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.
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.
The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918
Have you gotten mediocre output from AI and blamed the tool? Are you running a marketing team that is still activity-based when the clients who trust you need you to own outcomes? Today’s featured guest came up through the Navy, where he learned that calm in chaos comes from frameworks, not confidence. In this episode, Kevin walks through SMAC, the military-derived operating framework he uses with clients, employees, and his own agency. He also gets into the Iron Man model for AI usage, how he cut a two-day research process to eight minutes, and what his Red Lens tool does before any campaign goes out the door.
The 80% Rule That Frees Agency Founders from the Operator Seat with Mimi Banks | Ep #917
Have you hired people who look great on paper only to later discover the skills do not actually transfer? Today’s featured guest built her agency deliberately, one client at a time, carrying systems from her years at L'Oreal before anyone told her those systems would matter. She talks about how she structured accountability on her team from the beginning, how she filters out candidates who cannot think without AI holding their hand, and more.
Your Agency Does Great Work So Why Do Clients Choose Someone Else? with Bianca Beatty | Ep #914
Have you ever lost a pitch you were sure you had won on merit? Or if you did win the account, have you ended up with clients that only want to talk to you? Today’s featured guest came up through seven years as head of marketing at a lean e-commerce company, where wearing every hat was not optional. In this episode, she talks about how a story about sorting fish as a child became the deciding factor in a competitive pitch, why genuine connection is not a soft skill but a structural advantage, and what happens to your agency when you never learned to let clients connect with your team instead of just with you.
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.
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 AI Tools Helped a 24-Year SEO Agency Vet Scale 5x Faster Without Burnout with Navneet Kaushal | Ep #902
What separates the agencies growing through the AI wave from the ones quietly shrinking? Do you think you are on the right side of that line? Today’s featured guest claims his agency has grown faster than ever in these recent years of AI ubiquity.
He’ll break down how 24 years of process obsession set him up to capitalize on AI before his competitors even stopped panicking. We get into the real mechanics of building SOPs that survive scale, why founders keep sabotaging their own teams (and how to stop), and how personal branding turned his sales calls into qualification calls. If you're running a $1M+ agency and still feel like the bottleneck, this one is going to sting a little, in the right way.
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.
Why Hiring Without Systems Multiplies the Chaos with Chris Seminatore | Ep #894
What actually breaks an agency first, growth or the founder’s inability to evolve with it? And at what point does hiring more people stop creating leverage… and start creating chaos? Today’s featured guest dives into why he decided to close his first business, which he had grown to 22 employees, and start again solo. He needed to get away from the chaos of managing a large team, but what is the crucial mistake he can avoid if he ever wants to scale an agency team again? Beneath the tactics, it becomes clear that the role of a founder must grow if they want to build a business that doesn’t collapse without them.
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.