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.
Stop Setting Goals Until You Ask This One Question with Phil Davis | Ep #931
Phil Davis is the founder and CEO of Tungsten Branding, one of the world's top-ranked naming and branding agencies, and the man behind hundreds of company names including PODS, RallyHouse, and TeamLogicIT. Before Tungsten, Phil ran a full-service ad agency in Tampa Bay for 17 years before hitting an inflection point: he was succeeding by every external metric and miserable at the core of it. In this episode, Phil and Jason dig into the one question that cuts through all the noise of running an agency, why chasing revenue metrics is a trap, and what it actually means to build a business in alignment with what you want.
The Secret to Running an Agency for 30 Years Without Ever Wanting to Walk Away with Arne Hurty | Ep #930
Arne Hurty is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of BayCreative, a San Francisco Bay Area B2B technology marketing agency he has been running for 30 years. What started as a $500 illustration job has grown into a full-service agency serving brands like Cisco and ServiceNow — with Arne's son and daughter now working alongside him. In this episode, Arne and Jason dig into what actually sustains an agency owner over three decades: two business partner buyouts, a full pivot to remote work, and a philosophy of building the agency around life rather than the other way around.
How to Remove Yourself as the Bottleneck and Build a Scalable Agency with John Jantsch | Ep #928
John Jantsch is the founder of Duct Tape Marketing, a marketing agency he built over 30 years and the author of the bestselling book Duct Tape Marketing. He has since licensed his systematic marketing methodology to more than 400 agencies, consultants, and fractional CMOs around the world. In this episode, John joins Jason to talk about the hard lessons of removing yourself from the center of your agency, why smaller agencies have a real competitive edge when they lean into being human, and why the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed, even as AI reshapes the tools we use.
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.
The Invisible Ceiling Most Agency Owners Never See Coming with Brandon Harrar | Ep #898
What if growth isn’t actually about more clients, more hires, or even more revenue? What if the very thing driving your success right now is also the reason you’ll eventually stall?
Agency owners tend to chase the usual milestones: bigger deals, a growing team, rising top-line numbers. And for a while, that works. But there’s a breaking point most founders don’t see coming when the business can’t grow any further because everything still runs through them.
Burned Out Agency Owner to AI Architect: The Real Shift Founders Must Make With Austin Armstrong | Ep #888
How are you protecting yourself from the real risk of owner burnout?
Agency owners often burn out because they built a business that depends entirely on them.
Today’s featured guest is a former agency owner turned AI SaaS founder. He'll unpack what really caused his agency collapse, what he learned from it, and how he rebuilt from a completely different role.
How to Step Out of Day-to-Day Client Work Without Breaking the Agency with Brent Weaver | Ep #822
Are you still you agency’s “product”? Maybe you’ve thought about stepping back from the day-to-day but feel terrified you’ll break what’s working. Out featured guest is the newly appointed CEO of E2M Solutions and he shares what it’s been like going from being the main “product” at an agency he built and grew, to stepping in to run a 300-person white-label agency.
From losing the fear of breaking what already worked to accepting it’s better if he’s usually not in client call, he shares how he’s become comfortable with his new role: coaching the core leadership team, amplifying culture, and making sure hundreds of projects and thousands of tasks get executed well. Brent’s journey is packed with lessons on what real leadership looks like when you’re ready to grow.
How to Get Out of the 24/7 Grind and Scale Your Agency Smarter with RJ Huebert | Ep #820
Are you working harder than ever, but still can’t turn your brain off—even on weekends? Today’s featured guest is one of the many agency owners who has found it hard to find the right balance to take care of himself as well as the business. Like many agency owners, he made the leap from building someone else’s business to finally building his own. But trading a cozy corporate job for the chaos of running an agency with dozens of clients wasn’t as easy as it looked.
He shares the real challenges of sales, why speed is still the secret to winning leads, and how he’s figuring out how to convert prospects who aren’t quite ready to buy. Most importantly, he opens up about the ongoing struggle to find the right balance between health, family, and keeping the agency growing.
When Growth Isn’t the Goal: Rebuilding for Freedom, Not Burnout with Blake Denman | Ep #806
Have you ever found yourself grinding endlessly, only to pause and think, “Is this really what I signed up for?” Maybe you started your business chasing freedom—only to end up feeling trapped by the very thing you built. It’s a common trap: the belief that working harder and enduring more pressure will eventually earn you the right to enjoy life after a big exit.
But as today’s guest discovered, you don’t need to wait 10 more years to start living. What you really need is a clearer why, a stronger structure, and the right people around you—people who understand your vision and support your growth.
Hiring a Sales Team? Why Most Agency Owners Sabotage Themselves (and How to Get it Right) with Travis Hoechlin | Ep #797
Most agency owners screw up their first sales hire. Why? Because they either hire the wrong person, or refuse to let go of control.
Travis Hoechlin used to think building a sales team was a waste of time—until he realized he was the bottleneck. In this episode, you’ll hear how he went from solo closer to leading a performance-driven team that fuels his agency’s growth.