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.
What If Your Podcast Was Closing Deals While You Slept? with Doug Sandler | Ep #911
Are you treating your podcast as one more thing on an already impossible schedule? Today’s featured guest has been podcasting for over 11 years and nearly 1,800 episodes. In this conversation, he’ll make the case that a podcast, run correctly, removes the sales cycle almost entirely. He also has a lot to say about what it took to step back from working 100-hour weeks in an entertainment agency and into a business that earns a healthy six-figure income on 15 hours a week.
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.
9 Years, Zero Churn: The Agency Positioning That Turns Clients Into Long-Term Partners with Brooke Sellas | Ep #908
Do you publish content consistently but wonder why it is not moving the needle? Today’s featured guest owns a social media agency and built her client roster by getting on stage before she was comfortable. In this conversation, she’ll talk about how she landed enterprise clients with zero churn over nine years, what it actually takes to find a real differentiator, and much more.
What Does a 78% Close Rate Actually Tell You About Your Sales Process? With Jen Jurgens | Ep #907
Are you charging for execution when clients are about to stop paying for it? Are you building your sales process around your offer instead of around your prospect's trust?
Today’s featured guest built a growth workshop that converts 78% of buyers into long-term retainer clients. In this episode, she’ll get into what that workshop actually contains, why the entry offer might be the thing keeping it from scaling, how to stop your CEO from chasing shiny quarters mid-engagement, and what happens when you position strategy as the product instead of execution.
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 to Build an Account Management Team That Owns Client Outcomes with Michelle Keckler | Ep #905
Are your account managers drowning because you never built the system around them? In seven years, today’s featured guest and her co-founder built a team of six and developed an account management structure that worked well enough to earn a speaking slot at Elevate. She’ll break down the exact touchpoint cadence her agency uses to retain clients and grow accounts, what she looks for when hiring account managers, and more.
The Agency Incubator Model: How to Fund SaaS Products Through Clients Instead of Investors with David Carnes | Ep #904
Are you running multiple things at once and wondering why none of them are moving as fast as they should? Are you still the one every project, every client, and every decision routes through, no matter how many people you have on your team?
Over nearly three decades, today’s featured guest didn’t just run an agency. He turned it into an incubator, spinning up multiple SaaS companies, a mobile app, and an accessibility tool, all funded and validated through a model most founders have never tried. In this episode, he’ll get into how he built products without outside investors, why the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle, and what it actually took to step out of the operator seat after 28 years in it.
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.
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.