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

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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

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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 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 understanding the client, and the and-but-therefore is how that understanding gets made visible from the first sentence.
The Three Forces of Trust Your Story Needs to Build
When the and-but-therefore is executed well, it does not just clarify a message. It builds trust across three dimensions simultaneously.
The audience feels understood: you know what they are trying to achieve.

They feel appreciated: you recognize why that outcome matters to them.

And they feel that their current struggle is real and acknowledged: you are not glossing over the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Most agency communication fails on the third dimension. It jumps too quickly to the solution without spending enough time in the problem. When a prospect does not feel that their frustration has been fully seen, the solution that follows lands as a pitch rather than as a read. The difference between a founder who says "I just want more freedom" and a message that reflects back "you started this business for freedom and the business owns you instead" is in how heard the person on the other side of that message feels. That is what separates the story everyone remembers from the one nobody does.
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 hired your way into a problem? Have you promoted your best people into management roles and watched them struggle, not because they lacked talent, but because nobody asked whether that was actually the job they wanted?
Today's featured guest grew her agency team to nearly 200 people before making the deliberate decision to scale back to around 75. She did it not because the business was failing, but because she had learned the hard way that headcount is not leverage.
In this episode, she walks through what each stage of that growth actually cost, how she thinks about the difference between a manager and an executive, and why going all in on one service in 2017 was the scariest and most important decision she made for her agency.
Hope Horner is the co-founder and CEO of Lemonlight, a video content agency based in California that produces commercials and primarily works with enterprise clients. She started the company in 2014 in her bedroom with two co-founders, betting that affordable, accessible video content would become essential for brands who had been priced out of the market. She was right. Lemonlight grew to nearly 200 employees before a deliberate rightsizing brought the team to around 75.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
The difference that going all in on one niche made

The mistake fast-growing agencies make

Distinction between manager and executive

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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 Going All In on One Thing Was the Decision That Changed Everything
In 2017, Lemonlight was doing what a lot of agencies do: offering paid advertising, web design, social media, and video production, because saying yes to everything felt safer than narrowing down. Hope and her co-founders made the call to turn all of that off almost overnight and go all in on video.
This decision cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue at the time. It also removed every piece of ambiguity about what the agency was, what it was building toward, and who it should be talking to.
The downstream effects of that decision compounded over years. As the agency focused exclusively on video, the quality of the work got sharper. The quality of the work attracted better clients. Better clients required more sophisticated production. More sophisticated production required higher-end talent and systems.
By the time COVID hit and enterprise clients started investing heavily in video, Lemonlight had the positioning, the craft, and the infrastructure to capture that demand at a level a generalist agency never could have. The decision that felt like contraction was the one that made real scale possible.
What 200 Employees Actually Taught Her About Headcount
The path to nearly 200 people was not a strategic choice. It was a response to demand. When clients flooded in during 2021 and 2022, they did what fast-growing agencies do: they threw bodies at the problem. The result was a team where tasks were fragmented across too many people, ownership was unclear, and productivity per person was low precisely because the work was so divided. It looked like growth, but operationally, it was expensive redundancy.
The rightsizing that followed was a correction with a clear-eyed read on what actually produces leverage. Technology replaced a significant portion of the work that had been distributed across dozens of roles. Many employees who had been promoted into management discovered they preferred the individual contributor track and, given the option to step back, they performed better in it. Some of what felt like a painful downturn was actually the agency becoming the shape it should have been earlier. As Hope says: not better, just different. The problems at 75 people are real. They are just different problems than the ones at 200.
The Manager Versus Executive Distinction Most Founders Miss Until Too Late
Hope has a framework for telling a manager apart from an executive.
A manager is built for evolution: improving existing processes incrementally, guiding people through what already works, making the current system run better.

An executive is built for revolution: seeing where a fundamentally different process or product line needs to exist and building the case for it before anyone else has named the problem.

Most founders who hire senior people for the first time discover, sometimes expensively, that a great manager at a large company is not the same as an executive who can function in a resource-constrained environment.
The person who ran a function at a hundred-million-dollar company and wants a team of fifteen behind them to make them look good is not the same as the resourceful operator a growing agency actually needs. Recognizing the difference before the hire, not six months after, is the thing that separates founders who build strong leadership teams from founders who cycle through senior hires and wonder why nothing sticks.
The Support Group Nobody Told You That You Needed
Every agency owner knows that the loneliness of building an agency is real, it is underreported, and most founders make it worse by surrounding themselves with other founders who are performing confidence rather than telling the truth. The bravado of how many employees, how much revenue, how many awards is not just useless. It actively misleads founders into thinking their own internal chaos is unique to them when it is almost universally shared.
What actually helps is a room where the performance stops. Where a founder who is eight figures and structurally broken can say that out loud and find that everyone in the room recognizes the pattern. That kind of peer truth-telling is not therapy. It is the fastest way to close the gap between where a founder is and where they need to be, because the person across the table has already lived through the version of the problem that is still invisible to the person describing it.
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 treating your podcast as one more thing on an already impossible schedule? Are you running a sales process that creates friction at every step when the alternative has been sitting right in front of you?
Today's featured guest has been podcasting for over 11 years and nearly 1,800 episodes. In this conversation, he'll make the case that a podcast, run correctly, removes the sales cycle almost entirely. He also has a lot to say about what it took to step back from working 100-hour weeks in an entertainment agency and into a business that earns a healthy six-figure income on 15 hours a week.
Doug Sandler is the founder of Turnkey Podcast Productions, a podcast production agency, and the host of The Nice Guys on Business, a show he has been running for over 11 years and nearly 1,800 episodes with more than 6 million downloads. Before podcasting, Doug spent 30 years as a Bar Mitzvah MC and entertainment agency owner, running an operation that handled between 700 and 900 events per year. He also wrote the book Nice Guys Finish First, which became the original vehicle for the podcast.
Nowadays, he works roughly 15 hours a week and spends the rest of his time restoring classic cars and trucks.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
A podcast as a hub of the business

The decision to stop being the founder who works 80-hour weeks

Removing the friction from the sale

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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 Podcast as a Sales Tool, Not a Content Schedule
Agency owners who consider starting a podcast tend to frame it as a content commitment: another thing to produce, another distribution channel to manage, another task to fall behind on. Doug's framing is different. He calls the podcast the hub of the business, not a spoke. Marketing, lead generation, business development, sales, and relationship building are all running through the same conversation. Instead of adding to those functions, the podcast replaces most of the friction those functions create.
The mechanics of how he uses it to sell without selling are worth understanding in detail. Doug does not cold pitch podcast production services. He reaches out to a prospect, says he hosts a show and likes their message, and asks if they would come on. The answer is nearly always yes. The interview becomes a 30 to 45 minute relationship-building session. By the end of it, he knows whether they are a fit, they know who he is and what he does, and the question "have you ever considered podcasting as a marketing tool?" lands entirely differently than it would in a cold email. The wall that normally exists between a prospect and a vendor does not go up because the conversation never started as a sales call.
What 15 Hours a Week Actually Requires
Doug works 15 hours a week and earns a healthy six-figure income. That sentence tends to provoke two reactions: skepticism and envy. The skepticism usually comes from founders who have not yet identified what their zone of genius actually is, or who have identified it but have not yet hired out everything around it. Doug is direct about what made the shift possible: he stopped doing anything that did not require his specific capability and hired for everything else, including before he could comfortably afford it.
The operations manager hire at Turnkey came when it was just Doug and one other person. They were paying her $40,000 a year before either founder was drawing a paycheck. That decision was possible because Doug had kept his entertainment agency running in parallel and was not dependent on the production company income yet. The broader principle holds regardless of the specific situation: the sooner a founder identifies what they should stop doing and puts someone qualified in that seat, the faster the business grows and the less the founder has to be inside it to make that happen.
The Decision to Stop Being the Founder Who Misses the Kids'
Doug spent 30 years working weekends as an entertainment agency owner. His children grew up with a father who was almost always working during the exact hours when they were doing the things that mattered. This was a wake-up call. The shift he made when he launched Turnkey was not about working less for its own sake. It was about not repeating the same trade-off. Revenue is not the thing you look back on.
Some founders who tell themselves they are working hard now so they can be present later. We know how that story usually ends. The agency gets bigger, the demands grow with it, and the window closes before anyone decides to actually make the change. The structural path out of that loop is a hiring decision, a zone-of-genius identification, and a willingness to pay for someone to take the work you should not be doing before you feel financially ready to do it.
Live on Air: What Real Sales Confidence Looks Like
Mid-interview, Doug openly asked about the possibility to explore what a partnership with his podcast production company could look like. He narrates the logic as he does it: not asking means leaving a potential opportunity on the table simply because it feels awkward. Asking directly, transparently, and without pressure is not pitching. It is just an honest question between two people who have been talking for 30 minutes and have clearly established that they like and respect each other.
The lesson Doug draws from it is about what podcasting actually trains you to do. Every interview is a pre-qualified sales conversation with someone who already said yes to spending time with you. By the time the recording ends, the trust is built and the friction is gone. Asking whether there is an opportunity is the natural last step, not a hard close. That is a fundamentally different sales experience than any cold outreach can create, and it compounds across every episode, every guest, and every listener who has been tuning in long enough to already want to work with you before they ever reach out.
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 written a process that nobody followed? Or built a folder of SOPs that your team politely ignored and you quietly stopped updating?
That was a big struggle for today's featured guest, but six weeks before this conversation, he and his team built something that solved a problem most agency owners have tried and failed to fix for years: an AI context engine that makes their operating procedures actually stick. In this episode, he walks through exactly how it works, how they structured shared and personal context layers, how to get your team started without overwhelming them, and why giving AI an outcome rather than a task is the thing most founders are still getting wrong.
Andy Janaitis is the founder of PPC Pitbulls, a boutique digital marketing agency focused on Google Ads and Meta Ads for small to medium businesses. His background is in industrial engineering, data science, software engineering, and product management. Throughout these different stages of his career, he always worked at agencies. So naturally, when it came to starting his own business that seemed like the obvious choice.
He launched the agency in 2020 alongside a former colleague, the same week his first child was born and COVID hit. PPC Pitbulls' differentiator is measurement: every ad dollar is tracked, client behavior on-site is understood, and optimization follows the data rather than intuition.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
Andy's solution to the common owner SOP problem

Shared context vs. personal context

Get next-level results by providing outcomes, not tasks

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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.
The SOP Problem Most Agencies Have Given Up On
Every agency owner knows the rhythm. You write the process. You put it in ClickUp or Notion or a shared drive. You announce it to the team. Three months later nobody is using it, and you are back to making every decision yourself because it is faster than watching the system fail in real time.
Andy has run this loop and now, just six weeks before the recording, managed to use AI to create a tool that changed everything.
It was an AI context engine that pulled from every client touchpoint, including meeting recordings, email, and Slack, and converted that information into living context files the team can query in real time. The key detail is what happens when someone wants to update a shared file. Every central skills file has an owner. Changes get queued for approval rather than overwriting existing rules. What used to be a static document that slowly went stale is now a system that learns, updates, and actually enforces how the agency operates.
Shared Context vs. Personal Context: Why the Distinction Matters
The context gathered in this way is structured across the team in two tiers:
First tier: The central bank holds client context, agency-wide skills files, and general operating rules. That lives in a shared Google Drive folder that auto-syncs to every team member's desktop.

Second tier: Personal context, meaning individual rules that only apply to a specific person's workflow, like filtering certain emails that have nothing to do with the agency.

The reason this distinction matters is that most teams building shared AI context run into one of two problems: the files are so locked down nobody updates them, or they are so open that updates overwrite each other and nothing is reliable. The queue-and-approve structure Andy built threads that needle. Team members can flag a better way to do something. The file owner reviews it. If it makes sense, it gets merged into the main store. The agency gets smarter without the chaos of everyone editing the same file in real time.
Start With One Specific Thing, Not the Whole System
Most founders decide to build an AI operating system and then make the mistake of trying to build everything at once, load too much context into a single document, and end up with a system so heavy it cannot function efficiently. Jason describes his own early version as trying to get every person in the company to approve a single letter change. The architecture was right but the structure was wrong.
Andy's starting point recommendation is specific enough to actually follow:
Pick one workflow. The one that creates the most friction or the most inconsistency.

Open Claude desktop, describe what you want, identify the tool or source you want to pull from, and ask it to build a file structure that keeps client context organized and retrievable.

The plan it generates is not perfect. That is fine. You approve, adjust, and run it. From that first working piece, everything else becomes an iteration. The common mistake is waiting for a complete vision before starting. The agencies making real progress right now started with something small six weeks ago and have been adding ever since.
Give It an Outcome, Not a Task
The tactical shift that runs through this entire conversation is the difference between assigning AI a task and giving it an outcome. A task is "write me a sales proposal." An outcome is "we need to win this client, here is everything we know about them, here is our agency's positioning, here is what a strong proposal from us looks like, produce a first draft." The output from the second prompt is not in the same category as the output from the first.
This is the same principle that makes or breaks the first few hires at a growing agency. Most founders who have struggled with underperforming team members can trace it back to the same root: they handed someone a task without ever communicating the outcome they were trying to reach. AI amplifies both good and bad briefing habits instantly. Give it strong context and a clear destination, and it operates well above expectations. Give it a vague instruction and ignore the output quality, and the tool looks broken when the real problem is the brief. Building the context engine is how you make that outcome-focused briefing the default rather than the exception.
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 still optimizing your agency's content for Google while your clients are getting their answers from AI? Are you charging for the execution that AI is about to make obsolete, while giving away the strategy that commands real fees?
Today's featured guest works with agencies navigating the shift from traditional search to generative engine optimization. He'll talk about what the Anthropic research actually says about how much of the work agencies do today can be automated, how AI reads content differently than Google does, and the practical steps any agency can take right now to show up in AI-generated answers before competitors figure it out.
Tom Lee is an AI search and SEO specialist and co-founder of Visto, a platform that helps agencies build the visibility and optimization layer for the AI search era. Tom and his team advise agencies on generative engine optimization, or GEO, and how to position their clients to show up in AI-generated answers across platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.
His background includes working inside large enterprise companies including Apple and Walmart, where he managed SEO at scale. He now works directly with SEO and GEO agencies helping them build the strategic frameworks and content systems that translate traditional search authority into AI visibility.
In this episode, we'll discuss:
Is your value proposition still execution?

Why GEO does not replace SEO

Repackaging existing content will get you nowhere

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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 the Anthropic Research Actually Says
Tom referenced an Anthropic study published earlier this year that mapped out the theoretical automation potential across industries. For software development, AI can already handle around 35% of code generation, with a theoretical ceiling of 97%. For business and marketing functions including SEO, that ceiling is 94%. In his view, those numbers are not a reason to panic, but they are a reason to get clear on which part of the work you are actually selling.
The agencies at risk are the ones whose value proposition is execution. Writing the content, building the links, pulling the reports: if that is what you are charging for, you are in the category that AI is actively compressing. The agencies that will hold their ground and grow their fees are the ones charging for judgment. Which topics to chase. Which content gaps matter. How to translate client expertise into something AI will actually cite. That is the 6% that automation cannot touch, and it is also the highest-margin work in the engagement.
GEO Is Built on Top of SEO, Not Instead of It
Something that gets lost in the noise around AI search is that GEO does not replace SEO. It extends it. Showing up in Google search results is still the foundation. What has changed is that showing up is no longer enough. AI reads content the way a human being reads it, evaluating whether the argument is convincing and whether the source is credible, not just whether the right keywords appear in the right density. That changes what good content has to do.
The practical starting point Tom recommends is mapping what he calls the semantic space for a client:
Identifying what topic areas people are actually raising in AI conversations that the client should be part of.
From there, you translate that semantic space into specific prompts, run those prompts across the major AI platforms, and audit what comes back. Who is being cited? Where is the client showing up and where are they absent? What content is AI pulling from competitors that the client has not produced yet? That gap analysis is the strategic deliverable that commands real fees. It is also the work that no AI tool will do for you, because it requires knowing what the client actually wants to be known for.
Why Repackaging Existing Content Gets You Nowhere
Once you're clear about the topics your audience is looking for, there's something that will for sure not work the way many think it does. When you identify a content gap and ask AI to fill it, you get repackaged information drawn from the same sources the AI already used to generate the gap. That content does not move anything forward. AI knows where it got the data from. Recycled information does not earn citations.
What earns citations is new data, original perspective, and subject matter expertise that advances the conversation rather than summarizing what already exists.
The 5 step system Tom uses with his clients:
Identify the content gaps

Build a specific set of questions tied to those gaps

Send those questions to a subject matter expert at the client

Have them record a Loom or voice memo answering freely

Use AI to transcribe and chunk that recording into content

The raw material is original. The expertise is real. The content that comes out earns its place in the semantic space rather than competing with what is already there.
Your Clients Are Training AI. Are You Helping Them Do It Right?
The broader point running through this conversation is one that matters whether you run an SEO agency or not. AI systems are being trained on open-source content: social media posts, forum conversations, podcast transcripts, FAQ pages, markdown-formatted content. Every piece of content a client publishes is either building their presence in that training data or failing to. Agencies that understand this and can show clients where they are absent, who is filling that space instead, and what it would take to reclaim it, are in a fundamentally different conversation than agencies still talking about keyword rankings.
The founders who will build authority in this environment are the ones creating real content from real expertise, showing up broadly enough to be present in the long tail of AI conversations, and charging for the strategic thinking that makes all of it coherent. The execution is becoming a commodity. The strategy never was.
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.