The Agency Growth Podcast

The last few episodes we've talked quite a bit about how as agency owners, we start to lose our subject matter expertise in the thing we built our agency on.

We focus on growing the business and being good business owners rather than being the SEO or paid ads experts in the business. It's a weird feeling when your team starts to know more than you.

Of course, you could always be like Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky.

For those of you in ...

Borja Cuan from Four15 Digital joins us as we ask him how exactly his agency manages a quarter of a billion dollars in ad spend with only 21 people.

What kind of people do you need on your team to manage that? We envision disaster scenarios where someone on our team ads an extra zero or forgets a decimal in budgets while only spending $1,000 per month in ad spend on a client; imagine that client's actual budget being $500,000 per mo...

Johnathan Gryzbowski from Penji joins us on this week's episode. An episode that was meant to go deep into creating an agency where 100% of the services are whitelabeled through Penji's graphic design capabilities turned into a deep discussion on letting go of the subject matter expertise vine.

We went deep into how to build a great team and how to feel when you're no longer the smartest person in the room... in fact, in most cases,...

**Skip the Cold Open at 8:00**

After three years of talking about the Profit First System, we finally do an episode on just that. And what better way to do this episode than to have the creator of the system, Mike Michalowicz, on the show to answer some of our questions regarding how the system works for agencies.

But more importantly, why the Profit First system is important in already profitable agencies.

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Episode #118's Lindsay Halsey's business partner, Lori Calcott, joins us on this episode to talk about white labeling PPC services for other agencies.

We don't white label for other agencies at Evergrow but we're curious how an agency would consider doing that given that all agencies might sell their services a little different. Additionally, every vertical and industry is different. How does Lori go about creating streamlined proce...

**Cold Open (Charizard-shaped Cheeto Sells for $90k)**

**Skip the Cold Open at 6:38**

What is an AI Agent and the business model surrounding it? We tackle the AI agent topic on this week's episode and why a business model built around the use of an AI agent is fundamentally flawed in the way people are talking about it.

We also cover the hype around AI and how most people aren't using it correctly thinking they have to integrate it in...

We sit down with Drew Johnson with Everflow to talk about how agencies can offer affiliate and influencer services to their clients.

We press Drew on the viability of the influencer channel for small businesses and how agencies can effectively white-label affiliate marketing services through Everflow.

This is a whole new world to us.

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Drew is passionate about driving growth for B2B and D2C brands throu...

Newsletters are hard. Everyone wants to start one or have a way to subscribe to one but you never really know what to put in it or have it get good tracion. Once it does, how do you make it make you money?

We talk about Stacked Marketer quite a bit. It's where we get pretty much all of our marketing information on individual platforms. It's where we get the most condensed version of what the experts put out there in regards to updat...

Revenue share models never work. At least that's what we always say. Thomas Rudy from DataShopper comes onto the podcast to tell us how he built his 7-figure agency on a revenue share model earning multiple 6-figure annual contracts.

Thomas is the Co-Founder of DataShopper, a data-hygiene software that lets you retarget anonymous website visitors through digital media and even print mail.

This software could be a game-changer for age...

**Cold Open (Valentine's Day Stuff)**

**Skip the Cold Open at 10:49**

We dive into the not-so-riveting conversation about what defines an agency. It's not a topic we thought we'd have to cover but it seems like people (including us) are having some confusion over.

Is a videographer an agency? What about a HighLevel sAaSpReNeUr?

Why does any of this matter? Well, because it defines what you do and what your longterm business goals actua...

**Cold Open (How many bananas is too many?)**

**Skip the Cold Open at 7:05**

The productized service model is popular amongst agencies in the industry now. It used to be the Mad Men-type creative agencies that dominated the land but the productized models have been sweeping the globe.

However, agencies still struggle with productization. They don't admit it, but they do.

Having a package service isn't productization if your SOPs aren't...

**Cold Open (Cody is a God at Subway Surfers // r/agency Subreddit news // Google Gemini)**

**Skip the Cold Open at 21:00**

Everyone talks about qualifying prospects for their agency but no one every talks about what qualifiers they're using for themselves.

Our agency has lower-cost services than most agencies yet we still have client qualifiers. Some of these are based on how much revenue prospective clients are earning while others ...

Mordy Oberstein from Unify Brand Marketing joins us on the podcast this episode to talk about how most companies fail at marketing their brand and defining their brand identity.

Mordy has been a recognizable face in the SEO industry for nearly a decade as the CMO of Rank Ranger, Head of Communications at SEMrush, and finally the Head of SEO Brand at Wix before starting his own branding agency, Unify.

We ask Mordy to walk us through h...

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 and year-over-year churn and growth r...

**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 owners deal with other things that stifl...

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 Christiansen, "Don't Say That!". Jake ...

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 even if the results don't come as fa...

**Episode Start at 19:04**

**Cold Open (How Was Christmas? / Weird SEO Agency Guy)**

**Headlines without Context: 14:23**

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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 description is a distraction and ultimate...

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 postcards and brochures to providing c...