Podcasts

As we round the bend into the new year, I’m reflecting on the lessons learned from my time as an agency owner and the insights I’ve gained from working with hundreds of agencies.  While there are too many to count, I’m going to try to boil down my experiences into a few points that I hope you can take into 2025 as you start to think about what you want the next year to look like for your agency. This episode is packed with actionable advice on things like niche selection, service offerings, operational efficiencies, and how to foster a culture of continuous growth and dedication among your staff.  As you go into the new year, ask yourself, How do you want your agency to look different? How do you want your team to look different? How do you want to look different to the world? And how do you want the clients you serve to be different? With those questions in mind, join me as I walk through what my dream agency would look like today and how you can implement these strategies to align your agency for success in 2025.   A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. In This Episode: The most profitable size of an agency Dividing in-office work and at-home work for a hybrid agency The importance of having in-house accounts service people who are dedicated to growing the agency Using freelancers and contractors to support a smaller team of in-house creatives The continued […]

To grow the agency, agency owners need to be working on the business, not working in it. That means we have to accept that it’s time to get out of the day-to-day and embrace agency entrepreneurship as business leaders.  Michael E. Gerber, author of The E-Myth and renowned business guru, joined us today to share some profound lessons for agency owners to uplevel their businesses and stop getting stuck just being technicians of the business.  Too many of us get stuck in the day-to-day operations, doing work we should hire other experts to do. And while those experts do what they do best — so should we. By focusing on biz dev and enhancing the mission, vision, and values of the agency, we’re making room for the agency to grow while achieving our dreams.  If you’ve been looking for a push to get inspired to finally run the agency as the visionary you are, this is your episode. Michael is a great inspiration to show agency owners that following our dreams and visions is possible if we set ourselves up for the right kind of success.   A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: How agency owners get in their own way of their success Many agency owners are technicians suffering from entrepreneurial tendencies How to use systems and processes when you’re an agency doing custom work The 8 distinct personalities for a great entrepreneur Running an agency vs. doing the work of […]

Account executives are critical for agency profitability and success. Without them, we wouldn’t have anybody responsible for building deeper trust with clients and growing their accounts. That’s why we’ve brought Lori Highby on the show this week to share everything she knows about the account executive role. Some of you might recognize her from the AE Bootcamps she teaches at, and she’s here to bring that wisdom to the greater AMI community so we can better understand just how important our AEs are for agency success. As someone who has an inside look at how AEs think and the questions and concerns that are always in their heads, Lori is the perfect person to share them so we can learn how to better support our AEs.   We cover everything from the expectations in an AE role, how agency owners can better communicate their goals and expectations to AEs, recognizing their hard work, and supporting their goals and aspirations within their role so they can also grow with the agency.  This episode is packed with incredible insights, so we hope you can take some of these topics and use them to better understand and support the AEs in your agency.  A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: Recurring struggles that account executives face and are looking for guidance about The importance of standardized communication on the team and with clients Helping AEs level up their soft communication skills Supporting your account executives’ eagerness […]

This one is going to be hard for most agency owners to hear, but you need to take a sabbatical — or a vacation or any amount of time off where you completely unplug from the agency. No Slack, no email, no phone calls. Nothing.

The future of work is becoming more fractional. Instead of full-time, in-house teams doing all the work — how many of us grew up in the agency world — fractional employees like contractors and freelancers can take on more and more complex roles for us.

Many agency owners reported in 2024 that one of the best things about their agencies are their employees. Despite continued biz dev struggles and slow sales cycles, agency owners have had a hard time shrinking their teams because they just love them that much.

It’s no secret that new business for agencies was brutal in 2023. And for some in 2024, it’s been equally difficult. So, for 2025, we want to challenge you to get unstuck from those difficult sales cycles and lay the groundwork for some new energy as we come to the end of this year.

With more agency owners wanting to step out of the agency’s day-to-day operations to focus more on being the company’s visionary leader, there are many areas of the business that can sometimes go overlooked.

This is a topic we’ve covered many times before, but it’s an important one. When was the last time you checked in with yourself about what agency growth really means to you? It can be more than just adding more team members and physically growing and expanding the agency.

As agency owners, we’re perpetual change-makers, striving to affect real and sustained transformation not just in our clients’ lives, but also in our own. But as we all know, creating transformational, lasting change within the agency can be an uphill battle.