Episodes

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 comprehensive branding solutions for large companies. Neither...

**Cold Open (Travelling light as a business owner)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:04)** We answer the difficult question of "how many accounts can one person at your agency actually handle?" Answers are all over the place on the internet. Some people saying as little as 10 while other saying as many as 50 or even 100. Well, it depends on what that person's role is and how much time they dedicate on that account. Additionally, the time spent on the account isn't an indicator of the quality of wor...

Ever since we started our agency, we've been focused on generating leads for our clients because, ultimately, that's what they care about. We've preached this on this podcast as well over and over again. Today, Jeff Greenfield with Provalytics joins us to tell us that if we want to provide more leads, we should be focusing on mediums that can deliver high numbers of impressions vs clicks. That's a hot take. So we dive in to see where Jeff is coming from. ---------------------------------- ...

**Skip the Cold Open at 6:50** **Headlines with Some Context ("New Ways to Holiday Shop with Google Lense, Maps, and More")** The episode topic officially starts at the 12:53 mark. We wanted to talk about tech stacks. More importantly, why it's important for you as an agency to have a defined tech stack that you stick to. We've noticed a lot of agencies deciding to work in a lot of different websites or use tools defined by their clients. This leads to a number of problems with scaling an ag...

In this episode, we discuss the main problem with using foreign contractors for lead gen efforts within the United States. Understanding US geography and local targeting. States, cities, and even zip codes are simple enough to teach. But we've run into issue with describing how county, neighborhoods, geographic colloquialisms, and "DMA" targeting works with foreign workers. If you employ foreign workers, share this with them. If you are a foreign worker for an agency, listen to this! -------...

Sarah Noel Block from Tiny Marketing joins us to give her step-by-step on how she generates qualified leads for her agency. It's important to remember that we don't do any sort of lead generation for our agency. Everything we get is organic so this is a whole new world for us. Sarah breaks down her foolproof strategy from generating cold leads and converting them into clients with her 4-step process: Passive lead generator (free and downloadable) Active lead generator (free and time-sensitiv...

This episode breaks three records! The longest one we've had to date. Our first consultation episode! Our first returning guest! Cesar joins us on the podcast once again 5 months after his original episode ($25k MRR and I Have No Idea What I'm Doing | #108) seeking direct help from us. He has a list of issues his agency is dealing with at this size: Deliverables are being dropped. Quality isn't up to his standards. Good employees are too expensive and cheap ones are bad. There's too muc...

How much money can you make as an agency owner? We've been seeing this question pop up a lot and not just online, but in person. It seems that people seem to think that the earning potential is unlimited and thought that may be true, what is mostly disagreed on is the timeframe it takes to earn a lot o money as an agency owner. There really are two fundamental ways to make a lot of money as an agency owner: 1) Fast and dangerous. 2) Slow and sustainable. ---------------------------------- ...

**Cold Open (Our Advice to a Redditor // Google Local Service Ads are Changing)** **Skip the Cold Open at 16:15** Our agency has been working on two very big things that are fundamentally changing how digital marketing agencies operate. We talked about one of those things in episode 123. This time, we're tackling server-side tracking -- specifically with Google's "Enhanced Conversions". The days of accurate paid media reporting are coming to an end with privacy regulations and tech companies...

Since the release of Chat GPT 2 years ago, we have seen a surge in AI-related tools and content. AI allowed creators to pump out content at 1000x the rate they were and at 1/1000th the cost. The content was good, too. Over time, it became detectable just by reading it. Jon Gillham from Originiality.ai joins us on this episode to talk about the efficacy of AI content detection, when it's applicable, and why it's an important tool as AI content is continually used to pump out massive amounts of ...

**Skip to the HighLevel discussion at 36:58** A listener of the podcast has a bone to pick with us (Jake) on our position with High Level. Josh Kimmes owns a digital marketing agency called Bear North Digital up in Superior, Wisconsin who uses High Level as his agency's primary tech stack. We grill Josh on his whole agency journey, his business model, and his agency's size. Meanwhile, Josh makes the case for why High Level is the best agency tool on the market. Find Josh at bearnorthdigital....

**Cold Open (Someone told Cody our podcast was bad... to his face)** **Skip the Cold Open at 25:44** It's not looking good for the world's most widely used website builder. WordPress' founder, Matt Mullenweg, attacked WP Engine the other week and WP Engine sent Matt a cease and desist. If you're not in the website-building community or manage websites, that's okay -- we'll give you the backstory. Basically the #1 website builder is going after the #1 website host that hosts that website buil...

**Cold Open (AMAZON GIFT CARD CHALLENGE TO LISTENERS / Headlines without Context)** **Skip the Cold Open at 19:50** We've had to dive down the email rabbit hole. Exploring SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and SMTP solutions. Why? Because our job is to deliver leads to our clients. When someone fills out a form on our client's site, in order for us to properly get credit for that lead, the client needs to be alerted immediately. However, as 2024 comes to a close, the website and digital marketing space has...

**Cold Open (A listener and guest sent us a gift box -- we taste and rank everything in it)** **Skip the Cold Open at 13:08** If you don't have a lawyer and don't know how to write agreements for your agency, perhaps hearing how we write ours will help you craft yours. Because we need to say it, we're not lawyers. Our agreements are not airtight. But they work for us. We give practical advice for writing your agreements to make sure clients don't take advantage of you as well as helping you ...

We talk to Andrew Jenkins at Catalyst RVA about his home service agency and how he was able to scale to $15k/mo in recurring profit in under a year. Does Andrew have a secret to his quick success that we don't know? How long can he sustain that? Does he plan to get any bigger... or can he? Find out more as we sit down and chat with Andrew over the next hour and a half. ---------------------------------- Our recommended agency tools: everbrospodcast.com/recommended-tools/ ------------------...

For the first time in over 2 years of doing this podcast, we're covering mental health. Specifically our own experiences with it as agency owners. We're covering both perspectives of coming into agency ownership with pre-existing mental health issues as well as developed ones from the natural stressors that come with operating an agency and business in general. We both deal with our own very separate issues. It's not just depression. It's anxiety, imposter syndrome, body dysmorphia, anger, and...

**Skip the fun stuff and get to the meat of the episode at 21:26** The number one problem agencies seem to struggle with is getting clients. They often blame competition or not having a good enough value prop. But that's rarely actually the case. Lacking basic business, marketing, and sales fundamentals is what's killing agencies and causing them to spin their wheels. ---------------------------------- Our recommended agency tools: everbrospodcast.com/recommended-tools/ -------------------...

We're joined by Lindsay Halsey of Pathfinder SEO. Lindsay also owns her own SEO and PPC agency with her partner, Lori Calcott, called Webshine. Pathfinder SEO is a tool developed by Lindsay and Lori, to not only use in their own agency, but also help other agency owners learn the fundamentals of SEO as well as create standardized SEO processes and procedural SEO documentation. Get 30% off your first 3 months with code: EVERBROS pathfinderseo.com SEO is one of the hardest things to productize...

**Cold Open (Tea, Coffee, Reviews, Our YouTube Channel)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:52** Even if you're not an SEO or web design agency, you should know how to audit a website. The website is an asset that affects everything in digital marketing whether you're a social media agency, email marketing agency, or even video and design agency. If you're a design agency, you may want to consider adding website maintenance and basic SEO service for monthly retainer work. If you're an SMMA, you migh...

**Cold Open (The Everbros YouTube Channel)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:38** Agency software comes in different pricing variations. Picking the right software for your agency shouldn't just be about the features it has, how it's billed should also be a major determining factor in the scalability of that software in your agency as your agency scales. We break down the different types of pricing models and what software you should go with based on where your agency is in size as well as how your...

**Cold Open (Our advice to a developmental agency owner)** **Skip the Cold Open at 13:55** In this episode, we dive deep into what our onboarding process looks like for new clients. More specifically, we go over our entire Onboarding document that we make new clients fill out. It gives us every detail about their business that we need to know in order to effectively execute our services. That includes their brand messaging, the size of business they are, what their target CPA is, and even ac...

Our first agency guru-type episode where we talk about success. But more importantly... that when it comes down to it, nobody really cares if you don't succeed at something. The only person you should be doing things for you is you. Sharing your success is great, but don't be scared to do something if you feel like it might not lead to success because at the end of the day... nobody cares. ---------------------------------- If there's anything we've learned about owning a digital agency, it'...

Fresh off of Jake's appearance on Josh's Web Design Business podcast, Josh makes a special appearance on our podcast diving deep into just how accessible starting a web design agency is. We never wanted to build websites. It was something we realized we had to do for our clients because, at its core, any campaign is only as successful as the landing page. Josh is different. Josh started out doing what he loved -- designing and building websites. He went on to write for Elegant Themes (the comp...

Wix has never been a platform that agency owners or SEOs recommended. It was the DIY website builder for small businesses. SEOs brought up glaring issues such as the entire site structure being built with Javascript, the inability to issue 301 redirects, edit robots.txt, and the lack of simple integrations to necessary tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Facebook Pixel. Since then, Wix has had a bad reputation with agencies. However, it's clear the Wix of today is not the same Wix...