Episodes

**Cold Open (Jake asks what our biggest prediction flops were)** **Skip the Cold Open at 4:16** Chris M. Walker, owner of Legiit and Superstar SEO joins us on this week's episode to talk about why it's important for you to know how to execute the service you're delivering and not simply hire a contractor to do it for you -- at least no without being somewhat of an expert yourself. We talk about how it isn't only unethical but it also isn't scaleable. We also cover: How Chris got started wit...

On this special episode, Cody, Jenny, Jake, & Lauren all meet up in Kofu, Yamanashi, Japan for an in-person podcast episode! In this episode, we talk about all things relationships when it comes to owning an agency. Lauren gives her take on what it was like to date Jake while he already owned an agency. and Jenny tells us about the feelings she had when Cody decided to partner up with Jake. We also dive into the positives and negatives being an entrepreneur and agency owner can have on our relat...

On this special guest episode, we invite Alec Smith on the podcast; a former coworker and friend of ours at the agency we all worked at together in Iowa. Alec brings a unique perspective to the show as he, like us, left the agency employment life and started his own freelance / agency. However, after a while, even while proving to be successful on his own, he decided to give his clients a 30-day notice and work for another agency that wanted to bring him on as a full-time employee. Alec expla...

**Cold Open (Airport and flying tips and business travel)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:43** We've wanted to talk about the books we'd recommend to other agency owners for a while now so we decided to put together a pretty comprehensive list of those. Jake went deep. Cody provided his top 3-4 books. Here's a link to each book and article we recommended: Jake's Recommendations to the Listener How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie) The ONE Thing (Gary Keller & Jay Papasan) S...

**Cold Open (How many alarms do each of us set to wake up?)** **Skip the Cold Open at 4:14** On this episode, Jake and Cody are joined by Toggl Marketing Director, Ilia Markov, discussing the importance of tracking time in your agency for reasons beyond simply billing. We've talked about tracking time for various reasons in episode 4 (How to Price Your Agency Services) but most importantly in episode 19 (Understanding Your Internal Labor Rate Calculation is More Important Than Making Money) -...

**Cold Open (Cody exclaims his love for konbinis and how often he eats at them)** **Skip the Cold Open at 3:45** We've noticed a lot of newer marketing agency owners out there understand the importance of niching down but it looks like they have trouble grasping the concept of doubling down and becoming an expert in that niche. You can't simply "niche hop" every month or so; you need to stick to it and become an expert in that niche -- that's how business owners will trust you and how you'll ...

**Cold Open (Making some changes to the podcast - including shorter Cold Opens)** **Skip the Cold Open at 3:58** Whether you're first starting out or you've been in the agency game for a while, eventually you'll want to explore adding new services to your business. In this episode, we talk about how we navigate adding new services to offer to clients without having them crash and burn. When you offer a new service that you don't have a lot of experience in, you run the risk of rocky setups an...

**Cold Open (Cody eats a banana)** **Skip the Cold Open at 1:45) A lot of people getting into the agency space are realizing that we're in a time of pretty heavy market saturation, so we wanted to address it and what our feelings are on it. For starters, we don't really believe in paying too much attention to market saturation when dealing with a recurring good/service. It isn't difficult to stand out and separate yourself from the competition. In this episode, we cover three main topics abo...

**Cold Open (Bananas aren't that great for you... but also the optimal banana is around 30% brown)** **Skip the Cold Open at 8:11** We've been seeing a lot of businesses, not just agency owners, turning to paid ads in order to acquire clients in the early stages of their business. Although it can be a fast way to acquire clients, most businesses in the early stages don't have the courage or foresight to limit the number of clients they accept. In Cody's words, they pour gasoline on a business...

**Cold Open (How much would you buy an agency for that did $10k MRR?)** **Skip the Cold Open at 12:04** We asked the community what they wanted to hear more about and client retention was the top subject. We've covered it a couple of times on this podcast, specifically in episodes 005, 008, and 020, but we've noticed a few things that we didn't cover in those episodes that we see people lacking in the agency community. In this episode, we wanted to focus on 4 key things to make sure you're do...

**Cold Open (We're getting negative reviews and we're sad)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:38** Something we've seen new digital marketers struggle with is whether they should create an agency or focus their services around their personal brand and we wanted to talk about the pros and cons of each. Depending on your timeline, expertise, and goals, one or the other may be best for you. Maybe you want to do both, that's okay too. But some things to consider when it comes to each are: If you're no...

**Cold Open (Pre-podcast technical difficulties / Cody talks about how his stay in Japan is going)** **Skip the Cold Open at 18:17** In this special episode, we wanted to make sure that we didn't let a full year of creating, editing, and publishing this podcast go unnoticed. Although we do this for fun, a lot goes into making it, especially when there is no current monetary gain for us. Jake describes this episode as a "throwaway" early in the episode as we mainly recap the last 365 days and ...

**Cold Open (We discuss what we think about getting manicures as men)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:40** Our 52nd episode! That means we've been publishing a new episode every, single Friday for a full year! Thank you for continuing to listen and support our podcast! In this episode, we cover a brief topic that Jake saw while scrolling through Facebook. Someone had brought up that they think the marketing industry should be regulated to prevent people entering it who do not know what they're doi...

**Note: Starting at 41:15, there is some distorted audio for a few minutes. This podcast was recorded in person and Cody's mic sucks. This does pass and return to normal.** **Cold Open (Cody gives Jake a familiar mug for his birthday / Jake talks about the Iowa license plate scandal / Buzzfeed News closes down)** **Skip the Cold Open at 12:00** AI isn't a new topic but it's time we talk about it and how it will affect the agency space. Some agency owners think it will cause agencies to close dow...

Lately, within the last year, there has been a surge of new, self-proclaimed "agency" or "SMMA" owners. You might even be one of them -- but with that surge of new, ambitious agency owners comes a surge of other people capitalizing on it and taking money from naive people looking to finally make something of themselves. These people are the Mastermind, YouTube, and Facebook gurus. 99.99999% of them never actually had a successful agency that did over $10k in MRR but they've found it lucrative to...

**Cold Open (What's the maximum number of days you can eat leftover pizza?)** **Skip the Cold Open at 5:45** Lately, we've been getting a lot of requests from listeners and people in groups asking if there is an opportunity to work for us for free so they can gain experience. Although the idea of free labor sounds appealing, it really isn't from our perspective, and in this episode, we'll tell you why. When you hire someone, whether it's a paid position or an unpaid internship, you have to de...

**Cold Open (Jake almost dies at a paintball tournament)** **Skip the Cold Open at 13:00** 1 in 5 businesses fails within the first 5 years. We think that number is much higher in the digital agency space. We're rounding off our 4th year with Evergrow and seeing continual 100% year-over-year growth with no business debt. But when we look around, we see new (and even older) agencies doing really dumb things that are killing their businesses. The gurus out there will tell you that you can hire an ...

We're joined by Kevin Miller from the Marketing Agency Owners group on Facebook to talk about something we don't do ourselves to acquire clients -- cold messaging and outreach. Kevin owns All Approach and regularly gives tips as well as coaches agency owners on how to book appointments and acquire clients using LinkedIn messaging. As you know, we (Jake and Cody) don't do any outreach. All of the clients we receive are inbound and since we sell SEO and PPC services, we have a belief in drinking...

In episode 004 of the podcast, we talked about how to price your agency services. However, the episode was geared more toward pricing once your agency is more established. It covered understanding your labor hour allocation and market rates. When you're just starting out, you won't know this information. Additionally, you likely don't have much, if any, experience or case studies to show to prospective clients meaning they're going to have to take a chance on you. With that in mind, you cannot...

The main reason why Jake believes so many new agency owners and people who sell SMMA courses gravitate to social media is that you don't have to really learn how to track anything. All of the important tracking features are built into the Facebook interface. All you have to do is copy and paste a pixel into a landing page and boom, you're done. It's why there don't seem to be as many Google Ads or SEO experts out there as there used to be. People who teach themselves Google Ads fail to teach th...

In this week's episode, we go over arguably the single most important thing that separates our agency from the rest of the agencies out there. Tracking. The number one thing clients hire you for is results. If you can't provide results, they'll fire you. So it's your job to make sure the results you're providing are trackable. As much as we like to think, things like clicks, traffic, impressions, and rank are not results business owners care about. They typically care about leads and sales. B...

Are you a serial planner or do you take action for the sake of taking action? In this episode, we share differing beliefs on whether you should take time and plan out the right moves for your agency or just get started and figure it out. There are pros and cons to each method. Taking Time to Plan Pro: The actions you take will be meaningful and although will have slower short-term returns, the long-term results can be exponential. Con: Analysis paralysis is a real thing and taking too much ...

We sit down with Schieler Mew of Service Lifter and owner / admin of the Google SEO Mastermind group on Facebook (120k members) and dive deep into his business model where his average ticket is only a little more than $600 per client per month, yet he's hitting the $2.1m mark. We've seen it over and over again in SEO and agency groups that you need to charge thousands of dollars per month in order to hit not only the 6-figure, $10k/mo mark, but the 7-figure mark. Although Schieler focuses on the...

We've been seeing a lot of people in Facebook groups talking about how they're building funds by white labeling their services for other agencies or getting involved with setting and closing to "get money to start their agency". But that begs the question, "how much money do you need to start an agency?" If you're familiar with our earlier episodes, you know about how much you need -- but in this episode, we go into other objections we've been seeing like "I don't have time to start an agency ...