summary: Your agency doesn’t need another shiny new service. It needs clients who stay, predictable recurring revenue, and a delivery model that protects your margins. I sat down with Mark Herre, founder of SEO Game, who has spent nearly 30 years in SEO and built a business around helping agencies deliver results without building every capability in house. Takeaways: Why chasing AI trends can dist...

Summary: You probably don’t need more leads, another hire, or the latest AI tool to grow your agency. You might just need to stop leaking profit, improve the value of your next 10 deals, and stop being the decision-maker for everything. In this solo episode, I break down three practical changes that can help you improve your agency’s economics without adding unnecessary complexity. Takeaways: How...

Summary: Referrals can keep your agency busy while quietly holding back its growth. And if your team only understands marketing, not the financial realities behind it, you could be making expensive decisions without realizing it. In this episode, I sit down with Ryan Sliva, co-founder of Social Media Burst, to unpack the operational and financial decisions that help agencies grow without sacrifici...

Summary: Most agency prospects don't want another audit telling them what's wrong. They want to know how much more they could earn and how to get there. In this episode, I share how I transformed our agency's free audits into growth plans that doubled or tripled our close rate, then improved results further by quantifying the opportunity before asking prospects to book a call. Takea...

Summary: Most agencies sell the prospect to their best people, then hand the account to someone far less experienced. Matt Slaymaker saw that bait and switch firsthand and decided to build his agency around doing the opposite. In this episode, I sit down with Matt to unpack what happens when you make senior level delivery, honest expectations, and clients trust the foundation of the agency. Takeaw...

Summary:  You can have 10, 20, or even more employees and still be running your agency like a freelancer with assistants. Every time a client problem, team question, approval, or difficult decision makes its way back to you, you're reinforcing the same dependency: the founder is the safest path to getting things done. The problem isn't always lead generation, hiring, or productivity. Som...

Summary: The thing that makes you great at delivering client work can eventually become the thing that keeps your agency stuck. Van Oakes reached that point when running the ads himself left him with less time for sales, business development, and actually growing the company. In this episode, I talk with Van about the uncomfortable process of letting go of work you're good at, building a team...

Summary: What if the biggest thing holding your agency back isn’t your market, your leads, or your team but the assumptions you’ve accepted as facts? It took me more than three years to reach $1 million with my first agency. If I were starting again, I’d approach it very differently. Takeaways: Why $1M doesn’t require dozens of clients. How 9 clients can replace 84. Why bigger clients can actually...

Summary: One client made up roughly 40% of the agency’s revenue. When that client left, the team was massively overstaffed, layoffs followed, and the founders had to confront a painful question: what happens when growth is built on the wrong assumptions? In this conversation, I sat down with Aric Whiteley, co-founder of Lockhern Digital, to unpack the mistakes, systems, and founder dynamics that s...

Summary: Most agency owners are trying to grow. But growth without design can leave you with a bigger business, more complexity, and a job you desperately want to escape. In this episode, I break down the five decisions I would make if I had to build my agency from scratch today. Takeaways: Why revenue alone tells you almost nothing. How to design your role before hiring. Why complexity quietly de...

Summary: A client can be growing fast, spending heavily, and getting great marketing results and still be a terrible fit for your agency. I sat down with Amir Zinati to talk about one of the hardest lessons in agency growth: sometimes the biggest problems aren’t in the marketing. They’re hiding inside the client’s business. Takeaways: The questions to ask before signing a client. Why “we tried fou...

Summary: LinkedIn isn't Google. People aren't necessarily on the platform looking to buy something, which means asking a cold prospect to book a demo can be a very expensive mistake. I sat down with Chris Nelson, a former LinkedIn employee who now runs an agency helping B2B businesses advertise on the platform. We talk about LinkedIn ad strategy, low-friction offers, client experience, a...

Summary: Most agency founders want freedom and more money. Instead, they often create a job where they are the least-paid person on the team. I sat down with Dominick DeJoy to unpack why that happens and what it takes to escape it. We get into the founder dependency trap, managing client expectations, keeping your sales pipeline alive when you're busy, and why taking on more services isn&apos...

Summary: Growing an agency is exciting until you realize the thing slowing it down is you. I sat down with John Sampogna, Co-Founder and CEO of Wondersauce, to talk about what really changes when an agency grows from two founders to nearly 100 people and why scaling requires founders to become completely different operators. Takeaways: Why hiring more creatives first can be the wrong move. When th...

Summary: Hiring a team was supposed to give this agency owner freedom. Instead, he built a bigger business that required him to work 70–80 hours a week just to keep it from breaking. In this episode, I break down how we transformed that agency from a founder dependent operation doing $20K–$30K per month into a seven-figure business where the owner no longer attends client calls and can actually ta...

Summary: Most agencies think growth means adding more clients, more people, and more services. Then they hit a point where the founder becomes the bottleneck and suddenly the business that was supposed to create freedom becomes impossible to manage. In this episode, I sit down with Hal Smith, founder of H Street Digital, to unpack what happens when an agency reaches that inflection point and what...

Summary: Most AI tools promise to save you time. Then you spend five hours building, configuring, prompting, checking, and maintaining them just to save 15 minutes a week. I finally found an AI workflow that flipped that equation and it changed the question I ask about AI entirely. Takeaways: Why most agency AI projects create more work instead of leverage. The simple question that tells me whethe...

Summary: If AI can help your agency produce twice as much work, why does everything suddenly feel slower? The answer might not be production. It might be trust, approvals, QA, and your ability to actually understand the client well enough to move fast without breaking things. In this episode, I sit down with Drew Mabry, co-founder of Fast + Light, to talk about what happens when a 10 year-old agen...

Summary: What if the fastest way to grow your agency in 2026 is to stop doing so much? I unpack the six principles I'm using to create more leverage, protect my time, strengthen operations, and build a business that can perform without everything coming back to me. Takeaways: How to find the low-value work quietly consuming your week and systematically remove it. The reason documenting your p...

Summary: SEO agencies are facing a brutal double squeeze: AI can produce “good enough” content at a fraction of the cost, while Google is sending less traffic to traditional search results. So how do you prove the value of SEO when the old metrics and old playbook aren't enough? In this episode, I sit down with Jesse Ringer, founder of Method & Metric, to unpack what happens when an estab...