The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Izzy Lugo is COO at Urban Misfit Ventures, an 8-month-old, start-up holding company that Izzy confesses "pivots a lot." One agency subsidiary, IEEG, specializes in storytelling and influencer marketing – often by creating a video to tell a brand's story. The influencer marketing portion of their work is based on stories told by influencers, but the influencers are Urban Misfit Venture's employees,...

Jason Blumer is CEO of Blumer and Associates, a CPA firm dedicated to providing strategic growth strategies to creative design, digital, and marketing agencies ready to go to "the next level." Key areas of influence include transforming people to facilitate growth, leveraging teams to scale, and recrafting business models. Areas of greatest impact are pricing . . . and how a business is run. Jason...

Four years ago, Paddy Moogan, author of The Link-Building Book and Co-Founder of Aira, sat with Matt Beswick in the Aria casino in Las Vegas, and over a half hour and too many drinks, planned out the company that would be Aira. Today, the company employs 34 people and provides SEC, paid search, content marketing, digital PR, and link-building. Clients range in size from local companies with 3 to 4...

Bastian Grimm is CEO and Director of Organic Search at Peak Ace, a full-service marketing agency located in Berlin. Peak Ace provides organic and paid search, SEO, content marketing, and AdWords services. Bastian, with an organic search background, and his partner, Marcel Prothmann (now Director of Performance Advertising), with a paid search background, met when they found themselves working on t...

Eric Enge, CEO at Stone Temple Consulting, spent 15 to 20 years providing SEO, content marketing, and social media for large enterprise clients, including several Fortune 50 clients. The company distinguishes itself with a strong commitment to solving actual problems, rather than pitching generic formulas and "hoping they stick." Stone Temple Consulting became part of Perficient Digital, a $500 mi...

Mike Lieberman, CEO and Co-Founder, Square 2 Marketing (the first Hubspot Diamond agency), describes his company as a revenue growth agency. Its purpose is to create revenue generation "machines" for its clients that will provide scalable, repeatable, and predictable revenue growth results – starting with attracting website visitors, turning them into leads, and the helping clients convert these l...

Ryan Malone, Founder and CEO of SmartBug Media, an inbound marketing agency, HubSpot Diamond Partner, and winner of more than 100 awards, founded his company on this premise:  That clients would be best served by providing them with marketing strategists who had in-the-trenches P&L, product launch, skin-in-the-game experience and an understanding of the impacts of wrong decisions. Ryan started his...

Jackie Hermes is Owner and CEO at Accelity Marketing, A Hubspot Gold partner that provides B2B inbound marketing and lead generation, conversion, and nurturing. Accelity works primarily with B-to-B software companies operating at a pre-revenue, fundraising, or bootstrapping level on up to around $80 million in revenue. Accelity guarantees results: warm leads every month, and coordinates. product l...

Kade Wilcox, CEO and Owner of Primitive Social, was working at a church when he started managing business Facebook pages in 2011 as a "side gig." Two to three years into this work, a friend challenged him by labelling his Facebook work as "a hobby." It was time for some planning, goal-setting, and business "underpinnings." Some 5 years later, Primitive Social offers a far broader range of services...

Greg Andersen is CEO at Bailey Lauerman. Fifty years ago, before Greg's time, Bailey Lauerman published a lifestyle magazine promoting activities around Lincoln and Omaha and created ads in the publication for companies in exchange for their financial support. When these companies asked Bailey Lauerman to create ads to use in other venues, the publisher pivoted to start the journey to become the a...

Verity Dearsley is the Managing Director at The B2B Marketing Lab. In this interview, Verity explains how and why B2B Marketing Lab, originally a public relations company, changed its focus from content to inbound marketing and grew to become the first Hubspot Diamond partner in the UK and Singapore, a Hubspot trainer, and the largest Hubspot partner in London. Public relations is marketing target...

When Jon started Invoke Marketing, a scrappy startup agency, he made things up as he went. As the company pivoted and grew, his clients also pivoted and grew, and agency and client interests diverged. Jon, in his eagerness to help, also took on too many clients who were poor fits. Jon's intense drive for growth and eagerness to help led him to take on clients that didn't fit the services Invoke wa...

Perry Nalevka, CEO at Penguin Strategies, has almost 20 years of working in technology at various start-ups, with the last 10 years in sales and marketing. For the past 5 years, he has run Hubspot's first Israeli Partner, Penguin Strategies, a niche agency for technology firms with its "packages" named for different species of penguins. Why penguins? "They're just a cool bird," Perry says. Penguin...

Frank Cowell is CEO of Elevator Agency, a full-funnel digital agency providing a fully-integrated, synergistic marketing "ecosystem," differentiates his agency by a number of things. The first one is that accounts are managed by strategists instead of by account managers. Why strategists? Frank has found that strategy development, system testing and optimizing, and working with the client is a big...

Matt Hodkinson, Chief Exec Agent, Influence Agents, introduces his agency as "mutinous." He feels the old agency model of schmoozing for long-term retainers is not in a client's best interest. Instead. Influence Agents tells clients from the beginning that it "will not be there forever" and targets a two-year client relationship with these small companies, which are mostly mid-market B2B tech comp...

Jacob Baadsgaard is Founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising, an agency that helps companies grow to the next level using Google and Facebook ads, leveraging the platforms with revenue—through a CRM- or lead-gen-based campaign or by ensuring that the ecommerce analytics are strong so everything is revenue-driven, testing website experience to see what resonates with potential customers, and perfe...

Josh Dougherty and Polly Yakovich own A Brave New, a 4-year-old b outique marketing agency focused on branding, inbound marketing, and web design. A Brave New uses strategy, marketing, content, and technology to help clients around the USA tell their stories, expand their reach, and connect with the right kind of customers, clients, or donors, "who will benefit from whatever they have to offer." A...

Rhiannon Andersen is Co-Owner and CMO at Steelhead Productions, a company that designs exhibits and tradeshow environments, customizes displays to the clients' specifications, rents out the components, and oversees shipping, setup, onsite union labor workers, and teardown. Many companies sell complete exhibits or tradeshow environments. Steelhead Productions has been in the "rental business" since...

Clodagh Higgins, author of A Happy & Healthy Digital Agency: 6 Pillars to Build a Profitable Business with Ideal Clients and Digital Agency Coach/Consultant for GROWIT GROUP, consults with digital marketing agencies and provides them with the resources they need to make wise business (financial, hiring, and recruiting) decisions. Her company, Growit, targets agencies new to inbound marketing or lo...

Chris Denny is Founder and President of The Engine Is Red, an integrated creative agency which Chris claims functions more like a startup than like a traditional agency. The company provides a variety of services—branding, campaign work, and a lot of interactive and digital work—but it has eliminated the classic methods agencies use to try to control the risks and variables inherent in creative wo...

Bree Groff is CEO of NOBL Collective, a global change agency that helps quickly-growing startups or huge legacy organizations seeking to grow or scale to negotiate change. NOBL does not provide the strategy, or the brand work. Instead, it looks at decision-making, communication, meeting patterns and day to day interactions—the company's culture—and collaborates closely with the company to steer th...

Bob Afsari, CEO of Campaign Creators, a Platinum HubSpot Partner, started his career with "a love for business development and a love for sales." Disillusioned after companies he worked for consistently failed to deliver the products he sold, Bob decided to start his own company so he could control the whole process. Bob presented his story, "Shattered by Embezzlement: How We Rebuilt Our Agency to...

Daryn Smith is the Cofounder and Director of Mpull, a full-service inbound marketing-technology agency serving South African companies and, to a greater extent, partnering with and supporting agencies from around the world. Mpull has 50 employees as of this interview and is a Diamond HubSpot Partner. Working together at Verizon, Mpull founders, Daryn Smith and Graeme Wilson saw a huge waste of mar...

Dan Altenbernd, COO and Partner of H2M, works with clients to align objectives with allocated marketing budgets. He estimates that 75% of his company's clients have never worked before with a marketing agency and 75% of his clients are from outside the Fargo area. His company provides key marketing strategy development and tactical deliverables based on a client's true needs. Faced with so many ma...

Ingunn Bjøru, COO of Avidly's inbound line and Country Manager for Norway, is based in Oslo. A very recent merger of four former HubSpot Diamond agencies, Avidly is now the world's largest inbound agency and HubSpot partner. With additional offices in Stockholm, Sweden, Aarhu, Denmark; and "all over Finland," Avidly enables growing companies to use one agency to promote their products across four...