エピソード

  • Is the Digital Agency Model Broken, or Are We Just Calling It the Wrong Thing? With Brent Weaver | Ep #920

    Is the Digital Agency Model Broken, or Are We Just Calling It the Wrong Thing? With Brent Weaver | Ep #920
    2026/07/08
    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? Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    34 分
  • Why These Agency Partners Did an Eight-Month Soft Launch Before the Real Partnership Started with Josh Hanosh & Kevin Howe | Ep #919

    Why These Agency Partners Did an Eight-Month Soft Launch Before the Real Partnership Started with Josh Hanosh & Kevin Howe | Ep #919
    2026/07/01
    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 Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    35 分
  • The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918

    The Iron Man Model for Agency AI: Why the Suit Does Nothing Without the Operator with Kevin McGrew | Ep #918
    2026/06/28
    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 Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you're leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That's why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to wix.com/studio to get started. 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, ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    30 分
  • The 80% Rule That Frees Agency Founders from the Operator Seat with Mimi Banks | Ep #917

    The 80% Rule That Frees Agency Founders from the Operator Seat with Mimi Banks | Ep #917
    2026/06/24
    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training Are you still inside every client relationship because no one on your team has been given the room to own one? 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'Oréal 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 why she stopped caring about working with the sexiest beauty brands and started caring about working with the right ones. Mimi Banks is the founder and CEO of MB Social, a New York-based social media agency specializing in beauty. She spent years at L'Oréal, where she was among the first people to build social media infrastructure at the company, then moved to a Paris-based startup before eventually launching MB Social. Her team of 25 now handles social strategy, community management, and content for beauty brands across the market. In this episode, we'll discuss: Starting off with a vision on accountable vs responsible Can your team do 80% of what you do? Then you're set Why she stopped chasing the wrong clients Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 From the Beginning with Systems, Not Just Instinct Mimi came into agency ownership with something most founders spend years trying to build after the fact: a working model for how things should get done. Her time creating social media infrastructure at L'Oréal gave her a process orientation before she had a team to apply it to. When she started bringing people on at MB Social, the systems came with her. The ways of working, the documentation, the clarity around who was responsible versus who was accountable: those were in place because she had already built them once somewhere else. For instance, she started off with clarity on the distinction between responsible and accountable. She positioned herself as accountable from day one while making sure there was always a specific person responsible for each piece of work. That structure kept her from becoming the default executor on everything, which is the trap most founders walk into when they hire without clarifying ownership. The 80 Percent Standard That Actually Frees You Mimi is far enough along in her evolution that she no longer reviews most of what her team produces. She trusts the people leading each department to make judgment calls without routing them upward. Getting there required learning to live with the gap between what she would do and what her team does, and deciding that gap was acceptable. This is a framing every mastermind member knows: if your team does 80 percent of what you would do, that is good enough. Because you cannot do a hundred percent of everything, and the cost of trying is that you stay in the operator role indefinitely. The coaching method Mimi asks her leadership team to apply is asking questions. Similar to the Mastermind's 1-3-1 method, it's basically about asking questions that will help your team come up with options they have already considered, which leads to them coming up with the solution on their own. Do that enough times and the team stops treating the founder as the answer key. Hiring for Beauty When Everyone Says They Know Social The challenge Mimi keeps running into in hiring is the gap between what candidates say they can do and what the work actually requires. Social media for enterprise beauty brands is not the same skill as posting on a personal Instagram. The strategy is more complex, the client demands are higher, and the responsiveness required is relentless. Candidates do not always know that going in, and some of them figure it out in ways that are expensive to the team. The hiring process she built with Hireflex added a video interview layer with no retry option that filters for candidates willing to do the uncomfortable thing even when it is not required. From there she takes the transcripts, runs them through AI against a scoring rubric tied to the job description, and uses that data alongside her own read to make decisions. What she is testing for is the ability to think, not just to produce a clean output with AI assistance. The perfect presentation that does not match the resume tells her nothing useful. The candidate who works through a problem imperfectly, in their own words, tells her a great deal. Designing the Agency Around the Clients You...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    26 分
  • What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916

    What AI Cannot Replicate in Influencer Marketing with Jeanette Okwu | Ep #916
    2026/06/21
    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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, spent years learning how cultural nuance can derail a campaign that looks perfect on paper, 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. Jeanette Okwu is the founder and CEO of Beyond Influence, an influencer marketing agency based in Berlin. Her background spans social media strategy, brand research, and influencer marketing across luxury automotive brands including Jaguar Land Rover and Mercedes-Benz. That global scope became the foundation for her agency's core differentiation: running influencer campaigns that actually account for cultural nuance in each market rather than pushing a headquarters strategy downward and hoping it lands. In this episode, we'll discuss: Building international campaigns understanding regional nuances How to overcome the expert-owner bottleneck problem Can AI influencers replace real ones? Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you're leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That's why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to wix.com/studio to get started. Why International Campaigns Break When You Treat Every Market the Same Early in her career, Jeanette managed 24 markets at Jaguar Land Rover, which helped her understand that what works in one country does not translate by default. A TV spot that runs cleanly in Europe cannot air in the Middle East if it shows upper arms or alcohol. A campaign strategy built at headquarters and handed down to regional teams will get implemented, but it will not perform, because every market has cultural specifics that only someone operating inside that market will catch. The agency she built is the direct expression of that knowledge. Beyond Influence does not run German campaigns and call it international work. It builds campaigns from the ground up with an understanding of how audiences in each target market actually consume content and what they expect from the creators they follow. That distinction is hard to replicate without the years of field experience behind it, and it is exactly the kind of institutional knowledge that becomes a real moat when the rest of the market is running generic global strategies. The Sales Bottleneck That Comes With Deep Expertise Jeanette is candid about where she is stuck: sales still runs through her. This is something she has tried to change, but influencer marketing is still a new enough discipline that clients want to hear from someone who demonstrably knows what they are talking about. She frames it as expertise selling and she is probably right that some of it is structural to the space. But she also hears herself in the answer, acknowledging a degree of control that she knows is not fully serving the agency's ability to grow. The necessary shift in cases like this doesn't point toward finding a salesperson who already knows influencer marketing. The real solution will come from finding someone with the right consultative instincts and then giving them the success stories and methodology that let them carry the conversation. Such is the case of Darby, our agency scale specialist, who did not know what an agency was before joining the team. What he had was the ability to listen, qualify, and translate client pain into a path forward. That skill can be trained on the specifics. The instinct behind it cannot. What AI Influencers Actually Mean for the Industry Jeanette knows the question that is currently on every client's mind: will AI-generated influencers replace the real ones? Her answer is more nuanced than the headlines. AI avatars already perform comparably to human creators on certain content types. Brands are building owned avatars that show up on time, never gain weight, never create a scandal, and can post from six locations simultaneously without a travel budget. That part of the market is real and growing. What AI cannot replicate is the reason people follow a creator in the first place. The parasocial relationship that makes influencer marketing work is built ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    27 分
  • Your Agency Partner Wants Out. Now What? with Tim Bouchard | Ep #915

    Your Agency Partner Wants Out. Now What? with Tim Bouchard | Ep #915
    2026/06/17
    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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. Tim Bouchard is the owner and CEO of Luminus, a healthcare marketing agency based in Buffalo, New York, that delivers optimized marketing campaigns that capture the imagination of their audience and successfully convert them to prospects. Tim started the agency in 2010 alongside a co-founder, having come up through web design and digital development. After 10 years in partnership, a difference in vision and personal direction led to a buyout in late 2020, which Tim financed through an SBA loan while managing a new baby, a pandemic, and a client that represented 38% of agency revenue. He is now five and a half years post-buyout, has a core team that has been with him through the transition, and has fully committed Luminus to the healthcare niche. In this episode, we'll discuss: The first order of business post-buyout The black widow client problem Niching down into healthcare Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 Nobody Tells You About the First Six Months After a Buyout Tim's instinct after the papers were signed was that the agency would feel like his within a few months. The vision was clear. What he did not anticipate was that none of the work he actually wanted to do could happen yet. The first order of business was not building toward a new direction. It was stabilizing what already existed. Client relationships had to be managed carefully, particularly with the black widow account that accounted for 38% of monthly billings. The team had to be reassured that the transition was amicable and not a signal that the agency was in trouble. Production gaps left by the departing partner had to be filled through promotion and new hires, all in the middle of COVID hiring conditions, with an SBA loan payment already running. As a result, the feeling that he had actually built the foundation he wanted did not arrive until roughly two and a half years after the buyout closed. The expectation that structural change happens quickly is one of the most expensive assumptions a founder can carry into a transition. The Black Widow Problem and What It Revealed About a year and a half after the buyout, the client representing 38% of Luminus' revenue left. What that exit revealed was that the entire team structure had been built around servicing that client. Two account people for a sub-million-dollar agency made sense when a single client demanded that level of coverage. It made no sense for what the agency actually needed to become. The loss forced a cleaner look at which people, processes, and positions belonged in the agency Tim wanted to build versus the one he had inherited through the transition. Four core team members who had been with him for eight or more years remained. Positions that had been built around the black widow were eliminated. That kind of correction is painful, and it is also necessary. An agency that has never stress-tested its structure tends to discover what does not belong only when something large enough forces the question. What Niching Into Healthcare Actually Unlocked Tim resisted narrowing down for the same reason most agency owners do: it felt like reducing the addressable market and therefore reducing the chance of success. The shift into healthcare happened only after the post-buyout chaos had settled and he could see clearly what the agency was actually good at. The downstream effects were not subtle. Sales conversations became easier because the problem was always the same. Content development became possible because the topics did not change from client to client. The sales message stopped being a generic positioning statement about branding and became something specific enough to open a door: a healthcare practice owner can hear "I might be able to help you with compliance" and immediately understand what is being offered. That kind of entry point does not exist for a generalist agency, because a generalist has no right to claim expertise in any single area. The niche gave Tim something specific to stand on, and that specificity is what allowed Luminus to...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    33 分
  • Your Agency Does Great Work So Why Do Clients Choose Someone Else? with Bianca Beatty | Ep #914

    Your Agency Does Great Work So Why Do Clients Choose Someone Else? with Bianca Beatty | Ep #914
    2026/06/14
    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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. Bianca Beatty is the founder of Raven+Co, a full-stack boutique agency based in San Francisco offering everything from events to go-to-market strategy, social media, and brand communications. Before launching the agency in 2018, she spent nearly seven years as head of marketing at the largest online marketplace for antiques and vintage, where she built her foundation in SEO, paid ads, email, product placement, and revenue-driven decision making inside a lean team. She is also a licensed realtor, a fly fisher, and a former child caviar industry worker. In this episode, we'll discuss: The story that won Bianca an account over portfolio The double-edged sword of being the person clients want to talk to You do NOT have to work with everyone Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio Sponsors and Resources This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio: If you're leveling up your team and your client experience, your site builder should keep up too. That's why successful agencies use Wix Studio — built to adapt the way your agency does: AI-powered site mapping, responsive design, flexible workflows, and scalable CMS tools so you spend less on plugins and more on growth. Ready to design faster and smarter? Go to wix.com/studio to get started. A Story Can Win the Room Before the Work Does Bianca walked into a pitch for a caviar client with strong work and solid positioning. She almost did not mention that as a child, she spent a summer on her father's commercial fish house on the water in Florida, separating fish by sex for roe sold to China. She mentioned it. She won the pitch. The client told her afterward that the story, not the portfolio, was the deciding factor. The reason that moment is worth examining is not that personal stories win pitches. It is what the story actually communicated. It showed the client that Bianca understood the product from a level most marketers never will, that she had genuine curiosity about the industry, and that she was someone the client wanted to spend time around. A competitor with equally strong work and no story was indistinguishable. Bianca was not. Proof of capability opens the door. The story is what makes the client hold it open. When Your Personality Becomes the Bottleneck Bianca is honest about the double edge of being the kind of person clients want to talk to for two hours. The connection that wins the pitch is the same connection that makes clients want to route everything through you. Calls that run long, decisions that wait for your availability, relationships that belong to you and not to your agency: these are not signs that you are doing something right. They are early symptoms of a founder dependency problem that compounds as the agency grows. When the founder is most connected person in their agency, they're also the most trapped. Every client relationship that runs through him is a ceiling on how much the business could grow without him. The structural fix is not to become less personable. It is to build a team that is also personable, to hire for the same quality of human warmth and genuine curiosity that wins clients in the first place, and to let those people develop their own relationships. The goal is a team that holds the relationships well enough that the clients stop thinking about whether you are in the room. Picking Clients Before Clients Pick You Bianca is clear on something that most agency founders only learn after absorbing a nightmare client or two: you do not have to work with everyone. Early on, the answer is yes to almost everything because the pipeline is thin and the pressure to cover costs is real. As the agency develops a track record and a clearer sense of its own values, the ability to be selective is not a luxury. It is a structural protection for the team. The version of this that holds up over time is not just about avoiding difficult clients but about actively going after the clients you want, pitching yourself to companies that interest you even when they are not publicly looking, and staying honest about fit before contracts are signed rather than after scope has been blown. When clients align with what the team genuinely cares about, the work is better, the relationships last longer, and the agency does not ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    22 分
  • The Storytelling Framework That Makes Agencies Impossible to Ignore with Park Howell | Ep #913

    The Storytelling Framework That Makes Agencies Impossible to Ignore with Park Howell | Ep #913
    2026/06/10
    Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? https://www.agencymastery360.com/training 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? In this episode, he'll walk through the storytelling frameworks he pulled from Hollywood screenwriting, evolutionary biology, and 12 years of podcasting, and then apply one of them live to Agency Mastery in real time. Park Howell is the founder of Park&Co, an agency he opened in Phoenix in 1995 and grew from a one-man operation to a team of 20 and beyond. He is now a full-time consultant, speaker, and coach on the business of story, and the host of The Business of Story podcast, which he has been running for 12 years. Park has been on the podcast previously talking about storytelling, how agencies fail to use it, and how, used, correctly it can help you connect with clients. In this episode, we'll discuss: Is your agency telling the wrong story? The And-But-Therefore Framework How learning about Hollywood screenwriting can help you improve your proposals Three Forces of Trust Your Story Needs to Build Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio 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 Agencies Are Telling the Wrong Story The default agency pitch goes something like this: we have the best people, the best process, and a portfolio you will love. We are customer-centric, we care more, and we will be a true partner. And simply put, if every agency in the room is saying the same thing, none of it creates separation, none of it creates trust, and none of it gives a prospect a reason to remember you when the meeting ends. The root problem is that agencies tell their story from the inside out. They start with what they offer and work backward toward why a client should care. The structure that actually works is the opposite: start with the audience, name what they want, name what is standing between them and that outcome, and only then introduce how you help close that gap. The story is not about the agency. The agency is the guide. The client is the hero. The moment that inversion happens in how an agency frames its pitch, its content, and its proposals, the entire communication dynamic shifts. The And-But-Therefore Framework, Applied Live Park gave a live example of the and-but-therefore framework using Agency Mastery as the subject. The structure is deceptively simple: agreement, contradiction, consequence. You establish something the audience knows to be true about themselves. You introduce the contradiction, the reason they do not yet have what they want. Then the therefore: what becomes possible when that contradiction is resolved and how you help resolve it. The exercise surfaces something worth paying attention to. When Park asked for the one-word theme of Agency Mastery's story, he pushed back on it being focus. Why? It's a verb, a mechanism. The emotional outcome is actually freedom. You want freedom, but you do not have freedom, therefore here is how to get it. The distinction is not semantic. Copy that leads with a mechanism asks the reader to do intellectual work. Copy that leads with an emotional outcome pulls them forward before logic enters the picture. The and-but-therefore framework makes that difference visible and correctable in under five minutes. What Hollywood Screenwriting Has to Do With Your Next Proposal Park's Story Cycle System draws directly from the hero's journey and Blake Snyder's 15 beats, the frameworks professional screenwriters use to structure everything from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz. The parallel between those two films is genuinely worth sitting with: same structure, same emotional beats, same character archetypes, separated by four decades and completely different settings. The reason the pattern keeps appearing is not coincidence. It is the way human beings have organized meaning since the first stories were carved into clay tablets. A practical application for agency pitches. Before the next proposal goes out, write an and-but-therefore for the prospect. A single focused statement that demonstrates you understand what they want, why they do not have it yet, and what changes when they work with you. Bring that into the room instead of a feature list. The agencies that win consistently do not win on credentials. They win because they showed up having already done the work of ...
    続きを読む 一部表示
    34 分