Episodes

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...

**Cold Open (The new podcast music / Jake and Lauren started a new business)** **Skip the Cold Open at 14:58** Increasing regulations and privacy-focused web users are making it harder for agencies to target in-market audiences and track conversions properly. It's our duty as agencies to do those two things: 1) Target the right audiences 2) Track our success and ROI The harder it is for us to do that the harder it is for clients to justify paying us. In this episode, we talk about a numbe...

**Cold Open (A question for the listeners)** **Skip the Cold Open at 16:25** Whether you write content for your clients or you write content for yourself, writing good content for SEO is a must for every agency owner. And As Google pumps more and more spam updates into their algorithm their answer to everything seems to just be "write good content". But how do you write good content when the purpose is simply to get it to rank? In this episode, we give you extremely simple tips on how each o...

**Cold Open (Cody eats breakfast-flavored cup noodles)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:39** White labeling can be an easy way to earn revenue for your agency while still trying to carve out your niche. But it can be a slippery slope when you're first starting out. There's a time and place to consider other agencies as your clients. For us, we don't white label for a few reasons. However, white labeling might be part of your business model and that's fine. We simply wanted to put this episode out...

We're joined by Cesar Gil, owner and operator of Symphony Advertising based out of Houston, Texas. We found Cesar through TikTok where he regularly posts updates of his agency and bares all for his audience. His videos are often spur-of-the-moment monologues on different issues he's dealing with or comments he gets. Cesar runs a similar agency to ours that's about 2/3 of our size ($25k MRR). There's just one problem... He has no idea what he's doing. Join us on this episode where we dive into...

**Cold Open (Cody went to Scotland for a Taylor Swift concert)** **Skip the Cold Open at 12:40** Our podcast is largely about practical advice we give to other agency owners as we grow ours -- however, we thought it would be a good idea to air out all of the problems our agency is currently facing. Every business faces new challenges as they grow. Problems don't go away, they just change. In this episode, we talk about the challenges we're facing today. Let us know if you can relate to any o...

**Cold Open (Cody and Jake talk office chairs and Chat GPT)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:57** It's been a year since we've talked about AI and its potential effect on agencies. Now that we have had some time, it's time to talk about what is actually being impacted. When we first thought about this, we figured the biggest impact would actually come from agencies using AI. However, we've noticed something a bit different... Vendors and media platforms like Google and Facebook using more and more...

We're excited to bring AJ Doppke from Marketing Qubed onto the podcast to talk about his main acquisition method for new clients -- cold calling. AJ is a long-time listener to the podcast and owns an agency similar in size to our own. We grill him on his agency size, niche, and services, but especially his cold-calling strategy. What is it that AJ is doing differently that gets him 1 appointment out of every 8 calls to a decision-maker and a 50% close rate once he presents his solution? Learn...

**Cold Open (The agency space is getting dumber)** **Skip the Cold Open at 15:30** Most new agency owners can agree on one thing and it's that picking your niche is more difficult than it sounds. The majority of agency owners will pick niches they heard were good based on videos they've watched or what peers have said. Other agency owners will pick multiple niches to see which ones take off first. If you cast a wider net, won't you catch more fish? Not necessarily. We talk about the differe...

**Cold Open (Physical therapist that helps gamers)** **Skip the Cold Open at 4:58** Staying productive is hard when there is so much to do and you can start to get analysis paralysis by looking at your daily checklist of items. It's even worse when you leave your full-time job and you no longer have someone like a boss ensuring you come to work early enough and stay focused. We go through a few things we do to keep us focused and productive while working on our agency. That includes things li...

**Cold Open (Non-compete agreements are now illegal)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:15** We keep seeing things online about how your leads should only be costing you $2-$5 on Facebook or that a cost per lead of $80 is bad. But neither of those is necessarily true. We have clients at Evergrow that are willing to pay $200/lead. If we tried to get them the cheapest leads all the time, then we would likely be delivering poor leads. Jake breaks down his formula for helping clients understand how muc...

Jake has seen a lot of new agency owners get hung up on what their offer should be to prospective clients. People aren't sure what their guarantee should be or what sets them apart from the numerous other agencies out there. However, we have a belief that your "offer" doesn't need to be an offer to your prospective client. It can be as simple as being good at your service or being niche-specific. In this episode, we dive into what it means to actually have an offer that sells your agency witho...

We hit our biggest milestone in this podcast since we started... 100 episodes! Throughout the last 2 years, we've been asked numerous times why we're even doing this. What's the point? We aren't monetizing it with ads or even have anything to sell our listeners. We don't even bring on guests who have things to sell our audience. This episode answers that. ----- PREMIUM: Join the Patreon and get exclusive content from this episode with more in-depth advice and hours of bonus content each mo...

**Cold Open (Jake gets involved with Agency TikTok / People on Reddit Suck)** **Skip the Cold Open at 18:00** We talk cash flow and how our agency maintains a healthy flow of liquidity and a stockpile of cash in the bank that would make Ron Swanson blush. There are a few things we do to ensure that we are a cash-positive business and that there is enough money in the business to keep things alive for 6 months with everyone having jobs even if we were to lose all of our clients tomorrow. This...

**Cold Open (Do you use the tongs at gas stations?)** **Skip the Cold Open at 6:30** This is an episode regarding a question we get asked frequently. What does our onboarding process look like when we onboard a new client? We take you through the process of the initial sales call all the way to the live website. Both from our perspectives as well as each team member's perspective who handles a portion of that onboarding. ---------------------------------- If there's anything we've learned a...

**Cold Open (We Have a Bone to Pick with Stacked Marketer)** **Skip the Cold Open at 14:38** Evergrow Marketing's structure and goals are based on a business plan put together by Cody. But what is a business plan? What makes one good? We hear about business plans all the time but never really see them or see what's inside of them. In this episode, we talk about how we wrote our business plan, what's in it, and what business plans are even for. ---------------------------------- If there's a...

**Cold Open (Nickelodeon & Shohei Ohtani interpreter)** **Skip the Cold Open at 13:55** All of the gurus tell you how important it is to have multiple streams of income. But what they don't tell you is that advice is not for you. It's not for people who haven't made their money yet. You need to focus on your one, primary income stream before you even consider a second income stream. It's better to build one house with bricks than to build multiple stick houses. We talk about when you should ...

Cody and Jake were asked, "At which point should you take a salary at your agency?" which brings up a good point... when should you? The answer to this question has a lot of variables, especially if you're dealing with multiple owners of that agency. How much recurring profit is coming into the agency? Are you using the Profit First system? How are you forecasting? Although a salary leads to increased stability in your personal life, it often leads to inflexibility and instability in the busi...

**Cold Open (Cody is jealous of Jake's electric razor)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:40** On this episode, we talk about common mistakes agency owners make when they choose to flex but can't back it up. It's incredibly easy for us to tell who is and isn't a legitimate agency owner by only having a short conversation. Furthermore, it's easy for your prospective clients to tell if you're not being truthful. Be honest about who you are, how big you are, and how many clients you have. This has act...

**Cold Open (Jake's cigars and Cody solved the Google Ads suspension issue)** **Skip the Cold Open at 13:20** We often get requests to handle SEO and PPC services for other freelancers and agency owners and we've always had a firm stance against it for a few reasons. In this episode, we explain why we don't white label and why white labeling your services could be a trap that works against your business. ---------------------------------- If there's anything we've learned about owning a dig...

**Cold Open (Cody has to do Jake's job and hates it)** **Skip the Cold Open at 3:25** We tend to get a lot of comments on the way we price our services and how we handle billing. Those questions might include things like why do we charge credit card processing fees to our clients? Why do we put our payment information in the ad account? Why do we bill forward vs execute the work and then bill back? We thought it'd be a good idea to answer all of these questions in one episode. --------------...

We received an inquiry from a listener asking about how he could deal with contractors who weren't completing basic tasks such as time tracking. We decided to make this episode completely on how we handle not only underperforming contractors but employees as well. Ultimately, it starts at the hiring process and we get into why and how we pick our team but we also give really useful tips on how to manage team members when they aren't performing well or doing basic tasks or repeatedly missing som...

**Cold Open (The Russell Brunson thing... again)** **Skip the Cold Open at 5:00** Google is picking a fight with us and suspending ad accounts over their own platform errors. Having your ad accounts get denied, disapproved, or suspended is every agency's worst nightmare and it's happening to us right now. In this episode, we go over what's going on with Google Ads and how we're fighting back. We also stress the importance of not having all of your eggs in one basket. Thankfully doing so has ...

**Cold Open (Russell Brunson Punches a Kid?)** **Skip the Cold Open at 11:06** A lot of agencies out there seem to still be charging things in a manner that isn't really conducive to a scalable model. Ultimately, what it comes down to is that the agency's owner is still stuck in a freelancer mindset. In this episode, we really dive into what it takes to get out of the freelancer mindset and start charging prices and packaging your services correctly so you're not putting too much work into th...