Build A Better Agency Podcast

Online communities are quickly becoming one of the most powerful biz dev tools out there, but there’s etiquette to starting and maintaining one. It’s not for everyone, but for those who are ready, an online community could be your ticket to selling without ever having to actually sell. This week, we’re continuing the conversation about online communities vs. online audiences, and the vast benefits they can offer to agency owners. Now that we’ve established the differences between an audience and a community, it’s time to ask ourselves deeper questions about why and how we should start one. The main purpose of starting an online community shouldn’t be selling or profiting from its members. But if you’re in it to genuinely help others and create an avenue for collective thought leadership and connection, increased sales are just part of the benefits. If you think starting an online community could be the right move for your agency, tune in to this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. For 30+ years, Drew Mc

Everybody has a story they’re trying to tell, and brands play a massive role in people’s stories, whether they realize it or not. Most of the time, the stories consumers associate with a brand aren’t what we think they are. This is where behavioral economics becomes vital to creating an effective marketing strategy.   Behavioral economics is a study that attempts to make sense of people’s behavior around spending. We don’t always make spending decisions in our best interest and often base purchasing decisions on our emotions. In fact, people usually connect and interact with brands the same way they connect with people. This leaves brands with a lot of pressure on their backs. If you ignore your loyal customers’ needs and wants, they will feel deeply betrayed. But if you listen to their stories and get to the core of what they’re looking for, you’ll build a trust that feels like a close friendship. The psychology behind consumer behavior is complicated but fascinating. Join us this week to discover how brand

In-person networking is still a big deal. After a brief Covid hiatus, trade shows, conferences, and workshops are back and bigger than ever. So, if you or your team plan on attending any of these events soon, it’s important to get up to date on the do’s and don’ts of networking at these events. Instead of being stuck with a stack of business cards and struggling to recall conversations with specific individuals from an event, seasoned keynote speaker Dave Delaney shares how to manage and nurture your client and prospect interactions effectively. Not sure how to strike up a conversation with a prospect or keynote speaker? Or what about when you get home from the event and still want to close a potential sale without sounding too spammy? Dave shares insights on approaching these topics and more during this episode. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out thei

After a tough sales year in 2023, many of you have been looking for the next thing to consistently fill your sales pipeline with new prospects. With sales cycles taking longer than before, it’s essential always to have warm prospects teed up and ready to go. But how?   The answer is in thought leadership combined with lead gen and lead magnets. Positioning yourself and your agency as an authority in your niche (and giving some of it away for free) generates trust in your agency’s expertise before they’ve officially met you. When done right, lead gen can be mostly automated. And having great lead magnets like a podcast or YouTube channel, or offering a free mini-service to prospects to get them interested in your services will build trust and establish your agency as a thought leader in your niche. This week, Jay Feldman shares his tips and tricks for how his agencies used automated lead gen and lead magnets to still be profitable in a challenging sales year. This episode is packed with actionable insights th

We’ve all been here before — your agency grows, and your day-to-day is getting a little too chaotic for comfort. Each team member has their own way of doing things, and no one is on the same page about the best approach to doing recurring tasks. As the agency owner, you’re getting pulled into things that you shouldn’t, becoming the organization’s bottleneck.   If that’s you, it’s time to break that cycle with some project management software. With a million choices and a few that have become the industry standard, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly which is right for your agency. Often, agencies will pick one based on how popular or how pretty it is, and forget about its functionality specific to your agency’s day-to-day needs. This week, Alane Boyd is clearing the fog around project management software to help us decide if we need one — and if so, what tools and functionality we should be looking out for that will get our productivity back on track. Don’t be afraid to take the time to really learn what tool

Humans are hardwired to belong, and the desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves is in our blood. Whether we connect over shared values, a favorite sports team, a hobby, or even just from living near one another, we can find community and belonging all around us. These days, many of us are finding community online through social media and spreading our social nets wider than ever. This leaves a huge opportunity for agency leaders to build their own online communities to help others learn and share their experiences about business leadership, entrepreneurship, or any form of thought leadership in which they excel. Online communities should, first and foremost, be a way to bring people together with shared goals and interests, but the benefits reach far beyond that. With enough time and care, they can become robust sales and networking tools that do the prospecting work for you. But it’s not for everyone, and that’s ok. In this week’s solocast, I’m doing a deep dive into the ins and outs of creat

Sales cycles are elongated, but that doesn’t mean agencies can’t still win new clients. If we change how we think about and approach prospecting, we can up our client outreach game to really hone in on our right-fit clients without being too sales-y about it.   In this episode, I talk with Dan Englander about how to stand out against the competition in our prospecting and outreach efforts. He shares how personalized client outreach can cut through the noise and win us new business more often if we just take the time to commit and dial in our systems and processes. He also shares some tips and tricks for smaller agencies looking to build a sales team for the first time. You’ll learn how to identify the right hire who cares about solving your clients’ issues and won’t just read from a script or phone it in. If you’re among the majority of agency owners who are ready to get out of the slow sales cycle and want to revamp your sales efforts this year, be sure to tune in to this advice-packed episode. A big thank

In a sharp contrast to the earlier pandemic years, many agency owners said that in 2023, they have the best teams they’ve ever had and want to find ways to keep them around. This is great news, and we want to help keep your agency dream team alive and thriving.   To help in that journey, HR expert Barbara Mason joins me to share what agency owners and leaders can do to help make their employees feel like valued team members while staying true to the agency’s mission and values. She is a fountain of knowledge — from interviewing best practices and why HR experts need to be a part of your business to how to create the agency culture you want while caring for your agency employees as whole people. She’ll even share her top 3 secret interview questions she uses to get potential hires thinking about how they fit into the agency’s mission and values. This episode is full of practical and common-sense tips that will hopefully get the gears going and help you keep your agency dream team alive and thriving in 2024 an

Video budgets are up in 2024, which means the demand for video content from clients will be high this year. For agencies, it also indicates that we must start utilizing this incredible business development tool for ourselves to know what’s up when our clients ask about it. Not only that, but video content creation is an incredible medium for agencies in prospecting, connecting with current clients, and gaining valuable data and metrics on what content is engaging to your audience. Are prospects clicking off your video in the first 10 seconds? Are they even opening the email? Or are they going back to watch it again and again? Video tracking and metrics give us all these answers and more. Ready to learn more about what will soon be your best business development tool in 2024? Join us in this week’s Build a Better Agency to discover more about the power of video for agency growth. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource

What exactly makes an insight versus just an observation? What are the different types out there? How the heck do we uncover them? This week, we’re getting insightful about insights and laying out the key characteristics of strong agency insights — like inspiring action and reframing problems.   Chris Kocek will share his favorite techniques for generating insights during brainstorming sessions, like continually asking “why” like a toddler until you reach some real gold. With agencies feeling more and more pressure these days to stay competitive and continuously innovate, it’s important to know what really gets us to those “ah-ha” moments before building out a whole campaign. And once you uncover those golden nuggets, really selling them to your team for maximum impact is the cherry on top. Join us in this insightful episode to learn how to piece together all of these agency insight strategies from one of the pros. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resour

If there’s one word that will send any agency owner or employee running for the hills, it’s timesheets. Although one of the most universally disliked words in the agency world, timesheets are still the number one way to detect and diagnose problems within the agency before they become catastrophes. Essentially, they’re your best friend whether you like it or not. Timesheets, especially when completed daily by all agency employees (including the agency owner), will give you invaluable data about your agency’s day-to-day operations and where there’s room for improvement. For agency owners, daily timesheets will show you inefficiencies, areas where more staffing is needed, needs for more training, and so much more. For agency employees, this is your ticket to job security, bonuses, promotions, and recognition for excellent work. Tune in to learn more about why daily timesheets are essential for agency owners and employees and how to get everyone on board with the practice this year. For 30+ years, Drew McLellan

You’ve probably heard of IQ, EQ, or even SQ (spiritual intelligence), but have you heard of NQ? For those new to the term, it’s natural intelligence, or our ability to tap into our inner wisdom to guide us in our decision-making in the most high-stakes situations.   In life and leadership alike, we tend to let our ego get in the way of our decision-making. It’s normal, but it’s not often helpful for reaching our goals or leading our teams effectively. Instead, we should be listening to our natural intelligence to guide our leadership decisions. This is how animals survive in the wild. They don’t have the ability to overthink or hide away from a challenge like humans can. Instead, they innately know how to act in order to stay alive or lead their pack to victory. If we approach leadership in a similar manner, we can access a side of our leadership abilities we might not have known we had. To access it, all we have to do is learn to observe nature and understand our own gut reactions to survival moments. Join

It’s clear we can’t keep hiring and managing talent as we used to. Back in the days of the pandemic, and then The Great Resignation right after that, we were afraid to set boundaries and ask for what we needed out of fear of losing great team members.   The way we work isn’t the same, either. Many of us are now remote or hybrid, and a fully in-office team isn’t as common as it used to be. So, we have to adapt and change how we hire, train, and problem-solve with our teams scattered all over the place. It’s a mess sometimes, and many of you probably wish we could go back to the simpler days of training new hires through simple observation and shadowing. But we can still make this work for the new era of work. Vicky Brown is sharing some of her HR superpowers with us this week so we can learn about hiring, managing, and retaining great talent, regardless of the work environment. The simple answer is that we must roll up our sleeves and invest time in our people from the very first interview. Join us to dive de

This year, agencies are in for many industry changes — and fast. We’ve been scratching the surface a little with AI ever since ChatGPT first dropped, but even since then, everything has changed drastically. To start the year, we’re shifting our focus to learning how agencies can use AI tools to become AI consulting powerhouses.   Many agency owners and employees have been learning how to integrate AI tools into their day-to-day over the past year or so, from writing, planning, research, and more. Now, it’s time to take it to the next level (and to our clients). This week, Casey Meehan shows us how agencies can become thought leaders and subject matter experts for their clients using AI tools. Over his time as an agency leader, he has shifted from traditional marketing and PR work to creating content repurposed for AI consulting to teach clients how to harness the power of AI and create personalized content for their audience. Although there’s something new in the AI market each day, it’s an exciting time to

There’s no other way to spin it — agency owners had it rough in 2023. And while we spent all year going over the struggles of agency ownership, one universal positive kept coming up with everyone. Your teams are better than ever, and you want to learn how to keep your agency employees happy, so they stick around. So this week, we’re turning to some of our Agency Edge research to dive into what agency employees said are the key factors that keep them happy and willing to stick around for the long haul. While the assumption is that you’re already fairly compensating them and creating a fair and inclusive workplace, there are some less obvious things that really matter to agency employees. They could even be the difference between a star player staying for 10 to 15 years instead of three or four. This episode will teach you the dos and don’ts of increasing employee retention and really going above and beyond to help your teams feel valued and cared for. It’s got a lot of valuable tips and tricks, so if you’re c

It’s easy to get caught up in the chaos of day-to-day agency life. We all have a million things on our to-do lists, and they just keep growing. But part of being a successful agency owner is being present and open to what’s right in front of you.   Doug Fleener knows all about what it means to run a business intentionally. With history as a business owner and a rock bottom moment that led him into recovery, he’s had to learn some truths about life the hard way. But from that, he has developed some core principles to help business and agency owners live more intentionally. His six core principles can help anyone start their day on the right foot to make incremental but powerful life changes. All it takes is one day to wake up and decide to make positive changes, and if you take anything away from this episode, it’s that intentional actions create intentional results. This episode is packed with action items that are not only simple concepts but also easy to implement. I have no doubt that Doug will leave you

Remote and hybrid work environments are here to stay. While some agencies have successfully returned to the office full-time, and some may have never even left, many agencies are still struggling to crack the code on hybrid work without upsetting their employees.   It’s a difficult balance, but it has become ever-important as these demands begin cementing into our work culture. And if you’re working with creatives, the conversation around a hybrid workplace has probably been even louder. So this week, we’re joined by Felice Ekelman and Julie Kantor, authors of Thrive With a Hybrid Workplace: Step-by-step Guidance From the Experts, to teach us how to approach these conversations and transitions from a legal and psychological point-of-view. We all know that as agency owners, there’s nothing more expensive or as valuable as our employees, and we just want them to be happy working with us. So tune in to learn how to have these conversations and set expectations around hybrid work environments so we can all have

Agencies are under more pressure than ever to be innovative. While it used to be easier to solve your clients’ problems and wow them with a great solution, these days, it’s much harder to do that with the bar constantly moving. This is why it’s essential to develop an innovation strategy.   Wouldn’t it be nice to bring a lofty, innovative idea to a client and have them be over the moon and excited to be a part of the process? With the right innovation strategy, that dream can be a reality. An innovation strategy can help your team jumpstart the creative and problem-solving process while leaving room for co-creation and collaboration with your clients. This streamlines the creative process and takes the pressure off you and your team to have all the answers while you search for the solutions to their problems. Tune in to learn how your agency can become problem-solving and innovation experts by asking the right questions, enacting decisive decision-making, and building out a creative workflow. A big thank you

It’s no secret that 2023 has been a rough year for most agency owners. Between the elongated sales cycles, shrinking prospect budgets, and the need to re-evaluate some of our own expenses that have been piling up, many of you are feeling burnt out.   But it’s not all bad news. There’s still time to take a fresh look at how you want to run your agency in 2024 and pull yourself out of the trenches if 2023 has gotten the better of you. This episode will focus on what we can be doing differently in 2024 in our biz dev strategy, which will make next year a little less stressful for us. We’re taking a look at the data that Lee McKnight Jr. and his agency have compiled from many agency owners about their experiences throughout 2023. And while many of you were plagued with lower-budget prospects, dried-up client referrals, and slowed client growth, this leaves a glimmer of hope that the pendulum will swing the other way for us next year. So don’t miss this episode to learn how to dial in your biz dev strategy and pr