The Digital Agency Growth Podcast

Robert Patin has spent the better part of two decades inside agency finance — helping one firm grow from $1.2M to eight figures in 24 months, then taking those lessons to his consultancy, Creative Agency Success. His lens is analytical and unusually direct: most agencies have a pricing problem, and it's not the one they think it is. In this episode, Robert breaks down why under-pricing rarely...

Most agency owners treat legal as a tax — a slow, expensive speed bump between the handshake and the kickoff. Sharon Toerek thinks that's exactly backwards. Sharon is a marketing and intellectual property attorney who has spent over a decade working exclusively with independent agencies through her firm Torek Law, which operates in the agency world as Legal + Creative. In this episode, she br...

🎯 Referrals already work for your agency but you've never optimized them... Get our free 30-minute video crash   course - learn how to turn referrals from reactive and random to proactive and systematic.   -- Most agencies lose pitches before they walk in the room. Here's why — and what to do about it. Grant Gooding, founder of Proof Positioning, has helped agencies win high-stakes pitc...

🎯 Referrals already work for your agency, but you've never optimized them.  Get our 30-minute video crash course on how to turn referrals from reactive and random to proactive and systematic:  https://go.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine/?utm_source=podcast_dag -- Buying patterns have changed - fast. If you're still pitching the same offers the same way you were two years ago, y...

🎯 Referrals already work for your agency, but you've never optimized them.  Go here to get our 30-minute video crash course on how to turn referrals from reactive and random to proactive and systematic: https://go.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine/?utm_source=podcast_dag -- Adam Yaeger built Llama Lead Gen from solo freelancer to 17-person embedded growth agency over eight years. In...

Learn the small shift that makes referrals repeatable. Check out our new video training: https://hey.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine?utm_source=podcast -- Most agencies treat the RFP as the cost of doing business. Chris Rose has built a career out of sidestepping them entirely — landing clients like Hilton, Planet Fitness, and NBC Universal along the way. Chris serves as Executive Direct...

Learn the small shift that makes referrals repeatable. Check out our new video training: https://hey.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine?utm_source=podcast -- Most agency owners assume nobody can sell as well as they can. Lori Cox built an agency, sold it, and then took a BizDev leadership role — and says she's actually sharper at sales now that she's not running the whole show. Lo...

Learn the small shift that makes referrals repeatable.  Check out our new video training .  -- What happens when years of planting seeds finally meets the right market moment? Alexis Trammel is Chief Growth Officer at Stratabeat, a B2B SaaS organic growth agency. She recently transitioned from account management into a biz dev role.  But the real story is how timing and preparation collided. For y...

When clients start asking "What am I paying you for?", most assume they have a pricing problem on their hands when they're actually facing an operations problem.  Leah Leaves is the founder and CEO of Alderaan Operations, where she embeds operations directors and part-time digital project managers directly into remote agencies.  In this conversation, she reveals what's happenin...

Looking to build a repeatable, referral-focus biz dev system inside of your agency? Check out our new video training: https://hey.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine -- What if successful agency business development isn't about having the perfect system, but about showing up consistently in the right conversations? John Caruso is the Director of Business Development at Vendilli, where h...

Here's what nobody tells you about referrals: the real value isn't the introduction, it's identifying who will keep referring you for years. In this episode, Dan breaks down why the classic "let me know if you know anyone who needs our services" approach fails almost every time, and walks through a systematic process for turning your existing network into a consistent sour...

New Video Training. Referrals already work for your agency, but you've never optimized them.  Learn how in our latest video training: https://hey.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine  -- This year-end review distills the most important lessons from a year of conversations with agency owners, researchers, and growth experts who've been in the trenches. What You'll Leave With: Wh...

Chances are referrals work for your agency.  Maybe they're the only thing that ever has.  But you've never optimized them.   [Note: this is an encore of an episode originally aired 12/3/25].  If your agency is stuck in "the Cobbler's Children phase", where you deliver great work for clients but new business feels chaotic and reactive, this episode offers a way out. I'...

if you're using the holiday break to plan for a strong Q1, this conversation will reshape how you think about pipeline. [this is an Encore Episode originally aired December 3, 2025] Nick Petroski, founder of Promethean Research and the industry's go-to source for agency market data, spent years studying what actually drives growth for digital agencies. Not best practices or guru advice,...

What actually drives agency growth when pipelines are noisy, buyers are skeptical, and everyone sounds the same? In this episode, Dan Englander sits down with Alex Marshall, a longtime agency growth leader with two decades of experience across holding companies and independents, to unpack what really moves the needle. They explore why trust and relevance matter more than tactics, how storytelling...

What if the agencies that crush Q1 aren't working harder in January, they're making one  or two critical decisions right now, in December? In this solo episode, Dan reveals why Q1 consistently catches agencies off-guard and what separates those who stumble into the new year from those who hit the ground running. The secret isn't about working through the holidays or setting ambitiou...

If you’re planning your 2026 biz dev strategy without real market data, you’re guessing. In this episode, I talk with friend of the show Nicholas Petroski , founder of Promethean Research and creator of the Digital Agency Referral Playbook , about what the numbers actually say—and how top agencies are using referrals, account growth, and GTM clarity to build next year’s plan. This is the clearest...

Most agencies try to fix pipeline by working harder, but not by working smarter. This conversation digs into why outbound has gotten tougher, what’s changed in the last decade, and how agencies can build a healthier, more defensible acquisition motion. We cover the shift from brute-force outreach to signal-driven, trust-based systems, why TAM size changes everything, and how sales and marketing ne...

In this episode, Dan Englander sits down with Garrett Jestice, former CMO and founder of Prelude, to unpack how to turn that randomness into a repeatable Go-To-Market (GTM) system that actually compounds. Garrett helps B2B agencies and service businesses replace scattered marketing efforts with a focused GTM strategy built on customer proof — clarifying audience, offer, messaging, and channels so...

👉 Want to build referrals systematically instead of relying on luck? Grab my book 📘 Relationship Sales at Scale: https://salesschema.com/book -- In this episode, Dan Englander talks with Brooke MacLean, CEO of Marketwake, one of the Southeast’s fastest-growing digital agencies and a five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Brooke shares how she bootstrapped Marketwake from a solo consulting gig into an 80-p...

In this solo episode, Dan Englander breaks down a truth most agency owners quietly suspect: the majority of sales and marketing advice out there was never written for firms like yours. Most “agency growth” tactics are built for high-volume, productized services with large addressable markets—not for boutique, complex-service agencies selling trust, nuance, and strategy to a few hundred ideal clien...

Every few months, I like to pause and look back at the ideas that resonated most with agency owners on LinkedIn — the ones that got people talking, DM’ing, and quietly saying yeah, that’s been my experience too. This episode isn’t about tactics. It’s a quick tour through the lessons that seem to keep coming up again and again in our world, the stuff we all wrestle with if we’ve been selling comple...

In this episode, Dan Englander welcomeed Carl Smith , community builder and leader of The Bureau , for a wide-ranging, no-BS conversation on where the agency world is headed. 🧭 What You’ll Learn The “Philosophical Futurist” Mindset How to face rapid change—especially around AI—without fear or cynicism. Inside The Bureau The story behind one of the most influential agency communities and how it ev...

Most agencies don’t have a lead generation problem—they have a leverage problem. In this episode of The Digital Agency Growth Podcast , Dan Englander dives deep into how agencies can grow faster by amplifying what they already have: past clients, case studies, frameworks, and relationships. Forget chasing the latest marketing fad or new sales channels; sometimes the fastest path to growth is worki...

In this episode, I sat down with @Sharon Toerek from Innovative Agency to talk about the real shifts happening in agency business development — and the constant evolution that comes with them. We unpacked why 2025 is the year agencies need to get honest about their positioning, how trust — not information — has become the key currency, and why specialization isn’t just smart, it’s essential for su...