Episodes

**Cold Open (Cody's Too Sexy for His Shirts)** **Skip the Cold Open at 6:41** As we've been diving into integrating AI into our agency, we've realized that everyone on the internet seems to be lying about how they're using AI. When we ask about specific operational applications outside of spamming prospects or scraping lists, we're met with a mix of content production applications and crickets. We don't think AI is nearly where people are pretending it is on LinkedIn but we do talk a bit abo...

**Cold Open (Colorado and Dream Crushers)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:57** Kinsta (a WordPress hosting solution) reached out to us to be an agency partner. We had to break the news to them that our agency is transitioning to the Wix Studio platform. Roger Willams from Kinsta challenged us on that decision and before we let him keep talking, we asked him to duke it out with us on the podcast in an unfiltered and unedited debate. Wix Studio or WordPress? Which is better for agencies? If Wix ...

Clients unable to access Google Drive because they don't have Gmail... Clients unable to send files because they don't have Dropbox... Responding to, organizing, and taking feed back from cluttered email responses and Google Docs... Knowing if clients and prospects actually viewed your pitch deck These are some of the inefficiencies we've been dealing with in our agency and just a few of the things Tiiny Host solves. This week, we bring Tiiny Host CEO and Founder, Elston Baretto, onto the p...

Real estate, real estate, real estate... We see so many newer agency owners and freelancers trying to target or go after real estate agents. Thinking about this on our own... it doesn't seem that viable to us just off of our own basic knowledge of the industry. So we brought Matt Johnson with MicroFamous™ onto the podcast who has an extensive history in the agency space dealing specifically with real estate agents. Is this actually a lucrative niche? After all, homes and properties are huge i...

**Cold Open (The dentist and Jake's old man habits)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:00** We received an email from a client a few days ago that part asked and part dictated strategy. This didn't sit well with us and it led Jake to ask Cody if we should list our prices on our website. It sounds completely unrelated, but we position ourselves as a productized agency and not a boutique agency. That means our services are rigid and we are transactional, not consultative. No matter how many times we...

We have been deep into the AI ecosystem looking for solutions to operational problems both in our own agency and for our clients. We've also noticed other agency owners and SaaS businesses jumping on the AI bandwagon and building their own AI tools and reselling them wrapped as a service. Tony Small from HeyLibby joins us on this episode and gives us insight into why and how he started his AI call agent and receptionist, why he positioned it in the niche he did, and how he actually goes about ...

"Hey, I heard you guys don't like GoHighLevel.I got something you might like instead." That was the email Chris Willow with SPP sent us when he first reached out. Naturally, we were intrigued. After diving more into Service Provider Pro, we realized that Chris really understands the essence of the productized agency model and what tools actually need to do for productized agencies. Leave out all the fluff and make the features it does have as robust as possible. -----------------------------...

**Cold Open (Jake is mentoring high school kids in entrepreneurship)** **Skip the Cold Open at 18:43** This week, we tackle a topic we've kind of flipped on... the power of personal branding for agency owners. Previously we've advocated for “building the agency brand first,” now we share why the game has changed and why your personal brand could be your most valuable asset. Check out our thoughts on why personal brands drive credibility (even outside entrepreneurship) and lessons learned fro...

**Cold Open (We're Switching to Invoice Billing with Google Ads)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:37** What if you could sip pina coladas on a beach without a multi-million dollar agency? It's possible when you stop chasing the wrong goals. This week, we talk about the difference between setting monetary milestones and building toward lifestyle goals. We explain why we think true agency success isn't about hitting a revenue number. It's about designing a business that gives you freedom and fulfil...

We have talked extensively about optimal agency operations on this podcast because it's probably the most important thing in the profitability and scalability of your agency. Gray Mackenzie has been helping multi-million dollar agencies for the past 13 years find higher profitability in their operational procedures through his company, ZenPilot. Gray is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to agency operations and Jake has attempted to get him on the podcast for over 2 years after diving into h...

We've touched on our personal experiences with AI at our agency in this podcast as well as with other guests, but it's been a while since we've had a dedicated episode on the topic. Emily Thompson from CoSchedule joins us to go over their survey report on The State of AI in Marketing. We go over the various finding in this report and weigh in on each finding. Things like: Whether marketers feel that AI gives them a competitive advantage How other marketers are reporting using AI How many ma...

**Cold open (Jake takes a deep dive into agency Reddit and it sucks)** **Skip the Cold Open at 10:20** Last year, we recorded from our hotel in Colombia and recapped our finances from 2022 and how much we grew. This year, we're doing the same thing and recapping 2023. We had some explosive growth and also faced some challenges along the way that caused us to not grow as much as we wanted to. We also cover things we spent more on and things we spent less on. ---------------------------------...

**Cold Open (Jake has a question for the audience)** We keep seeing gurus make the money part of owning an agency really simplified. How money is spent and finances are handled in an agency at $10k/mo and at $100k/mo look very different but no one talks about it. Cody and Jake do a deep dive in how money looks at different levels of the business. ---------------------------------- ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ As always, if you enjoyed this episode or this podcast in general and want to leave us a review or rating...

**Cold Open (Jake and Cody talk about their Hubspot automation)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:08** There are many different lead generation agency models out there. On one hand, an agency can only be responsible for delivering leads. Another lead gen agency may also follow up with those leads for the client to make sure they close. We address why we don't like lead gen models in which it's the agency's responsibility to follow up with the leads. We also explain common objections to the idea of...

**Cold Open (Cody's had his credit card hacked twice in two months)** **Skip the Cold Open at 9:00** Jake and Cody answer the questions: What is networking? Who do you network with? Why should you network? For starters, it depends on what you're trying to do. Are you trying to grow your business or get better at growing your business? Because they're two different things. If you're trying to grow your business, Jake has tips and explains why you shouldn't care about networking with other ...

Ahrefs has been in the SEO community chatter quite a bit since the pricing model change so we thought it'd be good to bring Tim Soulo himself on the podcast to talk a little bit about the reasoning behind that. But we wanted to get more value out of the episode than that. In this episode, Tim gives us some useful keyword research tips both using paid tools as well as free tools and sheds some light on the accuracy... or lack thereof... when it comes to the metrics that SEO tools spit out inclu...

**Cold Open (Lissette is gone and we're sad)** **Skip the Cold Open at 5:30** We keep seeing agency owners emphasize the importance of documenting processes in order to scale, but there are a few problems with this. Most people: Don't know how to document their processes Don't know where to put their documentation Don't know what to do with it once it's documented Don't treat it like a living, breathing document Don't even know what their processes are In this episode, we go over what "d...

**Cold Open (Cody is back from surgery)** **Skip the Cold Open at 4:26** Jake is seeing way too many people looking for "appointment setters" and "high ticket closers" for agencies and SMMAs in Facebook groups. Building an agency off of this model will ultimately kill your agency. This also brings up an interesting point -- if you own a social media marketing agency... how good are your social media marketing services if you can't even get clients using the services you provide? Instead of ...

**Cold Open (Jake has to do dad stuff)** **Skip the Cold Open at 2:45** Cody and Jake often find listeners and other agency owners stuck. Whether they're stuck at only a few clients or struggling to move past $20k/mo, a few things keep popping up over and over again with these agencies who struggle to scale passed their current status. With these 6 things, nothing should be able to stop you from scaling your agency: You’re trying to scale too fast You lack a foundation Your processes aren'...

**Cold Open (Cody wears random shirts he finds / Having a tough week at Evergrow)** **Skip the Cold Open at 6:41** We had a listener of ours ask what our opinion was on HighLevel (GHL) as he was hearing a lot of agency owners promoting it and it seemed to have a lot of features he could sell. I had a pretty honest conversation with him about why we don't use GHL and reasons why he should or should not use it. If you build your agency in someone else's playground, you don't have a good agency...

**Cold Open (Cody brings up NVIDIA article / When is chasing money no longer worth it?) **Skip to Cold Open at 8:07** We're joined by David Tobin of TobinLeff M&A Advisors to discuss what agencies need to consider when thinking about selling their business. Jake mentions how he sees a lot of small agency owners (freelancers) looking to sell their "agency" in groups. We ask David very pointed questions on whether it's even feasible to sell an agency that only consists of one person and a clien...

**Cold Open (Jake and Cody talk about rebranding the podcast)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:11** A listener of the podcast submitted really great questions and we wanted to take the time to respond to all of them on the show. This is part 2 from episode 74 where we answer questions 7-10. There were 10 questions, we answered the last 4 in this episode: Why did you decide on digital marketing? What did you wish you could have done sooner to make you more successful today? How do you avoid burn...

**Cold Open (Jake delivers a keynote at a lawn care business conference)** **Skip the Cold Open at 7:42** A listener of the podcast submitted really great questions and we wanted to take the time to respond to all of them on the show. There were 10 questions, but we were only able to get to 6 of them on this episode: How did you learn more about building websites and utilizing SEO? What would you focus on learning first? Should I build my business first or learn marketing first? What do yo...

**Cold Open (Handkerchiefs / The Everbros Lost Episodes / Vulgarity) **Skip the Cold Open at 17:27** We see a lot of rookie mistakes new agency owners are making that's causing them to not get any sales or make it passed the $10k/mo mark. At its core, it comes down to commitment to your expertise and your niche. In this episode, we don't just tell you what we think the mistakes are, we also talk about things you can do to prevent these from affecting you and your agency. The 7 mistakes are:...