Smart Agency Masterclass Podcast with Jason Swenk
Bi-weekly interviews, strategy, and advice for building your marketing agency the smart way.
The popular agency podcast has just turned 12 years old and covers everything from starting a successful agency to selling your agency.
#1 Agency Leadership Podcast. Check Out Our Past Guests.
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Seth Godin
Best selling Author of Purple Cow, This is Marketing, Linchpin, Permission Marketing
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Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva and former Apple chief evangelist
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Dan Martell
Author of Buy Back Your Time. Influential coach in SaaS startups.
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Gino Wickman
The creator of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and author of Traction.
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Neil Patel
Founder of CrazyEgg, Kissmetrics, and other multimillion dollar companies
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![Uri Levine]()
Uri Levine
Co-founder of Waze
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Joey Coleman
Recognized for his expertise in customer retention & enhancing client loyalty
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Mike Michaelowicz
Best-selling author of Profit First and Clock Work
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Amy Porterfield
Renowned online marketing expert and educator
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Pat Flynn
The leaders in the podcast space
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Jay Baer
Best Selling author of Talk Triggers, Hug Your Haters, and one of the best speakers
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Todd Herman
Coach to Elite pro athletes, leaders, and public figures
About the Show
The popular agency podcast has been around since 2014 and covers everything from starting a successful agency to selling your agency. What makes this podcast a must-listen is Swenk’s background as the founder and CEO of an agency for over a decade. Swenk brings his own experience to the table, besides the expertise of his guests. He mostly covers topics that help growing agencies scale to the next level.
YOUR HOST
JASON SWENK
Smart Agency Masterclass
Jason is a family man who also happens to have created a couple big marketing agencies, helped thousands of agency owners, and had a big agency exit too.
The Storytelling Framework That Makes Agencies Impossible to Ignore with Park Howell | Ep #913
Have you ever pitched a client and led with everything your agency does well, only to watch their eyes glaze over halfway through? What you’re missing is positioning copy that actually moves people. Today’s featured guest has spent 40 years in the advertising and branding world, the last 20 of them devoted entirely to one question: why do some messages land and others disappear?
Built a 200-Person Agency, Why Cut It in Half? With Hope Horner | Ep #912
Have you ever hired your way into a problem? Have you promoted your best people into management roles and watched them struggle, not because they lacked talent, but because nobody asked whether that was actually the job they wanted?
Today’s featured guest grew her agency team to nearly 200 people before making the deliberate decision to scale back to around 75. She did it not because the business was failing, but because she had learned the hard way that headcount is not leverage.
What If Your Podcast Was Closing Deals While You Slept? with Doug Sandler | Ep #911
Are you treating your podcast as one more thing on an already impossible schedule? Today’s featured guest has been podcasting for over 11 years and nearly 1,800 episodes. In this conversation, he’ll make the case that a podcast, run correctly, removes the sales cycle almost entirely. He also has a lot to say about what it took to step back from working 100-hour weeks in an entertainment agency and into a business that earns a healthy six-figure income on 15 hours a week.
What Happens When Your Agency's SOPs Finally Have Teeth with Andy Janaitis | Ep #910
Have you ever written a process that nobody followed? Or built a folder of SOPs that your team politely ignored and you quietly stopped updating? That was a big struggle for today’s featured guest, until he created an AI context engine that makes their operating procedures actually stick. In this episode, he walks through exactly how it works, how they structured shared and personal context layers, and more.
Does Your Agency Sell Work That AI Does for Free? with Tom Lee | Ep #909
Are you still optimizing your agency's content for Google while your clients are getting their answers from AI? Are you charging for the execution that AI is about to make obsolete, while giving away the strategy that commands real fees? Today’s featured guest works with agencies navigating the shift from traditional search to generative engine optimization. He’ll talk about what the Anthropic research actually says about how much of the work agencies do today can be automated, how AI reads content differently than Google does, and the practical steps any agency can take right now to show up in AI-generated answers before competitors figure it out.
9 Years, Zero Churn: The Agency Positioning That Turns Clients Into Long-Term Partners with Brooke Sellas | Ep #908
Do you publish content consistently but wonder why it is not moving the needle? Today’s featured guest owns a social media agency and built her client roster by getting on stage before she was comfortable. In this conversation, she’ll talk about how she landed enterprise clients with zero churn over nine years, what it actually takes to find a real differentiator, and much more.
What Does a 78% Close Rate Actually Tell You About Your Sales Process? With Jen Jurgens | Ep #907
Are you charging for execution when clients are about to stop paying for it? Are you building your sales process around your offer instead of around your prospect's trust?
Today’s featured guest built a growth workshop that converts 78% of buyers into long-term retainer clients. In this episode, she’ll get into what that workshop actually contains, why the entry offer might be the thing keeping it from scaling, how to stop your CEO from chasing shiny quarters mid-engagement, and what happens when you position strategy as the product instead of execution.
Why Your Agency Grows Slower When You’re the Best Person on the Team with Olivier Bridgeman | Ep #906
Have you ever hired someone to free up your time and found yourself working more hours than before? Have you hit a point where your reputation for quality is actually the thing keeping you stuck in every project? Today’s featured guest and his wife have been building their agency for over 22 years. For most of that time, the business ran on referrals, no defined niche, and two founders doing most of the work. Six years ago they got serious about building a real team. In this episode, he talks honestly about what that transition looked like and more.
How to Build an Account Management Team That Owns Client Outcomes with Michelle Keckler | Ep #905
Are your account managers drowning because you never built the system around them? In seven years, today’s featured guest and her co-founder built a team of six and developed an account management structure that worked well enough to earn a speaking slot at Elevate. She’ll break down the exact touchpoint cadence her agency uses to retain clients and grow accounts, what she looks for when hiring account managers, and more.
The Agency Incubator Model: How to Fund SaaS Products Through Clients Instead of Investors with David Carnes | Ep #904
Are you running multiple things at once and wondering why none of them are moving as fast as they should? Are you still the one every project, every client, and every decision routes through, no matter how many people you have on your team?
Over nearly three decades, today’s featured guest didn’t just run an agency. He turned it into an incubator, spinning up multiple SaaS companies, a mobile app, and an accessibility tool, all funded and validated through a model most founders have never tried. In this episode, he’ll get into how he built products without outside investors, why the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle, and what it actually took to step out of the operator seat after 28 years in it.