How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Own Agency with David Khim | Ep #933
David Khim is the co-founder and CEO of Omniscient Digital], a B2B SaaS SEO and content strategy agency based in Austin, Texas. Before starting Omniscient, David was head of growth at People.ai and Fishtown Analytics, and a growth product manager at HubSpot, where he met his co-founders Allie Decker and Alex Birkett. What started as a side consulting project between colleagues turned into a full-time agency — and then required a different kind of founder entirely. In this episode, David and Jason dig into the identity shift that agency owners have to make to actually scale: from operator to architect, from doing to leading, and from proving your value through involvement to trusting your team to execute without you.
Subscribe
Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio
Sponsors and Resources
E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.
Key Takeaways:
The decision to go full-time is psychological, not financial. David says the numbers justified going all in on Omniscient before they actually made the leap. The harder thing was deciding to bet on themselves. This is a pattern Jason sees constantly: founders wait until it feels safe rather than until it makes sense. The market is often ready before the founder is.
Hiring self-managing talent changes everything about how you lead. When David and his co-founders hired more experienced people, they shifted the way they communicated entirely. Instead of explaining decisions, they said "I trust you" and "I defer to you." That language gives people real ownership rather than fake autonomy. The result is lower turnover, fewer escalations, and a team that makes better decisions without the founder in the room.
A founder's job has to evolve from delivery to architecture. David describes his current role as thinking 6 to 12 months ahead about services, team structure, and AI integration, not shipping work or solving daily problems. That shift from doer to architect is the operational definition of scale. Founders who cannot make that transition become the ceiling on their own company's growth.
Your schedule is a system design problem. Jason's example of taking Fridays off and limiting meetings to Tuesday through Thursday is not a lifestyle choice — it is a deliberate experiment in what creates clarity and output quality. David echoed this with his own practice of protecting summer weekends and family time. The framework is simple: treat your calendar the way you would treat any other business system. Test it, observe the results, adjust.
David also shares why he uses a time-value lens when making decisions — choosing to decline a small financial payout in exchange for protecting more personal time — and why thinking of major decisions as reversible experiments reduces the fear that keeps founders from making any change at all.
Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?
Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.
