Finding right-fit clients is one of the never-ending juggling acts of agency ownership. We need to keep the pipeline full, but we don’t want to rely only on referrals or say yes to clients who don’t fit our niche or values.

The solution lies in how you build and maintain relationships. Not just any type of relationship — relationships that are aligned with the mission, vision, and values of the agency.

On this week’s episode, Matthew Kimberley shares his expertise in finding right-fit clients through tactics like the Red Velvet Rope Policy, which makes it clear who you are (and aren’t) for. His strategies make it simple to get clear on your right-fit client criteria so you can focus on working only with those who excite you.

As any good agency owner knows, we’re in the relationship business. So Matthew also shares how to nurture relationships with clients and prospects once you dial in on who you want to serve.

This episode serves as a good reminder that even though building and nurturing relationships with right-fit clients might seem like a simple concept, we can always take the opportunity to reevaluate who we want to work with and how to go after them.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• The core tenets of attracting right-fit clients
• Determining who your ideal right-fit client is
• The Red Velvet Rope criteria
• Setting boundaries that make it clear who you are and who you want to work with
• Diversifying your offers to different tiers of clients
• Maintaining and nurturing client and prospect relationships
• Prioritizing who to keep in touch with
• Identifying your outreach network of 90

Every agency should be able to run at 20% profitability on a consistent basis. But as agency owners, sometimes we get in our own way and become the bottleneck to our agency growth.

For this week’s solocast, I’m breaking down the five biggest things agency owners do to stifle their agency’s growth. Whether it’s not being able to get out of the day-to-day operations, or not trusting what your numbers are telling you, these are all things most agency owners encounter at least once while growing and scaling the business.

The good news — you’re not alone. These five issues are very common. The bad news — they can be a tough pill to swallow and difficult to course correct once you realize what’s happening.

This episode will give you a detailed guide to recognizing these common patterns and behaviors for agency owners and what to do to get your agency back on the path to growth and profitability.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

In This Episode:

• Why doing everything your way won’t work forever
• The impact of this on agency growth and profitability
• The importance of documenting SOPs and systems and processes and updating them regularly
• How to start documenting SOPs if you don’t do this already
• Why serving clients instead of the agency will leave you stuck
• The 3 S’s of growing an agency
• Why you need to listen to what your numbers (AGI) are telling you
• Prioritizing performance-based growth over selling on personality or individual reputation

For many agency owners, sales is a necessary evil. For others, it’s your natural gift, and you look forward to doing it. Either way, you can always benefit from making it easier and better for you.

One of the biggest benefits we cover in today’s episode is shortening the sales cycle. Many agencies struggled with elongated sales cycles last year, but that doesn’t need to become par for the course. Stephen Steers joined me on the podcast to teach us how storytelling in sales is one of the most effective ways to make sales faster and easier.

He shares a ton of nuggets of info from understanding why people buy, why agency owners need to stay in contact with prospects (and how), and how to use storytelling to catch the attention of prospects and keep them interested.

The bottom line is sales doesn’t have to feel icky. By embracing storytelling, you can build trust, forge deeper connections, and get prospects excited to work with you.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• Why founders and agency owners should aim to fire themselves from sales
• The Magnificent 7 reasons why people buy
• Maintaining relationships with prospects throughout the sales cycle
• What is storytelling in sales?
• Unlocking urgency for prospects
• 4 questions to ask yourself before telling a story to a prospect
• Why storytelling is so effective and what we get wrong about it
• Preparing for 3 types of objections from prospects
• The AREA Framework

We’ve spoken before about how podcasting is a great tool for building an audience that sees you as a thought leader. That’s still true, but simply having a podcast is not enough.

To truly be successful in podcasting, you must know how to engage that audience and be worthy of their time. As our guest Tom Weber says, “You don’t have a right to have an audience.”

An audience must be earned.

Tom shared some insights about the importance of knowing who you’re really speaking to. It’s not just about demographics; it’s about understanding your audience’s needs, fears, and desires. We also explored how to build a captivating narrative that engages listeners and how to ask the tough questions that get you honest feedback.

If you want your podcast to engage your audience and make it past the first seven episodes, it’s worth investing the time and effort to make it truly exceptional. Your audience will thank you for it — and more importantly, they’ll keep coming back for more.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What podcasters get wrong about marketing their shows
• Respecting the audience’s time commitment that they’re making to you
• The #1 way to promote a podcast
• Why creating a compelling narrative is extremely important in podcasting
• Making your show something people want to listen to
• Getting on your audience’s level
• Don’t put out any content you’re not proud of
• Getting effective input and feedback from your audience
• Starting a conversation with your listeners
• Knowing what your audience wants to hear and learning from them

As agency owners, we’re always looking for ways to improve our business development strategies and stand out in a crowded marketplace. This week, I’m flipping the script and sharing an episode where I was a guest on Susan Quinn’s podcast, Better Experiences by Design.

Susan asks some great questions to help get to the bottom of the two main biz dev strategies modern agencies can count on today — niching and thought leadership.

Doing these two things can transform your agency’s growth trajectory. We cover several key components, including how to leverage thought leadership effectively, why niching down is crucial for agency success, and how to overcome the fear of narrowing your focus.

We also explore common mistakes C-Suite executives make in marketing their own firms, the importance of consistency in business development efforts, and how to identify and attract “right-fit” clients for your agency.

Success in agency biz dev today is about being consistently interesting and relevant to your ideal clients over time. By focusing on your expertise, generously sharing your knowledge, and staying top-of-mind, you’ll be the natural choice when prospects are ready to buy.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• How thought leadership is a critical part of biz dev
• What clients should think about when hiring an agency
• The riches are in the niches — narrowing your focus
• Knowing when you’ve narrowed your niche enough
• Why referrals aren’t the best way to grow your agency
• What does a right-fit client look like?
• Taking advantage of AI as an industry disruptor
• Bettering your best with constant learning

Systems and processes are a tough nut to crack for agency owners, and it’s even more challenging once you get clients involved. Many of us are accidental agency owners who thrive in the chaos and disarray of agency life but know that operating this way will reduce profitability.

This week, we’re sitting down with Xenia Muntean to share her journey of becoming an accidental agency owner and what it taught her about agency systems and processes as she began to build her own workflow software.

We dug into some meaty topics that I know are on your minds: How do we balance creativity with structure? Is it possible to have systems and processes without stifling innovation? We explored how bringing clients into the process earlier — especially for social media work — can lead to faster approvals and better profitability.

Systems and processes can be the bane of most agency owners’ existence. But with the right mindset and tools to get the job done, it can open the door to increased profitability and happier clients.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• Xenia’s journey from accidental agency owner to software entrepreneur
• The importance of balancing creativity with systems and processes in agencies
• How larger agencies involve clients earlier in the content creation process
• The value of getting client buy-in at the concept stage, especially for video content
• Why operating reactively creatives operational debt
• How to customize workflow while still having systems and processes
• AI’s potential to improve operational efficiency in agencies, beyond just content creation
• The challenge and opportunity of embracing AI in agencies
• How to be more systems and processes minded in how we operate

As agency owners, one of the things we fundamentally get wrong in sales is how heavily trust plays a role in the process. We’re selling intangible services and solutions to people with a high price tag, and we expect prospects to trust that we’ll deliver on our promises.

It’s a risky proposition, especially for the ones putting their trust (and wallets) in our hands.

This week, I’m sharing how agency owners can earn and leverage their trust with client referrals to increase sales. When you sit back and watch the sales come in simply because someone knows, likes, and trusts you enough to recommend you to others, it’s a beautiful thing.

I’ll share the four things we need in any sales process: the etiquette of social proof and earning client referrals, and how to ethically become part of a community without becoming a billboard for your agency.

When you earn people’s trust by being genuinely helpful, knowledgeable, and a pleasure to do business with, you won’t have to lift a finger to make a sale.

For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

In This Episode:

• Putting ourselves in the shoes of the buyers
• The role of psychological discomfort and decision fatigue in the buying process
• 4 things we need in any sales process to be successful
• The pros and cons of waiting on referrals
• The etiquette behind social proof and referrals
• What does it mean to belong?
• What it takes to earn someone’s trust enough to earn a referral from them

Agency owners have it tough these days, but we have more control over how hard it is for us than we think. This week, we’re going to talk in-depth about how we can change the course and direction of our business by changing our habits and mindsets.

To help us, we’re talking to Jason Yarusi about creating positive momentum around breaking bad habits, choosing to offload tasks that aren’t propelling us forward, and cutting out unnecessary chaos in our lives.

You might think there’s nothing you can personally change, or maybe you have too many variables that are completely out of your control. You could have a lot of fires popping up during the day that you have to address.

But the good news is we have a lot more say in what happens in our day-to-day than we think. And by taking a few moments to ground yourself in the reality of your situation, you’ll realize that a lot of those big fires aren’t fires at all — or someone else’s fires to put out.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• The near-death experience that changed Jason’s course in life
• Being self-aware in how you’re showing up each day
• Starting the day off with a solid routine that sets you up for success
• Regrounding yourself when things start going off course
• How to recognize you’re not focused on the right parts of your business
• Finding your way out of the day-to-day grind to reach your long-term goals
• Creating positive momentum around changing habits that aren’t serving you
• Where people get stuck in these habit shifts the most
• Writing down 3 things you can do write now to build positive momentum

When you’re stacked against other agencies with the same awards, credentials, and impressive case studies as you, it’s tough to stand out above the rest. But with the right pitch deck, you’re sure to catch the attention of your ideal clients.

This week, Tom Martin is teaching us a few things about crafting the perfect pitch deck that moves beyond just impressing clients, but making them remember you over the rest. You already have their attention just by getting the meeting, but your pitch deck is what will ultimately make you the undeniable choice in the end.

Tom shares his thoughts on strategic repetition, the science behind the pitch deck, and what agencies most often get wrong when building their decks. This episode is packed with tons of golden nuggets and actionable insights about what will make you the most memorable agency in the room.

Stop making easily fixable mistakes that could cost you right-fit clients, and join us to learn everything Tom can teach us about building a better pitch deck.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• The purpose of a pitch deck
• The science behind an effective pitch deck
• What makes us lose our audience while we are presenting
• Agencies have earned the right to be in the room and should act like it
• Taking your client on a journey with you during the pitch
• Why you might want an appendix in your pitch deck
• How to design slides for memorability and information flow
• Getting scientific about strategic repetition
• The most critical part of the pitch deck
• Don’t just show up and throw up

CMOs have a lot on their plates, and similar to agency owners, their role can be lonely in the C-Suite. Because of this, CMOs rely heavily on agency partnerships to keep them in the know.

To help us understand the crucial role of agency-CMO relationships, Liza Adams is giving us an inside look at what it’s really like to be a CMO—what they value in strategic partnerships, what they need from agencies the most, and why agencies are an integral part of doing their job well.

This episode is packed with candid, practical advice from Liza for agencies to nail it in their client-agency relationships. When you boil it all down, if your CMO is happy, your agency will be happy. And that alone will carry you far in your business journey.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What agencies don’t understand about the CMO role
• Getting out of the competition mindset against other agencies
• What a CMO wants from an agency-CMO relationship
• The difference between an agency that gets recommended by a CMO and ones who don’t
• How AI is changing the world from a CMO’s perspective
• Should agencies be trying to experiment with AI for clients?
• How AI will change the CMO role in the future
• How agencies can help CMOs do their jobs better

The glamor of working for an agency has worn off somewhat since the 80s and 90s. Markets are more saturated, salaries have stagnated, and recruiting top talent has become more difficult — especially since Covid.

As agency owners, that means we have to adjust our process to find and hire top talent to meet our clients’ needs. To help us understand all the changes we’re facing today, I sat down to talk with Michael Palma, an agency recruiting and business development expert.

With decades of experience in the industry, he’s seen all the shifts and changes that have occurred in the hiring process for both agency owners and employees. In this episode, he shares what agency owners often get wrong about finding top talent and why finding top talent is so hard nowadays. He also helps us understand how agencies can find right-fit clients and right-fit employees to match our clients’ needs.

Michael is essentially an expert agency matchmaker who has his finger on the pulse of the most pressing issues agency owners face, and helps us navigate them all with a “humble swagger.”

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What it means to “walk with a humble swagger”
• What agency owners often get wrong about recruiting top talent
• The downhill trend in finding right-fit agency employees
• How to find be confident without arrogance
• What’s making it difficult for recruiters and agency owners to find top talent
• Challenges in salaries in equity for agency employees
• Knowing what you want in a candidate before you write a job description
• How Covid has changed new business for agencies
• Strategies that win over a client
• Where agencies should be investing in their own biz dev and growth

In the last solocast, we reviewed the agency trends that most affected agency AGI in 2023. This week, we’re pulling back the curtain on the major trends rocking agency owners and their teams in 2024 — and giving you tips to stay ahead of them.

We’ll give you a reality check on misguided expectations around agency valuations and sales. And we’ll explore why daily timesheets and utilization metrics are so crucial for retaining your rock star team members.

Another big trend we unpack is moving back towards more in-office collaboration and nurturing agency employee fatigue through meaningful face time, employee retreats, and using in-office time more intentionally.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve and proactively build your agency’s future, don’t miss this deeper look at the key trends shaping the industry this year and beyond. And to catch up on all the other trends we unpacked, be sure to check out Part 1 from last month’s solocast.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• Why a COO role is becoming increasingly popular, even with smaller agencies
• Making the right decisions around selling your agency — or buying another one
• Why taking a smaller salary as an agency owner isn’t always better
• Hybrid work trends for agency owners and employees
• How contractors and freelancers can fill in worker gaps
• The continuing importance of keeping accurate daily timesheets
• What helps reduce agency employee fatigue and what’s causing it
• What agency owners are going to spend time and money on in 2024

Every year, we go out into the field to understand the biggest pain points and priorities for both agencies and clients. This year, we took data from the 2024, 2019, and 2014 Agency Edge Research studies to compare how client expectations have changed over the years.

This year, the burning issue was client-agency trust — what clients look for in an agency, how an agency can retain clients, and what causes a client to look elsewhere for another agency.

To help make sense of all the changes, Susan Baier from Audience Audit joins us to discuss what agencies can do and are already doing to impress clients. We’ll break down the three distinct client segments that emerged, their unique attitudes towards agencies, and what factors drive their decision to hire or fire an agency partner. We also discuss how to position your agency for better alignment with client priorities.

If you’re looking to learn how to better position yourself to win and retain more clients in 2024 and beyond, don’t miss our deep dive into the data to gain a competitive edge in your agency.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What clients think agencies do really well
• Changes in client-agency expectations over the years
• Agency advocates, begrudging buyers, and exacting experts
• How attitudes have changed toward having a trusted agency partner
• Why agencies are having more in-house staff than before
• What agency management fatigue has done to change client-agency relationships
• What does agency trust look like to clients?
• Do clients want an agency with a niche, or generalists?
• What makes an agency a poor fit for a client
• How client-agency trust can push a client to look for a new agency

The FTC has recently passed regulations against non-compete clauses on a federal level in all work contracts. Starting in the fall of 2024, agencies will have new rules to comply with regarding their employees and independent contractors.

This will be a big shake-up for many agency owners, but luckily, Sharon Toerek is always by our side to walk us through any new legal requirements that hit us unexpectedly. In this episode, she covers a lot of ground on how agency owners can comply with the new FTC non-compete rules for both employees and independent contractors.

We cover the difference between non-competes and non-solicitation agreements, how agency owners can prepare to announce these changes to their workers, and how we can still legally protect our IP and client relationships.

Sharon stresses that the quicker we start working on compliance, the better prepared we’ll be for when this goes into effect in a few months. So don’t delay — tune in to learn how this affects your agency and how to get ahead on compliance over the summer.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What covenants are still legal under the FTC non-compete ruling?
• What agency owners need to do to be compliant
• How these changes will affect your freelancers and independent contractors
• How to protect yourself if you’re selling your business
• Non-solicitation agreements vs. non-compete clauses
• Is the US ahead of or behind the times on this?
• How soon agency owners need to prepare new contracts or to announce the changes to employees
• Making sure your independent contractors are actually independent contractors
• The consequences of misclassifying employees as independent contractors

Agency owners who want to scale their business often run into a chicken-and-egg situation. To scale and grow sustainably, you need to hire more people. But to be able to hire more people, you need to scale and grow to have the money to do so.

This is where hiring international employees can help solve your problems.

This week, we’re diving into the growing trend of hiring full-time international employees with Kim Walker. Kim and her husband Brian initially had reservations about hiring international workers for their agency but quickly realized the immense benefits to them and the people they were hiring.

Kim details her thorough hiring process, how she overcame cultural barriers, the amazing talent and value international hires bring, and the life-changing impact it has had on their agency. We also touch on common concerns like pay rates, taxes, benefits, and time zones.

Whether you’re struggling to find affordable talent locally or just want to build a dynamic, multinational team, this episode is a mini crash course in finding incredible international employees to help supplement your U.S. team.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• How Kim and her husband got the idea to hire international employees
• How they started the process of finding international talent
• The worries they encountered when making their first international hire
• Average pay for international employees in the Philippines
• What they learned about hiring foreign workers
• How the hiring process differs from stateside interviews
• The secret lies in strong core values
• Weaving different cultures into the agency’s culture
• Taxes and benefits for foreign workers
• The mistakes they made and what they learned from them

If you want to future-proof your agency’s success and stability, now is the time to become a fractional CMO.

For those unfamiliar with the term, fractional CMOs are hired for their strategy first and execution second. It’s a client-agency relationship built on trust that you know their industry deeply and can execute your strategy to provide a high ROI to your client.

The pandemic paved the way for having this hyperfocus on one specialization and highlighted the need for agencies to be trusted thought leaders in their niches. This week’s guest, John Jantsch, is teaching us how to become fractional CMOs and what it takes to build that deeper trust with clients.

Join us to learn the data behind John’s ideas and how to position your agency as a fractional CMO.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• How the pandemic shifted the need for strategy and consulting
• Shifting to strategy over execution can help find right-fit clients
• Fractional CMOs are up 60% as an add-on service
• Clients want their agencies to have deep knowledge of their industry
• The two distinct types of fractional CMO — and which one you should be
• Showing up as part of your clients’ team to build trust
• Building trust through strategic partnerships, referrals, and thought leadership
• The growing emphasis on first-party data for agencies

In 2023, about 45% of agencies took an AGI hit — the biggest number we’ve seen for as long as we’ve been tracking agency trends. Last year was tough, but agencies are finally starting to bounce back from growing their AGI.

With some of our profitability struggles finally behind us, many of you are wondering how to get ahead of the curve once again. This week, we’re taking a deeper dive into some of the biggest influencers of agency AGI during this time and what agency owners can learn from the trends.

We have a ton of data on agency biz dev trends, specialization and niching, client ghosting, and much more. So join us to dive into the data and learn what your agency can be looking out for to help prevent a big AGI hit in the future.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• The work that has been super profitable for agencies in the past year or two
• The biggest hits to agency AGI
• Proving ROI to clients is more important than ever
• Why you need to raise your hourly rate if you haven’t already
• Finding ways to get more work out of your existing clients
• Overservicing clients is costing you money
• Why it might be time to cut some of your staff
• Clients want more from their agencies, and they’re not afraid to ghost
• Investing in first-party data and data analysts

Burnout can sneak up on us; before we know it, we’re ready to sell the agency. But before we get to this critical point, there are usually signs and symptoms of burnout, but it’s not always easy to differentiate them from regular day-to-day stress.

In this week’s episode, I’m talking to Eric Recker about those crucial signs that you might be burning the candle at both ends a little too often and how to turn it around for the better. If we can get ahead of our burnout by identifying that we’re heading in that direction early, there’s so much we can do to help turn it around before we start making rash decisions.

If your world is starting to feel a little gray, monotonous, or like you’re in the trenches a little too often for your liking, those might be your signs to start going into recovery mode. So join us to learn how agency owners can start recognizing burnout signs and symptoms and how to recover from them.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• Is it burnout or business as usual?
• The importance of having people around you to check in with
• How to de-crisis yourself if you feel you’re at risk of burnout
• Turning off the false sense of urgency in your mind
• Commit to 30 minutes of unstructured quiet
• Filling yourself back up after being chronically empty for a long time
• Disrupting your routine to scale burnout recovery
• A recipe for sustainable recovery that’s realistic and achievable
• Setting boundaries between work mode and relax mode
• Bringing burnout recovery tactics to our employees

Agency owners like to think they can do it all, but the real gold is in finding and defining your agency niche. To demonstrate, I spoke to Tyler Samani-Sprunk of Simple Strat to get into the head of an agency that learned this lesson the hard way but still did it very well — once they finally committed.

Tyler shares the false starts and missteps early on as Simple Strat tried half-heartedly to pick a niche without fully committing. He explained how feedback from prospects asking, “What are you really good at?” motivated them to double down on specializing in content marketing for a while before their YouTube channel HubSpot Hacks really gained traction.

This episode is your sign to finally work on nailing down your niche if you’ve been going back and forth about it for ages. It might seem like you’re limiting your scope, but in reality, you’re opening yourself up to a whole funnel of right-fit clients who need your expertise.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What motivated Simple Strat to start specializing
• The 3 phases of trying to find their agency niche
• Why they chose video and HubSpot as their niche
• Treating cornerstone content as a client in your day-to-day operations
• When they knew it was working for them
• How their sales cycle transformed when shifting to thought leadership marketing
• How content marketing plays a role in content strategy with clients
• People want to hear from people, not brands
• Weaving personality into professional content
• Simple Strat’s biggest mistakes and best decisions in the niching process

Clients increasingly want to know exactly what they’re getting in return for their dollars spent with agencies. This data can be tricky to compile, let alone interpret and visualize in a way the client actually understands. So this week, we’re diving deeper into the ongoing AI conversation to dial in on one thing — how AI tools can prove an agency’s ROI to clients.

In the episode, our guest, Jonathon Reilly, gives a great overview of how AI can revolutionize this task. The big idea is that AI tools can crunch huge amounts of data and surface valuable insights way faster than a human data analyst could. It allows you to be more responsive to clients, show the impact you’re delivering, and ultimately retain clients longer by demonstrating your value more clearly.

But it’s not just about reporting — Jonathon thinks AI tools will help agencies be more efficient across the board, from creative ideation to repetitive tasks. The goal isn’t to replace human effort, but to use AI as an assistant that makes us faster and better at our jobs (more ROI for clients).

Tune in to learn more about how AI tools will level the playing field for small- to mid-sized agencies to bring more value to our clients in a tangible, understandable way.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• How AI intersects with data to help agencies prove their worth to clients
• Helping clients understand the data and numbers
• Will AI tools remove the need to hire data analysts in the future?
• Being data savvy to prove ROI
• Leveraging AI tools to maximize agency efficiency
• How AI will change the billable hour
• Starting the conversation with your employees about encouraging the use of AI tools
• Embrace AI, but with boundaries and structure
• Getting more educated in the AI landscape
• How AI tools are leveling the playing field for small- to mid-sized agencies
• How Akkio works to maximize agency efficiency

As agency owners, we all want to be different. We don’t want to be the boss who is a stickler for punctuality or to feel like we’re micromanaging our employees. But HR issues will inevitably arise, and that’s when the reality check sets in.

HR issues aren’t always as intense as the term may imply. They could be as small as someone being late to a couple of meetings or an employee missing a deadline one too many times. They’re often small things that build up over time and can balloon into bigger issues — like souring client-agency relationships or diluting the agency’s core values.

In this week’s episode, Allyns Melendez shares lots of great tips and tricks to help prevent minor HR issues from getting out of control. From leading by example to being a chameleon leader who can shift based on who you’re talking to and what tone is needed, she knows exactly how to help agency owners and leaders resolve nearly any conflict an agency might face.

Tune in to learn tons of valuable tactics that will make you feel like no employee problem is too big for you to handle.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• How HR has stayed surprisingly the same over 100 years
• How to show up as an agency leader to everybody vs. with individual employees
• Handling first-time HR issues with an employee
• What happens when we don’t address bad habits immediately
• Preparing for difficult one-on-one conversations with agency employees
• Conflict resolution with agency employees and how to follow up with your plan
• Why chameleon leadership will help you communicate better
• Get to know your communication style and how you show up in a room
• How to ask for candid feedback and make your employees feel safe to do so

Online communities are quickly becoming one of the most powerful biz dev tools out there, but there’s etiquette to starting and maintaining one. It’s not for everyone, but for those who are ready, an online community could be your ticket to selling without ever having to actually sell.

This week, we’re continuing the conversation about online communities vs. online audiences, and the vast benefits they can offer to agency owners. Now that we’ve established the differences between an audience and a community, it’s time to ask ourselves deeper questions about why and how we should start one.

The main purpose of starting an online community shouldn’t be selling or profiting from its members. But if you’re in it to genuinely help others and create an avenue for collective thought leadership and connection, increased sales are just part of the benefits.

If you think starting an online community could be the right move for your agency, tune in to this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency.

For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

In This Episode:

• How to start an online community (who, what, where, why)
• Are you starting a community for the right reasons?
• Why you should expect nothing in return from online communities
• Identifying your target audience
• What a community leader should provide to community members, and vice versa
• The main difference between a community and an audience
• 3 questions to ask yourself before creating a community
• Consistency wins over complexity in online community building
• How to benefit from a community without starting one yourself
• Using online communities as a powerful biz dev tool
• Qualifying your community members

Everybody has a story they’re trying to tell, and brands play a massive role in people’s stories, whether they realize it or not. Most of the time, the stories consumers associate with a brand aren’t what we think they are. This is where behavioral economics becomes vital to creating an effective marketing strategy.

Behavioral economics is a study that attempts to make sense of people’s behavior around spending. We don’t always make spending decisions in our best interest and often base purchasing decisions on our emotions. In fact, people usually connect and interact with brands the same way they connect with people.

This leaves brands with a lot of pressure on their backs. If you ignore your loyal customers’ needs and wants, they will feel deeply betrayed. But if you listen to their stories and get to the core of what they’re looking for, you’ll build a trust that feels like a close friendship.

The psychology behind consumer behavior is complicated but fascinating. Join us this week to discover how brands can use behavioral economics to build an effective marketing strategy that fosters deep trust from your customers.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What is behavioral economics?
• Why people build human-like relationships with brands
• How narrative psychology can improve our relationships with our customers
• Clues that a brand uses narrative psychology well
• Convincing clients that a strategy based on behavioral psychology is worth investing in
• How strategic changes ripple throughout a whole organization
• Getting to the bottom of your customer story
• What brands get wrong about customer stories
• Why feelings of betrayal run deep when brands miss the mark

In-person networking is still a big deal. After a brief Covid hiatus, trade shows, conferences, and workshops are back and bigger than ever. So, if you or your team plan on attending any of these events soon, it’s important to get up to date on the do’s and don’ts of networking at these events.

Instead of being stuck with a stack of business cards and struggling to recall conversations with specific individuals from an event, seasoned keynote speaker Dave Delaney shares how to manage and nurture your client and prospect interactions effectively.

Not sure how to strike up a conversation with a prospect or keynote speaker? Or what about when you get home from the event and still want to close a potential sale without sounding too spammy? Dave shares insights on approaching these topics and more during this episode.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• Why in-person networking is still essential
• How we get networking and connecting with others wrong
• Networking best practices for competitors, prospects, and keynote speakers
• The etiquette behind not being creepy or pushy to your peers
• How to get people’s information while you’re at the show
• Don’t count on the other person to reach out to you after the show
• How to create meaningful relationships with people after trade shows and conferences
• Focus on relationship-building over getting someone in your sales funnel

After a tough sales year in 2023, many of you have been looking for the next thing to consistently fill your sales pipeline with new prospects. With sales cycles taking longer than before, it’s essential always to have warm prospects teed up and ready to go. But how?

The answer is in thought leadership combined with lead gen and lead magnets. Positioning yourself and your agency as an authority in your niche (and giving some of it away for free) generates trust in your agency’s expertise before they’ve officially met you.

When done right, lead gen can be mostly automated. And having great lead magnets like a podcast or YouTube channel, or offering a free mini-service to prospects to get them interested in your services will build trust and establish your agency as a thought leader in your niche.

This week, Jay Feldman shares his tips and tricks for how his agencies used automated lead gen and lead magnets to still be profitable in a challenging sales year. This episode is packed with actionable insights that you’ll want to take notes on, so make sure you have a pen and paper ready to go, and check out the links in the show notes for all of the programs and tools he mentions during the interview.

A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• How lead gen and lead magnets turned a bad sales year into a good one
• Commit to being relentlessly helpful to others
• What Jay’s agencies used as lead magnets to attract attention from prospects
• How to retain the clients you close from lead gen
• Giving big wins early on when working with new clients
• Establishing trust authority in the first 90-120 days with lead gen clients
• Cold email tactics that work
• What defines success for lead gen and lead magnets
• Scalable lead magnets that bring results
• Avoiding shiny object syndrome and doing what works for your agency