Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies

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Have you been telling yourself that once the agency reaches the next level, you will finally take care of yourself? As an agency owner, you shouldn't be fitting life into your work schedule; instead you should fit work into your life.
Today's featured guest is not the type of founder who ground his way to success and then learned to slow down. He built the life first and designed the agency around it from early on.
He talks about how he built lead flow through SaaS partner ecosystems without ever asking for a referral, why he started charging $500 donations to his veterans nonprofit as the price of a meeting with him, and what it actually looks like to flip your calendar so life is the priority and work fills in the gaps.
Dobbin Buck is the CEO of GetUWired, a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in Dahlonega, Georgia. He came up through the museum world and found his way into the agency space out of necessity after a move to North Georgia. Over two decades, he evolved from Joomla websites to marketing automation to AI, building an agency alongside a team that includes his wife as COO.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
Building strong relationships that don't start with "send me business"

Flipping the calendar

Putting yourself first is not a reward

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Sponsors and Resources
E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.
Building Business Development Through SaaS Ecosystems Without Ever Asking for a Lead
Dobbin's growth strategy runs counter to how most agencies approach partner programs. The default is to join a partner ecosystem, badge up as a certified provider, and wait for the platform to send over referrals. Dobbin's version starts from the opposite end: show up, bring value, make friends, and trust that reciprocity will follow.
He did this first with Infusionsoft after building a vertical solution for a residential real estate client that became a template he could rinse and repeat across hundreds of buyers. Infusionsoft noticed, started sending him to other verticals, and opened doors to more ecosystems from there.
The practical principle underneath this is worth naming. The agencies that get the most from partner ecosystems are rarely the ones that join with the loudest ask. They are the ones who spend long enough demonstrating capability that the referrals become inbound rather than requested. That takes longer. It also produces a different quality of relationship and a different quality of client. Dobbin's most interesting clients came from introductions he never anticipated. None of it came from leading with "send me business."
What Charging $500 For Your Time Actually Signals
When Dobbin started getting hammered by unsolicited outreach from salespeople and lead generation services, his response was more creative than an unsubscribe filter. Any vendor who wanted a 30-minute meeting with him had to make a $500 donation to his veterans fly fishing nonprofit first. If the business conversation was worth having, the cost per acquisition was already north of $500 anyway. If it was not worth $500, there was nothing to discuss.
The filter worked on two levels. It stopped the low-intent outreach immediately. It also generated meaningful donations for a nonprofit he cared about. The lesson here is that your time has a real cost, and building a structure that reflects that cost is not arrogance. It is clarity. Most founders who feel overwhelmed by the wrong kind of attention have not yet made that cost visible. Dobbin did, and found that the people worth talking to were happy to pay it.
Flipping the Calendar and What Changed When He Did
Dobbin used to work twelve-hour days and fit the rest of life into the gaps his schedule allowed. His kids' soccer games, date nights, time outside: all of it was scheduled around work, which meant all of it was conditional. Every agency owner has experienced this and Dobbin knew it was time for a change, so he loaded his calendar first with everything he wanted to do for himself, and then filled work in around it. Two rounds of sauna and cold plunge, thirty minutes of meditation, one to three hours of reading daily: those go in first. Work finds its place in what remains.
The move that tested this the most was taking Mondays off entirely to lead veterans fly fishing trips. His team's reaction was predictable: disbelief, concern about productivity, questions about how he would compensate. His answer was that he would not compensate. He would just take Mondays off. Nothing broke. The work that had taken five days fit into four, and he came into Tuesday sharper and more energized than he had been in years. The carrot he describes, the one that keeps moving no matter how fast you run toward it, stops being motivating the moment you realize it is never going to sit still. Taking Mondays off was how he stopped chasing it.
Putting Yourself First Is Not a Reward for Reaching a Certain Revenue
Most founders structure their lives around a deferred promise. When the agency reaches the next milestone, then I will take care of myself. The problem is that the milestone keeps moving. The agency gets bigger and the demands grow with it. The window does not open automatically. It has to be forced open deliberately, and waiting for the right time to do it means it rarely happens.
Dobbin has been living the alternative version for long enough to see what it produces. He is 60 years old, energized, genuinely happy, and clear that none of it is correlated with a revenue number.
The agency is the vehicle. It was never supposed to be the destination. The founders who figure that out early enough to actually act on it are the ones who end up looking back with something other than regret.




Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?
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Are you still fixing every problem your team brings you because it feels faster than teaching them how to fix it themselves? Maybe you're proud of how low your overhead is, but could that low overhead also be a growth ceiling?
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.
Billy Scott is the founder of Grow Marketing, a digital marketing agency serving home service businesses. Before the agency, he spent seven years as a door-to-door salesman for a pickup and delivery dry cleaning service, growing the route to 1,500 customers and $25,000 a week in billings before realizing his ceiling was someone else's decision.
He taught himself digital marketing through online courses, launched Grow Marketing six years ago, and ran it as a solo operation for the first three years. He is now building out his team and working toward the Architect stage, with a focus on getting his sales process documented well enough to hand off.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
Lessons from seven years in door-to-door sales

Is low overhead something to brag about?

What the next move looks like for Billy

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Sponsors and Resources
E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.
What Seven Years at the Door Actually Built
Billy will tell you he would not trade the door-to-door years for anything, and for good reason. Standing at a stranger's door with a pitch they did not ask for and a credit card form to fill out on the spot before you leave: that is the highest-friction version of sales that exists. You learn rejection, you learn to read people in seconds, and that being liked is not the same as being trusted. Building that trust takes consistent, repeatable interaction, not a clever line.
The psychology Billy took from those years mapped directly onto digital marketing. A website has the same window a door-to-door pitch does: seconds to earn enough interest for the person to keep going. That kind of pattern recognition, built through years of in-person rejection and course correction, is what makes Billy a strong founder-level salesperson.
Now the next challenge is not closing more deals. It is building a system around what he does instinctively so someone else can eventually do it without him in the room.
The Low Overhead Trap
For the first three years, Billy ran Grow Marketing alone and measured the health of the business by how little it cost to run. Five hundred dollars in monthly overhead felt like discipline. What it actually was: a ceiling. He hit forty hours a week of capacity and had nowhere to go. He could not take on new clients or grow revenue. He had built a system that was perfectly designed to stay exactly where it was.
The shift came when he and his wife had an honest conversation about what they actually valued, which was time. Low overhead is only an advantage when it does not limit what the business can become. The moment it becomes a point of pride rather than a strategic posture, it starts working against the founder instead of for them. Billy recognized it, made the hires, and has been working through the cost of that transition ever since.
Where the Bottleneck Is Right Now and What the Next Move Looks Like
Billy is clear about where he is: Manager stage, trying to reach Architect. The work in front of him is structural. Every sales call needs to be recorded. Every client interaction needs a documented process. Every time he solves a problem his team brings him, he is making himself indispensable in a way that compounds against the business rather than for it.
He initially thought he needed to hire "another him". However, this instinct is worth challenging: two visionaries in the same room produce ideas, not execution. What Billy actually needs is someone who can manage themselves, understands the outcome without needing every step handed to them, and who can learn the methodology from the stories rather than from being told what to do.
The sales handoff system is the starting point: record every call, build a folder, use AI to extract the framework from what you already do naturally, then shadow and be shadowed until the system exists outside your head. The bottleneck does not move by working harder inside it. It moves when the work that only you can do becomes the work that almost anyone trained well enough can do.
Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?
Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.

Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training
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. In this episode, he draws the line between an AI-first agency and an agentic agency, what that distinction actually means structurally, and what the parallel-build approach looks like inside a 400-person operation.
Brent Weaver is the CEO of E2M Solutions, a white-label digital agency with a team of over 400 people serving more than 400 partner agencies worldwide across web development, SEO, paid media, content, and AI services.
Before E2M, Brent built and sold his own agency, UGURUS, where he spent years coaching agency owners on positioning, sales, and growth. He joined E2M deliberately, partly because it gave him a forcing function to go all-in on AI at scale rather than observe it from the outside. Brent has been on the podcast before, discussing the sale of UGURUS, and how he found his next path.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
AI-first agencies vs agentic agencies

Creating a separate AI services team

What happens to thinking when you stop doing it?

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Sponsors and Resources
E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.
The Difference Between AI-First and Agentic, and Why It Matters
Most agency owners who say they have adopted AI have adopted AI-first. What's the difference? Everyone on the team has an assistant, things ship a little faster, and the org chart looks the same, yet the billable expectations have quietly gone up.
That is not a transformation. That is acceleration inside an existing structure. An agentic agency is something different:
The seats themselves are being replaced by agents.

Front-end development: going to an agent.

Standard WordPress builds: going to an agent.

Content production: already 90 to 95 percent there.

The humans remaining in those workflows are the ones responsible for the quality layer and the decisions that require genuine contextual judgment. When describing this structure, Brent is actually describing what E2M is already building inside its own teams, through dedicated agentic squads that operate separately from the traditional delivery team.
Why Retrofitting Your Existing Team Is the Wrong Move
E2M spent nine months doing what most agencies do: mandatory training, dedicated Fridays, internal incentives, and all-hands sessions. The team showed up, but the adoption did not follow.
The problem was structural, not motivational. You cannot ask people who have spent years developing expertise in a specific workflow to simultaneously do that workflow at full speed and fundamentally question whether the workflow should exist. Those are incompatible demands.
Brent uses the Blockbuster parallel: Netflix did not ask its DVD fulfillment team to build a streaming platform. It built a separate team for a separate business. The skills required were different. The mindset was different. The incentive structures were different. What E2M found was identical: the AI services team they launched separately now approaches 100 people, and those people think about work in a way that the traditional web and SEO teams simply do not.
The Two Pizza Team as the Starting Point
For agencies that are not 400 people with the runway to build a parallel operation, Brent's practical starting point is the Jeff Bezos two pizza rule: a team small enough to feed with no more than two pizzas. Take the three or four people in your agency who are most curious about AI, most willing to experiment, and least burdened by how things have always been done. Give them a specific problem to solve. Isolate them from the expectation of full billable output and let them build.
The reason isolation matters is the same reason the parallel builds at E2M matter. When an AI-native team is embedded in a traditional delivery team, the culture of the traditional team absorbs them. They get pulled into existing workflows to cover capacity. The experimental mandate loses to the billable mandate every time. A separate squad with a separate objective is not a luxury for large agencies. It is the structural condition that allows genuine new capability to develop without being smothered by what the business already needs today.
What Happens to Thinking When You Stop Doing It
Before AI, Brent recalls he used to write a thousand words a day. Clear writing, shaped by years of intentional practice including time inside Amazon's writing culture. He has noticed that skill is atrophying as he routes more cognitive work through AI.
A New York Times study of 350,000 college admissions essays found the same pattern at scale: AI-assisted essays read as more polished and were rated higher by reviewers, but contained fewer novel ideas, fewer dynamic arguments, and less of the fringe thinking that produces genuinely new directions.
Should we feel alarmed? Agency founders are creative, resourceful, fast-thinking problem solvers, and those traits make them the people best positioned to direct AI rather than be directed by it. The risk is for founders who hand over their thinking entirely, as they will end up with polished output from borrowed ideas. The ones who stay in the seat as directors, using AI to build what they can envision rather than to do the envisioning for them, are the ones who will compound the fastest in an environment where the tools keep getting stronger.
Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?
Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.

Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training
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.
Josh Hanosh and Kevin Howe are the co-founders of Three29, a full-service digital marketing agency. Kevin started his agency in 2010 after the web division at his employer shut down, building from a single client into a team over fifteen years. Josh left eight years of teaching math and computer science after a student asked him why he was not doing what he told them to do.
They merged their two agencies after years of friendship and peer mentoring, soft-launching the partnership for eight months before combining finances and legal structure. Three29 has since built Visible, an AI-powered analytics and optimization platform, and is now positioning around GEO alongside traditional digital marketing services.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
The partnership soft launch

What the first twelve months looked like

 How a career in teaching made Josh a better manager

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Sponsors and Resources
E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.
Why the Merger Happened and What Made It Different From a Hire
Kevin had tried to solve his growth ceiling the usual way: salespeople, key employees, internal promotions. None of it held. The ceiling was not a skills gap that a hire could close. It was a leadership gap that required someone with genuine ownership mentality. That is not something you can interview for or create through a compensation structure. The conversation about merging with Josh happened almost by accident and moved quickly once it started, because both of them already knew what the other could do.
What made the arrangement structurally different from other partnerships either had seen is how they entered it. Instead of signing papers and hope for the best, they worked together for eight months with shared clients but separate finances and a clear exit ramp if the working relationship did not hold. That trial period removed the pressure that tends to make founders commit to the wrong arrangement before they have enough information. By the time the legal structure was formalized, they already knew they worked well together and understood how their individual strengths fit without overlap.
What the First Twelve Months After a Merger Actually Cost
Kevin and Josh admit the first year was harder than expected and produced less than either of them had projected. Integrating two teams, two client bases, two financial structures, and two ways of doing things took nearly all of the bandwidth they had assumed would go toward growth. The things they wanted to build together, the new positioning, the new service lines, the platform they eventually launched: those did not start moving in any real way until the second year.
This is a pattern worth understanding before any founder considers a merger as a growth strategy. The combination of two ongoing operations creates a temporary period of higher complexity, not lower. The payoff is real. Josh describes having a partner with genuine ownership mentality as something no hire ever delivered. Kevin describes having Josh handle the strategy side as giving him back the work he is actually built for. But neither of those outcomes arrived on day one, and founders who go in expecting immediate lift will misread the first twelve months as evidence the merger was a mistake.
How Teaching Prepared This Owner to Manage an Agency Team
Not every agency owner is cut to be a manager, and many admit to being terrible at it. However, Josh's teaching background actually gave him just what he needed to succeed:
The patience to let someone struggle toward an answer rather than handing it to them

The ability to explain complex concepts one level above where the other person is, not ten levels above

The instinct to serve rather than impress

These are not soft skills. They are the exact capabilities that determine whether clients stay, whether junior employees grow into senior ones, and whether a founder can eventually step back without the team falling apart.
In fact, one Mastermind member hires former teachers specifically because they can onboard and train in a way that most founder-operators cannot. The person who makes clients feel smart instead of dumb, who can walk a prospect through the agency's entire process without fear that the prospect will go do it themselves, is the person who wins the relationship. Josh built that instinct over eight years before he ever had a client.
The Trap of Too Many Good Ideas at Once
Agency owners are often visionaries, which can be both a strength and a challenge. It can be a source of many distractions unless there's someone there to slow you down.
 When Three29 set out to build Visible, an AI-powered analytics and optimization platform, the opportunity was obvious. However, the execution challenge was equally obvious: building a software company while continuing to deliver exceptional client work.
With two visionary founders, a team operating at full capacity, and enough ideas to fill the next three years, something had to give.
The team pushed back, and they were right to do so.
A healthy leadership team doesn't exist to say yes to every new idea. It exists to create the discipline that turns the right ideas into reality. Vision provides the acceleration, but execution requires brakes as much as a gas pedal.
Founders should expect their teams to challenge priorities, question timing, and protect focus.
Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?
Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.

Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training
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.
Kevin McGrew is the founder and CEO of Strategos, a demand generation agency based in Southern California. He served in the Navy after high school, where he discovered that elite performance under pressure is a function of drilled frameworks, not natural ability.
He went on to found and exit three businesses before launching Strategos, which started as a social media agency at the dawn of Facebook business pages and has since evolved into a full demand generation model. Kevin trains his team and his clients on the SMAC framework and has rebuilt his entire production model around what he calls human-led, AI-amplified operations.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
Kevin's SMAC Framework for successful campaigns

The Iron Man model for human-AI relationships

How to get a resistant team to use AI

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Why Spray and Pray Is Still the Default and What SMAC Replaces It With
In his time in the Navy, Kevin was impressed by how cool, calm, and collected the SEALs were when dealing with stressful situations. The reason for this was basically training and frameworks. This is something he applies to every aspect of his life, and it's the tool he uses to train his team on how to build winning campaigns with the SMAC framework, which comes directly from military operation:
Shoot: knowing your target with enough specificity that you are not wasting ammo. In marketing terms, that is ICP clarity before any campaign launches, understanding who you are looking for before you spend a dollar trying to reach them.

Move: staying agile and not sitting still long enough for the competitive environment to get a clear bead on you.

Adapt: this is the data discipline: running campaigns on real signals rather than assumptions, the way combat aircraft are identified friend or foe before anyone pulls a trigger.

Communicate: this refers to preparation, having the right message built before you need it rather than scrambling to write copy mid-campaign.

The reason most agencies default to activity-based marketing instead of this kind of disciplined execution is the same reason Kevin's early Navy self had no framework for anything: nobody built it for them. Spray and pray is what happens when the target package is unclear and the pressure to produce something is higher than the standard for producing the right thing. SMAC does not require a military background. It requires deciding, before the work starts, that clarity is worth more than speed.
The Iron Man Model and What the Suit Cannot Do Without the Operator
Kevin uses Iron Man to frame the human-AI relationship. Basically, the suit by itself is junk. Tony Stark is the variable that matters. AI handles research and synthesis, first draft production, and reporting narratives, the parts of the work where speed and information aggregation are the constraints. The human operator stays accountable to the client, owns the strategic direction, and runs everything through a quality check before it goes out.
The practical output of this model is striking. A competitive landscape analysis that used to take two and a half days of dedicated people hours now takes eight minutes. Monthly client reports that required two hours of prep are now twenty minutes. That compression is coming from building the right AI infrastructure, training it on your frameworks and your quality standards, and having the discipline to keep humans in the accountability seat. The agencies getting burned by AI right now are the ones treating the first draft as a finished output. The ones building leverage are the ones who figured out what the suit is actually for.
The Red Lens: Why You Need a Skeptic Before Anything Ships
AI is optimistic about its own output. It produces something impressive-looking and fast, and the human reviewing it gets pulled into the quality of the presentation rather than the quality of the thinking underneath it. This is why Kevin built an internal tool called Red Lens.
Red Lens is an agent trained as a skeptic that reviews every campaign output before it launches. It runs Gary Klein's pre-mortem framework: instead of reviewing what went wrong after the fact, it anticipates what is going to fail before money gets spent.
The results of running this tool on their own output have been instructive. The tool flags messaging aimed at the wrong stage of the buyer journey, audiences that do not match the campaign brief, and positioning claims that cannot hold up under scrutiny. It catches things the human team missed because they were too close to the work. Every agency that is shipping AI-assisted content without a systematic skeptic layer is doing the equivalent of proofing your own copy. You see what you intended to write, not what you actually wrote. Red Lens is the outside read that makes the inside work trustworthy.
Crawl, Walk, Run: How to Get a Resistant Team Actually Using AI
How do you get a team that thinks AI is cheating or that it will replace them to actually adopt it? Kevin approached the solution at the operational level. The answer was not a training session or a mandate. It was engineering small, undeniable wins at the individual level before asking anyone to change how they work at the system level.
Kevin calls them micro moments of awesomeness: twelve to fifteen small experiences where a team member feels the tool working for them rather than threatening them. Crawl, walk, run is the philosophy underneath it. You do not learn to sprint before you can stand. You master the foundation layer until it becomes the floor, and then you add the next layer on top of that. The agencies that have struggled most with AI adoption inside their teams are the ones that announced the new direction without engineering the experience of what it feels like to win with it. Giving someone a taste of the efficiency before asking them to commit to the change is not soft management. It is how behavioral adoption actually works.
Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?
Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.