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 Low Agency Overhead Actually a Growth Ceiling? With Billy Scott | Ep #921
Today’s featured guest spent seven years knocking on doors selling dry cleaning before he ever thought about digital marketing. He built his agency to serve home service businesses, ran it solo for three years, and is now in the middle of the transition most agency founders dread: building the systems and the team that let the work happen without him in the room.
In this conversation, he and Jason work through the Evolution Framework, what the door-to-door years gave him that no formal sales training could, and what the next move looks like from the manager stage.
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.
Why These Agency Partners Did an Eight-Month Soft Launch Before the Real Partnership Started with Josh Hanosh & Kevin Howe | Ep #919
Have you ever realized that the thing your agency needs most is the exact thing you are worst at? Have you been trying to hire your way to a leadership partner when the right one might already be someone you know? Today’s featured guest built a full-service agency by merging two separate agencies after years of running in the same professional circles. They’ll walk through how the merger actually happened, why they soft-launched it for eight months before making it legal, and how their complementary weaknesses turned out to be the most valuable thing either of them brought to the table.
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.
What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916
Are you trying to sell a service so specialized that closing new clients feels like it can only come from you? What do you think about how AI is reshaping your industry and where that leaves the human at the center of it? Today’s featured guest came up through luxury automotive and built a niche precise enough that she can spot from two miles away when someone writing about influencer marketing has never actually run a campaign. In this episode, she’ll discuss what makes international influencer work fundamentally different from domestic campaigns and what AI-generated influencers mean for an industry built on human authenticity.
Your Agency Partner Wants Out. Now What? with Tim Bouchard | Ep #915
Have you ever sensed that you and your business partner want different things, but neither of you has been willing to say it out loud yet? Today’s featured guest bought out his co-founder in 2020. During a pandemic and two months after his first child was born. In this episode, he walks through what that transition actually required, how a black widow client almost derailed the whole thing, why niching into healthcare unlocked a sales clarity he had never had before, 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.
The Storytelling Framework That Makes Agencies Impossible to Ignore with Park Howell | Ep #913
Have you ever pitched a client and led with everything your agency does well, only to watch their eyes glaze over halfway through? What you’re missing is positioning copy that actually moves people. Today’s featured guest has spent 40 years in the advertising and branding world, the last 20 of them devoted entirely to one question: why do some messages land and others disappear?
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.