Episodes

**Cold Open (Jake has started mobile gaming)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:19** The best agencies out there aren't necessarily the ones producing the best results. They're the ones with the best communication and value for what is being paid for. On this episode, we navigate how we have failed in the client communication area recently and how we're trying to correct that and provide more communication to our clients without eating into labor hours that are better spent on servicing their actua...

The United States is often seen as the holy grail of markets for agencies. That's great if you're already located in the US, but what if you're not? For the last couple of years, agency owners in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa have asked us our advice on how they can get clients in the US, but we've never had a good answer for them. Managing time zones is one thing, but the cultural differences and US stereotypes of foreign work plague agency owners not located in the US. Faisal and Umair j...

**Cold Open (Jake moves to Chicago // Jake played Semi-Pro in Portugal)** **Skip the Cold Open at 19:21** Sorry for the long cold open. Cody and I haven't recorded in a while, so we had a lot to catch up on. As tenacious business and agency owners, we tend to dive deep into business, the agency space, and whatever our agency's niche is. However, we have to be careful not to make our entire personalities our business. Nobody likes that, and it isn't what we got into the business to be. We got...

**Cold Open (How do you jump-start a car?)** **Skip the Cold Open at 00:05:44** We've featured a lot of different kinds of agencies on this podcast but have yet to have an agency on the podcast that deals almost exclusively with direct mail or a more traditional form of advertising. So we called our buddy, Wayne, up at Inside the Box Marketing to talk about how he and his wife built a 7-figure direct mail marketing agency specializing in postcards for local store franchise marketing and resta...

**Cold Open (Business Challenges / Jake is Moving to Chicago)** **Skip the Cold Open at 11:44** Our podcast isn't the only agency podcast out there. We decided to have a listen to other podcasts similar to ours and give you our take on them. The good, the bad, and the ugly. We also spend some time reflecting on our own podcast and wonder what would make ours better for agency owners. Either way, we hope you take something good away from this, and maybe that's finding another agency podcast y...

Earlier this year, when we started verifying agencies in r/agency, we created a user flair for agencies that have achieved the 8-figure status. We didn't think anyone in the subreddit would get that flair... That is, until Jordan Brannon from Coalition Technologies reached out. One look at his P&Ls, and I knew we had to have him on the podcast. Jordan has gone through just about what every agency owner has gone through... 5 times or more. He's the extreme example of what agency owners can ach...

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 the SEO space, you probably recognize her name. She's the f...

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 month and someone forgetting a decimal... Bo also drops some lif...

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, you should probably be the dumbest person in the room at your ...

**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. ---------------------------------- Follow Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com...

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 processes for PPC accounts across verticals? Lori also talks more a...

**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 into their business or else they'll be left behind. --------...

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. ---------------------------------- Drew is passionate about driving growth for B2B and D2C brands through performance marketing and works hand-in-hand with agen...

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 updates for the things we care about in SEO, PPC, social media, emai...

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 agencies looking to white-label a print media option for clients...

**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 actually are. ---------------------------------- Our recomme...

**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 clearly defined and rigid. That also means you need to b...

**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 are contingent upon what CMS or tech stack they're using. ...

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 his history in SEO and why the seemingly sudden pivot to obses...

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 rates uncovering some surprising details about when and how our ...

**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 stifle their ability to grow such as operational issues, process...

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 references parts in the book that blew his mind and has Anik el...

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 fast. ---------------------------------- Our recommended agency...

**Episode Start at 19:04** **Cold Open (How Was Christmas? / Weird SEO Agency Guy)** **Headlines without Context: 14:23** ---------------------------------- 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 ultimately pulls us further away from successful scalability. On...