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 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.
The Secret to Running an Agency for 30 Years Without Ever Wanting to Walk Away with Arne Hurty | Ep #930
Arne Hurty is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of BayCreative, a San Francisco Bay Area B2B technology marketing agency he has been running for 30 years. What started as a $500 illustration job has grown into a full-service agency serving brands like Cisco and ServiceNow — with Arne's son and daughter now working alongside him. In this episode, Arne and Jason dig into what actually sustains an agency owner over three decades: two business partner buyouts, a full pivot to remote work, and a philosophy of building the agency around life rather than the other way around.
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.
Why Managing to Strengths Beats Managing to Tasks with Laura Lee Jones | Ep #927
Have you been losing good people and telling yourself it is the market, the economy, or bad luck? Maybe you’ve been watching revenue numbers so closely that you forgot to ask whether the profit and the life underneath them were actually working. Today’s featured guest runs a 45-person data-driven healthcare marketing agency she starting building just four days after being fired from an agency job. She’ll get into why she intentionally built her agency thinking about employee happiness and fulfillment, how she evolved from drill sergeant to leader who plays to people's strengths, and what she has learned about staying profitable and mentally steady across three decades of business cycles.
They Ran the Same Agency for 8 Years Without Knowing Who Did What with John Scheer | Ep #926
Have you and your co-founder been stepping on each other's toes for years, not because of conflict, but because nobody ever drew the line between your roles?
Today’s featured guest moved across the country to Santa Monica after his current partner called him and asked him to take a chance on building something of their own instead of “working for the man”. It took eight years of figuring out what not to do, a 360 review that finally split their roles, a niche into healthcare and wellness, and eventually a third partner to unlock what the agency is today. He’ll walk through how the role division changed everything, why going upmarket after 2022 forced a more rigorous kind of work, and what he actually thinks AI is doing to branding.
What Happens When You Build a Team Around Projects Instead of a Vision with Victor Huynh | Ep #925
Have you been hiring people and growing your team without a real plan, only to find yourself with a bigger payroll and a business that still runs through you? Today’s featured guest and his partner started out as graphic designers doing packaging work and then pivoted to web when the real estate crash wiped out their client base overnight. He walks through what it looked like to grow to 25 people without a plan, how the co-founder dynamic actually works after two decades, and why he’s found that, in a partnership, the disagreements are actually the thing keeping the business alive.