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.
Why Being a Category of One Is Your Best Defense Against AI Commoditization with Leslie Silverman | Ep #935
Leslie Silverman is the co-founder of Hive 180, a strategic marketing agency based in Colorado that serves expert service businesses including architects, contractors, attorneys, medical professionals, spas, and high-end consultants. She started her career in print media at Condé Nast and Hearst in New York City before eventually co-founding Hive 180 almost by accident. In this episode, Leslie and Jason dig into what it actually takes to stop being a generalist, why individuality is your most durable competitive advantage in the age of AI, and how she rebuilt her agency model around project-based strategic work instead of retainers.
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.
How a "Never Say No" Philosophy Built a 20-Person Analytics Agency with Rob Sanders | Ep #933
Rob Sanders is the founder of RSO Consulting, a boutique digital analytics agency with over 20 years in business. Rob's background spans web development, early-stage digital marketing at Ford Motor Company, and some of the first PPC work done through Yahoo and Overture. Today RSO is a 20-person shop with a military-influenced leadership philosophy, a low-turnover culture, and a clear point of view on how agencies should engage with AI. In this episode, Rob and Jason talk about what actually keeps an agency going for two decades, why "never say no" is not recklessness but a growth discipline, and how being transparent about AI with clients has become a trust-building strategy.
How 19 Years of Niche Focus Built an Agency Where Clients Compete to Work With You with Wendy Covey | Ep #932
Wendy Covey is the co-founder and CEO of TREW Marketing, a strategy and content agency exclusively serving engineering and manufacturing companies. She started the agency in 2008 — during the Great Recession — as a generalist, and within a year or two of niching down, won a Wall Street Journal Small Business Innovation Award. Today, TREW Marketing is 19 years in, and Wendy has stepped fully into the owner role, with a president and leadership team running day-to-day operations. In this episode, Wendy and Jason dig into what it took to get there: the painful business partner buyout, the career path restructuring, and the niche positioning that now has clients convincing Wendy to take them on.
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.
From Getting Fired to Running a Thriving SEO Agency with Leo Poitevin | Ep #929
Leo Poitevin is the founder of Astrak, a fast-growing SEO agency based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, specializing in the French-speaking market. In just a year and a half, Leo grew his team from one to ten people — a journey that started not with a bold entrepreneurial vision, but with getting let go from a job during his probation period. In this episode, Leo and Jason get into what it really takes to go from freelancer to agency owner, how to reclaim your time as you scale, and the hard lessons of hiring your first salesperson.
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.
Is Your Best Skill Actually Squashing Your Agency's Growth? with Brett Singer | Ep #923
Are you willing to give up the work you built the agency around in order to build the agency itself? Today’s featured guest recounts how he and his partner built their agency after a decade working together at the Oprah Winfrey Show. Fifteen years in, they are still figuring out what the founder job actually is versus what they have always been good at.
He talks through how the transition from doing to leading actually happened, what it cost him creatively and personally to step out of directing, and what he means when he says that making the video was always the easy part.
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.
How to Break Through Your Agency’s Revenue Ceiling (Without Hiring a COO) With Alex Membrillo | Ep #828
What happens when the agency you’ve built is just… stuck? Or when you hit a revenue ceiling, lose a major client, and start wondering if you’ve been playing the wrong game entirely? Those moments either break you or become the pivot points that redefine everything.
In this episode, you’ll hear from an agency owner who’s lived through the grind growing his agency from scratch, riding out recessions, choosing a niche that would help him get out of “no man’s land”. He’ll discuss the strategic bet that broke through plateaus, why he still refuses to hire a COO, and the million-dollar risk that could have sunk him but ended up being a worth-while bet on his vision.