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.
How One Bad Hire Turns a Marketing Agency Owner Into the Bottleneck with Scott Leff | Ep #903
What if hiring smart people and getting out of your way was not enough to build a self-managing agency? Today’s featured guest will talk through the decisions most agency owners get wrong: when to stay involved, when to let go, and how the absence of rigor compounds into structural problems you won't even notice until you're stuck.
He’ll talk about how bad hiring decisions led him to become the bottleneck, how he’s trying to fix that, as well as why your "number" for how much your agency is worth is probably based on nothing, and the one financial habit that gives you genuine optionality.
When an Agency Merger Falls Apart: Lessons on Reinvention with Tom Snyder | Ep #864
What would you do if the merger you believed would change everything suddenly collapsed? Agency owners often dream of the big exit: the acquisition, the payday, the validation. But if you’ve been in this industry long enough, you know the story rarely goes as planned. Today’s guest lived through the dot-com boom, a merger gone sideways, a rare “un-merger,” and multiple reinventions across three decades.
Today’s featured guest is an agency owner who lived through the dot com boom, a merger gone sideways, an unmerger (a rare event), and multiple reinventions over three decades. He’ll talk about his journey and the lessons he’s gained in resilience, clarity, and what it means to build a business that lasts.
Why the Middle Layer of Your Agency Org Chart May Not Survive AI with Jennifer Bagley | Ep #841
Are you still thinking of AI as just “ChatGPT with a better prompt”? Or maybe you’ve played around with Zapier automations and thought, yeah, that’s good enough. Today's featured guest knows that the agencies pulling ahead right now are building full-on AI agent networks that replace routine tasks, streamline data pipelines, and give their teams superpowers. She’s re-engineering her agency around AI and will talk about where she finds top-tier talent and why you don’t need to code to lead your agency into the future.