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.
-
![]()
Seth Godin
Best selling Author of Purple Cow, This is Marketing, Linchpin, Permission Marketing
-
![]()
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva and former Apple chief evangelist
-
![]()
Dan Martell
Author of Buy Back Your Time. Influential coach in SaaS startups.
-
![]()
Gino Wickman
The creator of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and author of Traction.
-
![]()
Neil Patel
Founder of CrazyEgg, Kissmetrics, and other multimillion dollar companies
-
![Uri Levine]()
Uri Levine
Co-founder of Waze
-
![]()
Joey Coleman
Recognized for his expertise in customer retention & enhancing client loyalty
-
![]()
Mike Michaelowicz
Best-selling author of Profit First and Clock Work
-
![]()
Amy Porterfield
Renowned online marketing expert and educator
-
![]()
Pat Flynn
The leaders in the podcast space
-
![]()
Jay Baer
Best Selling author of Talk Triggers, Hug Your Haters, and one of the best speakers
-
![]()
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 Waiting for the Right Revenue to Start Living with Dobbin Buck | Ep #922
Have you been telling yourself that once the agency reaches the next level, you will finally take care of yourself? As an agency owner, you shouldn’t be fitting life into your work schedule; instead you should fit work into your life.
Today’s featured guest is not the type of founder who ground his way to success and then learned to slow down. He built the life first and designed the agency around it from early on.
Is Low Agency Overhead Actually a Growth Ceiling? With Billy Scott | Ep #921
Today’s featured guest spent seven years knocking on doors selling dry cleaning before he ever thought about digital marketing. He built his agency to serve home service businesses, ran it solo for three years, and is now in the middle of the transition most agency founders dread: building the systems and the team that let the work happen without him in the room.
In this conversation, he and Jason work through the Evolution Framework, what the door-to-door years gave him that no formal sales training could, and what the next move looks like from the manager stage.
Is the Digital Agency Model Broken, or Are We Just Calling It the Wrong Thing? With Brent Weaver | Ep #920
Are you running an AI-first agency and telling yourself you have made the shift, when what you have actually done is give everyone on your team a faster version of the same job? After months of AI training, are you wondering why the team still works the same way it always did? Today’s featured guest currently serves a CEO of a white label agency serving over 400 partner agencies worldwide. He came into the role specifically to go deep on AI, and what he found was not an upgrade to the existing model. It was a fundamentally different model.
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.
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.
Your Agency Can’t Scale Past the Role You’re Stuck In with Dave Benton | Ep #901
How can you build an agency that outlasts your involvement in it? And what happens to your identity when you finally make that shift?
Over the course of 22 years, today's featired guest grew a one-person freelance operation into a full-service digital agency doing eight figures and then sold it. In this conversation, he'll unpack the real lessons from that journey: the painful transitions between operator, manager, and architect, the hiring decision that finally unlocked his ability to step back from the work he loved, and why the question isn't just who you need on your team — it's who you need to become.
The CEO Trap: Why Founders Either Check Out or Can't Let Go with Matt Nelson | Ep #899
Does growth break agencies or does it expose underlying issues? It’s a common thing. Even with momentum, scrappy decisions, loose roles, and unspoken agreements eventually become the very thing that holds the business back. And by the time it’s visible, it’s no longer a small fix. It’s structural.
Today’s featured guest pulls back the curtain on that transition.
How to Build an Agency That Doesn’t Depend on You with Ted Harrison | Ep #897
Are you struggling to scale your agency or are you unknowingly the thing holding it back?
At what point does your growth stop being a systems problem and start becoming a leadership one?
Today’s guest shares what it to break through those ceilings.
After scaling quickly off the back of a strong network, he made the critical decision to systemize everything before growth turned him into the bottleneck. By leveraging documentation in a smart, intentional way, he built a foundation that allowed the agency to grow without everything running through him.
In this conversation, he unpacks the realities of working with enterprise clients, the often uncomfortable shift from operator to CEO, and why—despite all the noise, AI is actually increasing the need for human judgment, taste, and leadership, not replacing it.
Why Your Agency Can’t Scale Until You Stop Being the Doer with Matt Kovacs | Ep #893
Have you ever wondered how to strike that balance between managing your team and ensuring success for your clients? Today's featured guest is here is talk about what it actually takes to evolve from doing the work to building a team that can win without you.
The conversation cuts through common agency myths, like hiring better clients first or relying on RFPs, and instead exposes the real drivers of growth: team strength, leadership evolution, and structural leverage.