Behind the Agency

Episode 68: "We're in the '94 and '95 Era of the Internet. Well, for AI.": 26 Years Building Orases with Nick Damoulakis

David Hoos

"We're in the 2024, 2026 era of AI. Nobody knows where it's gonna go. Nobody really understands the power of it. But you gotta use this technology, bring it into your culture, reskill your people, or else you and your people will become obsolete."

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TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Grit compounds across generations. Nick's father immigrated from a small Greek island, worked on Apollo 13 trajectory math, and built a life from nothing. That template (keep going past what looks impossible) is the engine behind 26 years of Orases.

• The first big break came from the weirdest side project. Nick built the first-ever online guitar tablature site in the '90s, which led to meetings with the Harry Fox Agency, Sony, and BMG. Specialized obsession generates doors that general ambition never opens.

• The NFL became an Orases client from a chance lunch at the Ritz Carlton in DC. A former partner introduced Nick to a friend who worked at the NFL. Nick had no money, no company infrastructure yet, and won the pitch on conviction alone.

• Culture starts with the leader knowing themselves. Most agencies try to write values on a wall before the founder has done the self-reflection. That order is backwards and it shows.

• Marriage and business partnership with Amy has worked for 26 years because they can't do each other's jobs. Nick runs sales and vision. Amy runs operations, legal, and finance. Neither tries to cross the line.

• AI is not the 2012 social media moment. It's the 1994-1995 internet moment. Everyone was still on Prodigy, AOL, fax machines, and Yellow Pages. Most people missed the shift because they couldn't see the shape of it yet.

• The leadership job right now is reskilling. Most organizations are using AI to increase efficiency and then downsize. Nick's bet is the opposite. Use AI to reskill your team so they and you don't go obsolete.

• Comfort is the enemy of progress. Companies that do nothing with this transformation will be obsolete inside a decade. The next generation of leaders is already moving.

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Does This Sound Familiar?

You've been building for a while. Long enough to have lived through a real inflection or two. Maybe you watched the 2008 collapse reshape your client list. Maybe you watched mobile rewrite what a website was supposed to be. Maybe you watched the 2020 digital boom drop a wall of new competitors into your space.

Now it's AI. Your peers are split. Half are laying people off and calling it a strategy. The other half are freezing and hoping the hype cycle ends. Your gut says neither is the right play but you can't quite name what is.

You've also started to notice something uncomfortable. The founders who survived the last two inflections aren't panicking. They're reskilling. They're investing. They're talking about AI like it's 1995 and they already know how the story ends.

Nick Damoulakis is in that camp. 26 years into building Orases with his wife Amy, he's clearer than ever on what matters. This episode is the unfiltered version of what longevity actually teaches a founder about the current moment.

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Meet the Guest

Nick Damoulakis is the co-founder of Orases, a custom software development and AI consulting agency he started in the mid-90s with his wife Amy and has grown to five-time Inc. 5000 recognition, 950+ clients, a 96% retention rate, and an 84 NPS. Orases serves mid-market clients including the NFL, MLB, Kimberly-Clark, Johns Hopkins, and Walter Reed. Nick's current focus is AI transformation for established service organizations and he invests time coaching young entrepreneurs on the side.

Visit orases.com →

Episode Summary

1. Grit as an inheritance

Nick opened the conversation where most founders wouldn't: with his father. Born on a small Greek island, Nick's dad immigrated to the US with nothing, earned his way to Rice University for engineering, and ended up on the team that worked on Apollo 13's trajectory math to bring the crew home safely. That context matters because it frames everything Nick said later about grit. He didn't choose grit. He inherited it. And he sees his 26-year run at Orases as the smaller, quieter continuation of the same template: keep going past what looks impossible.

His own first swing at that template was the guitar tablature site he built in college during his first computer science class. He took his passion for music, his new passion for software, and put the first online guitar tablature community on the web. That weird side project earned him meetings with the Harry Fox Agency, Sony, and BMG. Specialized obsession opens doors that general ambition never does.

2. The Ritz Carlton lunch that became the NFL

The origin story of Orases as a real business was an accident of relationships. Nick was teaching, renting a house from two guys who ran a furniture store, and starting a company on the side with Amy. A former partner asked him to lunch at the Ritz Carlton in DC. Nick had never been inside a Ritz Carlton in his life. Over that lunch, the partner told Nick that in thirty minutes a friend from the NFL would walk through the door, and asked if Nick wanted to partner on pitching some tech work.

Nick said yes. The NFL became a client. They remain a client today. Nick was candid about what made that moment possible: it wasn't his pitch deck or his infrastructure. It was his conviction. "I thought I knew so much back then. I was so confident in myself. That rubbed off on others, and they believed it." Twenty-six years later, he says he feels like he knows less every day. The grit and the people are what carried the rest.

3. The marriage that doubles as a partnership

Amy Damoulakis co-founded Orases with Nick and still runs operations, legal, and finance. Nick runs sales and vision. They've made the partnership work for 26 years for a specific reason: neither tries to do the other's job. Nick comes back from a deal with "can you go execute this, can you do the legal, can you make the math work." Amy makes it real. Nick is clear-eyed that he couldn't do her job, and she couldn't do his. That mutual inability is what keeps the boundary clean. It's not a technique. It's a temperament match that held up for a quarter century.

4. Conviction after 25 years

When asked what he'd tell his younger self, Nick's first answer was honest: "I don't know if I'd even start a company if I knew what I know today." He meant it as a joke and also as a truth. The early years of Orases were the happiest ones. Broke, looking for work, building an agency up, figuring things out one problem at a time. He misses that version.

He channels the nostalgia into coaching young entrepreneurs now. Just this month he lent his space and bought equipment to help someone start a podcasting company. His rule for those coaching relationships: no expectations. Just show up, help, and see what happens. "That's how the snowball starts. You go out, meet people, help them, see where it goes. You can't have expectations."

"Back then I thought I knew so much. 26 years later I feel like I know less and less every day. The grit and surrounding yourself with great people is what it's all about."

5. Culture starts with the leader knowing themselves

Nick's framing on culture cuts against the typical agency approach. Most companies try to write values on a wall before the founder has done the self-reflection. That order is backwards. "Leaders need to really know who they are, what their values are, what their non-negotiables are. That's infectious. That becomes your culture."

The cultural result at Orases is a 5% turnover rate sustained over 15 years in an industry averaging 30%. Nick credits it to leader-level self-knowledge first, then to putting words to those values, then to leading by example so consistently that the team absorbs it. You can't shortcut any of those three steps. Skip the first and the other two are performative.

6. The 1994-1995 era of AI

Nick's strongest framing in the episode, and the one most worth stealing, was his positioning of AI as the 1994-1995 era of the internet, not the 2012 social media moment. In 1994 most people were still on Prodigy, AOL, fax machines, and Yellow Pages. The shape of the shift wasn't obvious yet. Only in hindsight did it become clear that the people who started building early had permanently different outcomes from the people who waited.

AI has been publicly available for about 1,200 days. Nick is betting we're at the same inflection point, with the same narrow window to start building. "Nobody knows where it's going. Nobody understands the full power yet. But you gotta use this technology, bring it into your culture, reskill your people, or else you and your people will become obsolete."

7. Reskilling as the main leadership job

Most companies, in Nick's read, are using AI to increase efficiency and then downsize. He sees that as the short-term extraction play that ends badly. The harder and more durable play is reskilling the team you already have. Give them the tools, the training, and the runway to become people who work with AI rather than people AI replaces.

He pointed to the Sequoia thesis of "services as a software" as a signal worth tracking. Software as a service can be increasingly commodified by AI. Human judgment and taste cannot. The agencies that win the next decade will be the ones that promise outcomes to clients and use AI aggressively on the back end to deliver those outcomes faster and cheaper than anyone else. The ones that do nothing will be obsolete. "Comfort is the enemy of progress."

Notable Quotes

• "We're in the 2024, 2026 era of AI. We're in the '94 and '95 era of the internet, just for AI."

• "Back then I thought I knew so much. 26 years later I feel like I know less every day."

• "Reskill your people, or you and your people will become obsolete."

• "Comfort is the enemy of progress."

• "My wife and I can't do each other's jobs. That's why it works."

Related Episodes

• Ep 63 — 28% of Revenue Came from AI Recommendations

• Ep 57 — 25 Years of Agency Survival (What Actually Kept the Lights On)

• Ep 42 — How to Run an Agency for 20 Years Without Blowing It Up

Learn More / Get in Touch

Visit → orases.com Tool → orases.com (fill out a form to learn about AI transformation services) LinkedIn → [Nick's LinkedIn URL]

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Your outbound numbers have slipped. The sequence that used to land meetings doesn't anymore. Open rates look fine, reply rates are a graveyard, and every tweak to the copy moves things a little less than the last one. Meanwhile your best clients still come through referrals, and you say that out loud with an apology attached: but that's not scalable.

Dan Englander founded SalesSchema in 2014, spent a decade running outbound for agencies, and pivoted the firm toward engineered referrals when outbound's effectiveness started collapsing. He is also the author of Relationship Sales at Scale. His name for what happened is the trust recession: high-ticket complex services feel risky to buy, a wrong decision can cost the buyer their job, and trust does not travel through cold email.

What's in this one

• Why the old signals are quietly resurging: referrals, PR, events and communities all run on trust rather than targeting
• The haystack problem, in his words: asking "do you know anyone" is picking up a giant haystack, putting it in front of someone, and asking them to find you some needles
• The replacement ask, which is small and specific: I saw you might know these five people, would you be open to intros so I can be a future resource to them
• Why SaaS sales playbooks break on agency economics: they presuppose a standardised product and unlimited prospecting hours, and percent-of-funnel math needs a funnel you do not have
• The line that reframes the whole market: your best-fit clients could fit in a high school gym
• Why your network is a feature, not a confession. Founders, consultants and private equity operators brag about doing twenty years of business with five people. Only agencies apologise for it
• Reactive versus proactive: a boat without a sail takes whatever drifts in, which is how you become the everything-to-everyone agency that cannot defend margin
• Why roughly 80% of agency sales hires fail, and the handoff conditions that make the other 20% work: a functioning lead engine, a tight ICP, a packaged offer, and the owner's Rolodex for the first six to twelve months
• Partnerships as phase two, and his contrarian take on them: once five people send most of your leads, do not standardise them. Some want commission, some refuse it to stay unbiased, some want collaboration
• The counterintuitive AI play, which is not becoming the AI agency: notice what AI makes harder, which is attention and trust, and position what you already do as refuge from the noise

Dan Englander

SalesSchema: salesschema.com
">https://salesschema.com/">salesschema.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danenglander
">https://www.linkedin.com/in/danenglander/">linkedin.com/in/danenglander

Author of Relationship Sales at Scale.

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/dan-englander-engineered-referrals-salesschema">hausadvisors.com/podcast

Find out how much of your agency's growth still runs through you: take">https://www.hausadvisors.com/score">take the free Bottleneck Score

Weekly newsletter: haus-advisors.kit.com
">https://haus-advisors.kit.com/8dd478d383">haus-advisors.kit.com

David Hoos on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davidhoos

">https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhoos/">linkedin.com/in/davidhoos

Episode 66: The Partner Buyout, the $4 Billing Error, and Why "Do More With More" Beats Cutting Heads

David Hoos

"We had guns to each other's heads and couldn't pull the trigger. That's what happens when you don't have a real shareholders agreement."

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TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• A failed acquisition is often the moment partner misalignment finally surfaces. Ben and his co-founder spent months prepping a sale, then spent another 9-10 months coming to terms with what the process revealed: one wanted an off-ramp, the other wanted a bigger swing.

• A 50/50 shareholders agreement with no exit mechanism is a gun both partners hold at each other's heads. Build in a shotgun clause, drag-along, tag-along, and scenarios for death, disability, burnout, and adding partners before you need them.

• Decide everything you can before lawyers get involved. Their fees scale with the gaps in your agreement.

• If you're the partner who's staying, start running before the closing date. The relay handoff only works if the remaining partner is already moving.

• New business lines often come from complaint calls, not strategy sessions. Ben's Cloudflare partnership started with a $4 billing error, a banned domain, and an all-caps email written at 30,000 feet.

• Creative and digital agencies are the first line for client security conversations. When the director of marketing mentions spoofed emails, that's where managed security starts, but most agencies drop it at "turn on DMARC."

• "Do more with more" beats "do more with less" when you have real leverage. Ben is growing headcount from 12 to 30 while using AI as the work thread that runs through everything. The limit isn't hardware. It's economic and human.

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Does This Sound Familiar?

You and your co-founder built something together. You pulled profit out for years. You got approached about a sale, went through the acquisition dance, and when it fell apart, something broke that can't be unbroken. The conversations have a different weight now. You're ready for the next move. They're not.

Or maybe the partnership is fine, but AI is rewriting your cost structure faster than you can rewrite your offer. Your peers are trimming heads and calling it a strategy. You're not sure if that's the play for a 12-person shop.

Or you're watching a new opportunity emerge through a back door. A partnership, a channel, a service line your clients actually want. The cautious voice says stay focused. The other voice says this is the window.

Ben Fox has lived all three. This episode is the unfiltered version of what those decisions actually look like from inside.

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Meet the Guest

Ben Fox is the founder of FP Digital, a managed web operations and DevOps agency he built over 13 years with a co-founder, and ZeroArc, a managed security services practice built around a Cloudflare partnership. FP Digital runs managed hosting, DevOps, and web operations for agencies and direct clients. ZeroArc serves the underserved mid-market segment (100 to 5,000 employees) that needs enterprise-grade security without enterprise overhead.

Visit fpdigital.io →

Episode Summary

1. The 13-year partnership and the moment it fractured

Ben and his co-founder Bart ran a profitable agency for 12 years. Bart's philosophy was simple: don't lose money. That discipline meant 12 profitable years, productized services, and pricing that reflected the work. Ben was the sales and vision side. Bart was the technical anchor.

The fracture came through an acquisition attempt. They entertained a good offer, did the deep work of prepping a sale, and in the process ended up in what Ben described as a counseling session together. What emerged, slowly and then all at once, was that Bart wanted an off-ramp and Ben wanted to take a bigger swing. "Once it was said out loud, that's it. It's the 'I want a divorce' moment." The deal fell through. The realization didn't.

2. Why the shareholders agreement is the conversation you don't want at 25

Ben's advice to younger founders is direct: have a real shareholders agreement. Not a two-page 50/50 document that says you'll figure it out. A real one, with a shotgun clause, drag-along and tag-along rights, and mechanisms for every scenario you hope never happens. Death, disability, divorce, mental capacity, burnout, long breaks, adding a partner later.

Without those mechanisms, Ben and Bart had mutual leverage but no way to use it. Each could technically block the other from moving forward. Neither wanted to. The trust held, but Ben is clear that trust isn't a substitute for structure. "Your partnership is going to dissolve. One way or the other, your partnership's going to end. So structure it."

3. The actual mechanics of a buyout

Ben was candid about what a partner buyout looks like from inside. The lawyer bill is larger than you expect. The details nobody tells you about (directors' liability, E&O insurance continuity, cell phone ownership, tax implications) all need to be negotiated. His advice: decide as much as possible before the lawyers are in the room.

He also described the moment he and Bart realized they were talking through lawyers and fighting about the wrong thing. One phone call, one honest conversation, and the issue resolved in a day. "I said, 'I'm so mad at you.' He said, 'I'm pissed at you too.' I said, 'Well, I'm glad we figured that out. Now what's the problem?'" The lesson: lawyers amplify distance. Partners who still trust each other can close it faster than any filing.

4. The relay handoff

For the partner who's staying, Ben's advice is to start running before the closing date. "If you wait until the final closing date, it's too late." He compared it to a marathon: the clock starts when you cross the start line, but if you're at the back of the pack, you've already lost a half mile. Bart let Ben promote people into a leadership team, hire a COO, and start executing the plan well before the buyout closed. By the time Ben was officially the sole owner, the new organization was already functioning.

"Once I accepted that I had a vision and that he didn't want to be part of it, and for the first time in our partnership he said no and I said, 'Well, I want to do it anyway,' that kicked off the conversation."

5. The $4 billing error that became a Cloudflare partnership

The ZeroArc origin story is one of the better accidental-business stories on the show. Ben was on vacation in the Dominican with his wife. Their largest client's site went down. His team diagnosed it: Cloudflare had a $4 billing error on a test account, banned a subdomain, and because the hosting company used Cloudflare's edge network, the ban cascaded and took down the production site.

There's no support on a free Cloudflare plan. There's no support on the $20 plan either. Ben wrote what he described as "all caps lock emails at 30,000 feet" to Cloudflare's senior team, warning them his lawyer was meeting him at the airport. The problem got fixed. An hour later, a senior Cloudflare contact called him back. Not to apologize. To invite him into the partner program. "The mark of an absolutely excellent salesperson, because he realized I was emotionally invested." That call became a reseller agreement, a managed services partnership, and the foundation for ZeroArc.

6. The channel partner model nobody else is running

ZeroArc is built around a simple observation: the enterprise managed security firms (Arctic Wolf, Accenture, and the like) have no agency liaison program. They don't talk to the creative and digital agencies who are actually in the room when the director of marketing says "our emails keep getting spoofed."

Ben's position: that conversation is where client security really begins, and the agency is the first line. Most agencies drop it at "turn on DMARC" because they don't have a path beyond that. ZeroArc's channel program gives agencies a clean referral path with real economics: a percentage of managed services recurring revenue and a larger percentage of reselling. The pitch to agencies isn't white labeling. It's "you own the relationship, we handle the security, everyone wins."

7. Do more with more

Ben's framing on AI is the cleanest contrarian take in the episode. While the industry narrative is "do more with less" (cut staff, deploy AI, shrink overhead), Ben is doing the opposite. He's growing from 12 to 30 and using AI as the work thread that runs through everything.

The logic: a 12-person agency is not a 5,000-person enterprise. The leverage math is different. When you have strong process, domain expertise, and client relationships, AI compounds what's already working. It doesn't replace it. Ben's bet to his team was explicit: I'm investing in you, in benefits, in headcount. In exchange, use these tools to do more. The multiplier goes to the firm, the clients, and the team.

He was equally clear about AI's real limits. Not hardware. Economic and human. "Businesses are still businesses. They're going to have to figure out how to absorb the benefits of all these new tools." And the human side: we still buy from humans, we still process a limited amount of information, and great talent with judgment and curiosity is more valuable, not less.

Notable Quotes

• "Your partnership is going to dissolve. One way or the other, your partnership's going to end. So structure it."

• "Once it was said out loud, that's it. It's the 'I want a divorce' moment."

• "As soon as possible, if you're the one staying, start running. Don't wait until the final closing date. It's too late."

• "More is more. Less is a bore. That's our work thread."

• "The hype machine is going to keep going, but we're going to hit the limits of just reality."

Related Episodes

• Ep 24 — Why 50/50 Partnerships Fail Without a 15-Year Plan

• Ep 41 — Why Deal Flow Matters More Than Recurring Revenue

• Ep 58 — How a 4-Person Shopify Agency Builds a Partner Engine That Actually Pays Off

Learn More / Get in Touch

Visit → fpdigital.io Tool → zeroarc.io LinkedIn → [Ben's LinkedIn URL]

Want More Interviews Like This?

Subscribe to the show on YouTube

Subscribe to my weekly newsletter

If this resonates, here's your next step.

Pick the path that fits where you are right now. No pitch deck. No pressure. Just clarity.

Start with the free Bottleneck Score →

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Episode 65: He Built a High 7-Figure Agency With Zero MRR. And Your Gross Margins Are Probably Wrong.

David Hoos

Episode 65 | Behind the Agency Podcast with Sam Shepler, Founder of StorySnap

"An ounce of positioning is worth a pound of ad spend."

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR -- Key Takeaways

• Sam Shepler built a high 7-figure agency portfolio almost entirely on project-based revenue. MRR is a billing mechanism, not a growth strategy. If you want predictability, solve that with marketing.

• Almost no agency P&L has correct gross margins. Sam says he has literally never seen one. The most common error: W-2 employees who deliver the service get classified as OpEx instead of COGS, making margins look better than they are.

• 50% gross margin is the floor before you should spend on marketing at all. Sam targets 60%. At that level, you can afford to invest 10% or more of revenue in sales and marketing and still pay yourself well.

• "An ounce of positioning is worth a pound of ad spend." Tactics do not solve a strategy problem. Most agencies try to get deep on channels before they have a clear position and message.

• Sam got out of sales by Year 2. The formula: productize your service, hire a salesperson, and create a forcing function (his was a two-week honeymoon in Thailand). The business closed deals without him.

• The right relationship to founder-led sales is "option, not requirement." Getting out completely leaves money on the table. The goal is optionality.

• StorySnap is actively acquiring and incubating agencies. They prefer rough diamonds over polished ones -- and they look for: specialty, accurate financials, founder independence, low client concentration, and real gross margins.

Does this sound familiar?

You have heard the MRR advice a hundred times. Everyone says recurring revenue is the goal. Build retainers, reduce churn, create predictability. So you have tried -- maybe a maintenance plan here, a monthly reporting package there -- and the result has been more work, more client friction, and no meaningful improvement in how your pipeline feels.

Meanwhile, your books show a healthy net margin. Your CPA is satisfied. But when you look at what it actually costs to deliver your work versus what you charge, the numbers do not quite add up. You have never been sure whether the problem is pricing or something else.

Sam Shepler built Testimonial Hero, StorySnap, and Productype into a high 7-figure portfolio almost entirely on project-based revenue. No monthly retainers. No MRR worship. And he has looked at enough agency P&Ls to say, with confidence, that the margin problem is almost universal -- and almost nobody is calculating it correctly.

Take the free Bottleneck Score

Meet the Guest

Sam Shepler is the founder of StorySnap, a video agency portfolio that includes Testimonial Hero and Productype. He built Testimonial Hero to high 7 figures on a project-first model, got himself out of sales by Year 2, and is now actively acquiring and incubating agencies through StorySnap. He has a sharp perspective on agency financial health, the MRR myth, and what makes an agency worth buying.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samshepler Visit: storysnap.com

Episode Summary1. The MRR myth

Sam is not anti-revenue. He is anti-confusion about what revenue structure actually solves.

His agency sells packages. He hopes clients buy three or four of them over three or four years. That is recurring revenue -- just not monthly. The distinction matters because monthly retainers, for a lot of service types, mean forcing clients to commit to something they do not need on that cadence. "Sometimes it's better to just embrace reality and not force that."

The real problem MRR is supposed to solve is predictability. Sam's argument: predictability is a marketing problem, not a billing problem. If you want to know what next quarter looks like, build a marketing engine that tells you. Do not restructure your pricing model to give yourself a false sense of stability.

"If you want predictability, solve that with marketing. Not your billing mechanism."

2. Why your gross margins are almost certainly wrong

Sam has reviewed a lot of agency P&Ls. He says he has never seen one with accurate gross margins. The reason is accounting conventions designed for tax reporting, not business management.

Most agency books are kept by a CPA optimizing for net margin at year-end. For tax purposes, that is the right number. For running a business, it is the wrong number. Gross margin is what tells you whether your unit economics work.

The most common error: agency owners put their W-2 delivery employees under operating expenses rather than cost of goods sold. Anything related to delivering the service belongs in COGS -- internal labor, freelancers, contractors, and relevant software subscriptions (Adobe Creative Suite is COGS for a video agency, not overhead).

"I look at a lot of agency P&Ls, and almost none of them -- and I can actually say like none of them -- have correct gross margins."

Sam's minimum threshold: 50% gross margin. His target: 60%. At a 50% margin on a $10,000 project, your delivery cost should not exceed $5,000. That includes all in-house labor allocated to that project.

The reason the number matters: you cannot invest in sales and marketing if your margins do not support it. Most agencies spend a few thousand dollars a month on marketing and wonder why it is not working. Sam's answer is that they have not even started yet.

3. Positioning before everything else

Sam runs multiple specialized agencies. StorySnap is a video agency. Testimonial Hero is focused on customer testimonial content. Productype sits in a different category entirely. Each has a specific lane.

When David asked about sales and marketing channels, Sam said the channel question was secondary. "An ounce of positioning is worth a pound of ad spend." Tactics applied to a weak or generic position produce weak results regardless of execution quality.

For paid advertising, Sam's portfolio uses LinkedIn and Google. Google provides intent but no firmographic targeting -- you can get leads from companies that are too small, too large, or just wrong fit. LinkedIn provides firmographic targeting (company size, title, industry) but no buying intent. You want both. LinkedIn even allows you to upload your own account list to ensure better targeting when the platform's native data falls short.

But all of that is a second-order question. "Nothing's gonna work if you are trying to appeal to everyone and your message is super broad."

4. Getting out of founder-led sales

Sam hired his first salesperson in 2019. Then, in January 2020, he went on his honeymoon in Thailand for two weeks. He told his new salesperson he probably would not close anything while Sam was gone.

He closed deals.

"I was like, great, I'm just gonna stop showing up for sales calls as much as possible now."

Sam calls this the forcing function approach. You could do it through a vacation, a planned absence, or a deliberate role transition. The point is creating a situation where the business has to operate without you in sales before you feel ready. Waiting until you feel ready often means waiting forever.

Productization makes this work. The more you package your service, the less the sale depends on the founder's ability to contextualize a custom engagement. A clearly defined offering is easier for a salesperson to represent, easier for a prospect to evaluate, and easier to repeat.

He also notes that getting out of sales entirely has a cost. "The pinnacle of leadership is never required but always helpful." If you disappear from sales completely, you will leave revenue on the table. The goal is optionality: be available when it matters, without being required for every deal.

"You want the option, not the requirement."

5. What makes an agency worth acquiring

Sam and StorySnap are actively looking at agency acquisitions and incubations. He is candid about what they look for -- and what they prefer.

They like rough diamonds. Agencies that are slightly distressed, need a turnaround, or have the bones of a good business without the financial or marketing infrastructure are interesting targets. "The more we can see an opportunity where the bones are good, the more excited we are." A perfect agency usually does not want to sell, and if it does, the price reflects that.

What they look for in any acquisition:

Specialization. Does the agency have a clear niche and a defined service? Generalists are harder to grow.

Accurate financials. Most agencies they look at do not have them. That is expected. But books that are so wrong they require a complete rebuild slow everything down.

Low founder dependency. The less the business requires the founder to operate, the more it is worth and the easier the transition is.

Client concentration. If most revenue comes from three clients, losing one damages the business materially. That is a significant risk flag.

Gross margins at minimum threshold. Sam's floor is 30% gross margin as a starting point for an acquisition. If the margins are so low that reaching even that level requires ripping and replacing the entire business model, the deal may not be worth pursuing.

6. The holdco model

StorySnap operates as a holding company with a centralized model. Separate P&Ls for each business unit, shared resources behind the scenes. Different brands in market, one operational layer.

Sam describes the businesses as different storefronts with a shared back of house. No duplicate CRMs. Shared operational infrastructure. The president oversees all the companies and reports to Sam, rather than running individual CEOs for each entity -- a deliberate choice to reduce complexity while the portfolio is still in high-7-figure territory.

Incubation is equally important to acquisition in his model. StorySnap could not close deals on Productype through acquisition, so they built it themselves. Sam actively invites freelancers and early-stage agency owners in the video space to reach out about becoming part of the portfolio.

Notable Quotes

"If you want predictability, solve that with marketing. Not your billing mechanism."

"I look at a lot of agency P&Ls, and literally none of them have correct gross margins."

"An ounce of positioning is worth a pound of ad spend."

"The pinnacle of leadership is to never be required but always be helpful."

"We love rough diamonds. The bones are good, but there are things we can bring to the table."

Related Episodes

If this one resonated, you'll like these:

• Ep 31: Ryan Watson on the financial hierarchy of needs for agencies and building the cash discipline to invest in growth.

• Ep 55: Greg Hickman on the 5 Ones framework and why ruthless focus on a single offer for a single market is the prerequisite for everything else.

• Ep 2: Kevin Whelan on the deconstructed agency model and what genuine founder independence actually looks like from the inside.

Learn More / Get in Touch

Visit --> storysnap.com

LinkedIn --> linkedin.com/in/samshepler

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Episode 64: She Had Near-100% Contractor Retention for 11 Years. Here's the Actual Method.

David Hoos

Episode 64 | Behind the Agency Podcast with Natasha Golinsky, Founder of On Purpose Projects

"My job is to make sure you have a job. Sales, biz dev, networking. Your job is to do the thing."

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR -- Key Takeaways

• Near-100% contractor retention for 11 years. Only two people left Natasha's team. Both left because they got full-time job offers -- not because they wanted to leave.

• The retention method is simpler than you think: know what each person wants from the arrangement and make sure working for you delivers it. Most agency owners never have this conversation.

• "Know which knife in the drawer you are." Natasha avoided niching for six years. Once she got specific about what On Purpose Projects actually does (complex, custom, full-stack work -- not commodity dev), her marketing got dramatically easier.

• During COVID, she made a hard pivot to custom-only work rather than compete on price. The right call for a North American shop with real overhead.

• When she was diagnosed with aggressive stage 2 breast cancer in 2024, she had six weeks to set up ops coverage. The business kept moving. May 2025 was her second-biggest revenue month ever -- while she was still recovering.

• Her SOP method: do a screen recording of everything you do for a week and hire someone to turn it into documentation. You do not have to write the SOPs yourself.

Does this sound familiar?

Your contractors show up, do good work, and clients are generally happy. But you quietly dread the day one of your key developers takes a full-time job somewhere. You have never had the conversation where you actually ask what they want from this arrangement. You assume the work and the paycheck is enough.

And if you had to step back tomorrow -- for any reason -- you are not sure the business keeps moving. The client relationships are in your head. The processes are undocumented. The DNS credentials live in your personal 1Password.

Natasha Golinsky started On Purpose Projects as a management consultant with zero dev experience, hiring a developer on Upwork for five dollars an hour. Over eleven years, she built a 14-person contractor team with near-perfect retention. Then she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer right when she was ready to scale past seven figures.

What happened over the next year became the real test of whether she had built a business or just a job.

Take the free Bottleneck Score →

Meet the Guest

Natasha Golinsky is the founder of On Purpose Projects, a full-stack web development agency specializing in complex, custom work -- multi-five-figure ecommerce migrations, corporate builds, and technical projects that commodity dev shops cannot touch. She built the agency as a non-technical founder, starting with a single Upwork hire, and has led a remote contractor team for over a decade.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/natasha-golinsky

Episode Summary1. The accidental agency

Natasha did not start an agency on purpose. She was a management consultant working in the nonprofit sector when a client asked her to find someone to fix a website. She went to Upwork, hired a developer for five dollars an hour, fixed the site, and then the same client asked if her developer could do another site. Then another.

"I am like the quintessential accidental agency owner," she said. A decade later, she leads a remote team of 14.

What stands out is how deliberately she has built it since those early days. The accident is the origin story. Everything after that was a series of conscious decisions.

2. Know which knife in the drawer you are

On Purpose Projects does full-stack, custom, complex web development. It does not do $500 Elementor landing pages. It is not the team you call for front-end polish. When a migration involves 50,000 SKUs or a multi-five-figure budget, that is the right fit.

Natasha avoided committing to that clarity for six years. She was worried about what niching meant for her pipeline. Once she committed, the marketing got easier.

"Know which knife in the drawer you are, and then find the people who need that problem solved." It is advice she gives every agency owner trying to get new clients outside their existing network.

During COVID, she made it official. When commodity dev flooded the market and rates collapsed, she made a hard pivot to custom-only work and stopped competing on price. For a North American team with real overhead, she says that was the only move that made sense.

3. Eleven years, near-zero contractor churn

In eleven years, two people have left On Purpose Projects. Both left to take full-time jobs. Neither left because they were unhappy.

Natasha attributes this to a practice most agency owners skip: she asks what her contractors actually want and then makes sure working with her delivers it.

Her operations manager wants to work 25 hours a week so she can be home with her young son. Natasha structures the role around that. One developer wants to build his React skills this year. Natasha assigns him to React projects. A new QA hire has two kids and specific schedule needs. Natasha and her ops manager track that, week to week.

"If people are getting what they want out of working with you, why would they leave?"

She also does not require weekends. No evenings. Above-market wages. Clear project management. These are not perks -- they are the standard.

The business case is straightforward: churn is expensive. Inconsistent team quality kills brands. A team that has worked together for years knows the systems, knows each other, and knows the clients. When she had to bring in two contractors during a slammed Q4, the contrast was immediate. The new people did not know the etiquette, the protocol, or the communication patterns. "Oh my god, thank God I do not have to do this all the time."

Retention is not just good ethics. It is a delivery strategy.

4. Leading a technical team without being technical

Natasha tried to set up a Bluetooth adapter in her car recently and nearly called her kids for help. She is not technical. She has never pretended to be.

Her approach to leading technical people is radical honesty about roles from day one: "My job is to make sure you have a job. Sales, biz dev, networking. Your job is to do the thing."

Early on, a developer got frustrated that she did not understand what he was trying to explain to her about a technical issue. She told him directly: "Do you want me to do your job or do you want me to do my job?" He said do your job.

That became the culture. Her team understands she is not the technical authority. They operate in a scrum-style setup where the client gets direct access to the project manager, the developer, and QA. The information does not have to flow through Natasha because she learned early that she was not the right conduit for it.

"You are here because I can't do it. I cannot have this conversation. I do not know how to explain any of this to a client. This is a technical team and my lane is this."

Clarity about lanes turned out to be a foundation for trust, not a confession of weakness.

5. The diagnosis, and the year the business ran without her

In late 2024, Natasha was diagnosed with aggressive stage 2 breast cancer. She had six weeks before a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction -- a major surgery followed by months of treatment.

For ten years, the whole business had been in her head. No succession plan. No exit documentation. Everything ran through her.

She brought in a friend who had been a client for four years -- someone who knew the team but had no technical background. She onboarded this person while on pain medication and going through chemotherapy. "Like, not even kidding, like, I was just high on pain medication, drugged out from chemo. And we were training her through it."

The team kept moving. Revenue kept moving. When Natasha returned to full-time work in May 2025, her operations manager told her she did not need her in the day-to-day anymore. May 2025 was the second-biggest revenue month in On Purpose Projects' history.

The team she had built over eleven years -- the one with near-zero churn -- held the business together while she recovered from cancer.

6. Getting ops out of your head before you need to

The advice Natasha gives now is simple: stop waiting for a reason to document things.

Her method: record everything you do for a week as a screen capture. Do not stop what you are doing -- just record it while you work. Then hire a freelancer or assistant to watch the recordings and turn them into SOPs. You do not have to write the documentation yourself. You just have to capture what you are already doing.

"I do not have the patience to actually sit down and write step one, step 1B. I cannot. But there are a lot of people in the world who think very systemically like that."

The point is not to have a perfect operations manual. It is to extract the business from your head before life forces you to do it in a harder way.

Notable Quotes

"Know which knife in the drawer you are, and then find the people who need that problem solved."

"If people are getting what they want out of working with you, why would they leave?"

"My job is to make sure you have a job. Sales, biz dev, networking. Your job is to do the thing."

"Churn is so expensive. Once you have someone who's really good and they keep up that quality of work, that creates your brand."

"I was just high on pain medication, drugged out from chemo, and we were training her through it. Team kept moving. Revenue kept moving."

Related Episodes

If this one resonated, you'll like these:

• Ep 62: Kevin Whelan on the deconstructed agency model and what it looks like to build a business that genuinely runs without the founder.

• Ep 53: Chris at Dynamic Agency OS on the More, Better, New framework for hiring and building a team that can sustain delivery without you.

• Ep 31: Ryan Watson on the financial hierarchy of needs and why most agencies do not build the financial resilience to survive a real disruption.

Learn More / Get in Touch

LinkedIn --> linkedin.com/in/natasha-golinsky (On Purpose Projects)

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Subscribe to the show on YouTube -->

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Episode 63: 28% of Revenue Came from AI Recommendations

David Hoos

Episode 63 | Behind the Agency Podcast with Shaun Davidson, VP at Sembit and Co-Founder of Zero Channel

“A prospect spent 30 minutes with ChatGPT, got our recommendation, searched us on Google, and booked. No comparison shopping.”

Watch

TL;DR -- Key Takeaways

• 28% of Sembit's revenue over 9 months came from prospects who found them through LLM recommendations. This is not a future trend. It is happening now, and most agencies have no idea whether they are visible.

• Citation-first methodology: test your target prompts 100+ times to understand how AI models reference (or ignore) your agency. Without a baseline, you are optimizing blind.

• Directory profiles carry outsized weight. Clutch, DesignRush, and GoodFirms profiles are heavily represented in AI model training data. Complete profiles with reviews, case studies, and accurate service descriptions improve your chances of appearing in AI-generated recommendations.

• High-intent focused prompts outperform scattered queries. Optimize for the specific questions your ideal client would ask an AI, not generic category terms.

• Actionable test you can run today: Ask ChatGPT the prompt your ideal client would use. Run it 5 times. If your agency never appears, you have found the gap.

• The buying journey is changing. Prospects are using AI to shortlist agencies before they ever open Google. If you are invisible to LLMs, you are invisible to a growing share of buyers.

Does this sound familiar?

Your SEO is solid. Your Google rankings are good. Your referral network produces steady work. But new leads are arriving through a channel you never optimized for. They say things like "ChatGPT recommended you." They book calls without comparing three other agencies first. They show up ready to engage because an AI model already told them you were the right fit.

Shaun Davidson noticed this pattern at Sembit and did what most agencies would not. He tracked it. Methodically. Over nine months. What he found was that 28% of their revenue originated from prospects whose buying journey started with a question typed into an LLM. Not Google. Not a referral. Not a conference. An AI chatbot.

That number would have been zero if Sembit had been invisible to AI models. Most agencies are invisible. They have never tested whether their name appears in AI-generated recommendations. They have never asked the question their ideal client would ask ChatGPT. They have no idea what the AI says about them, if it says anything at all.

Shaun did not just discover the problem. He built a methodology to measure it and a system to fix it. The approach is straightforward, repeatable, and available to any agency willing to invest the time.

Take the free Bottleneck Score

Meet the Guest

Shaun Davidson is the VP at Sembit, a digital marketing agency, and Co-Founder of Zero Channel, a platform focused on helping businesses optimize their visibility in AI-generated recommendations.

Over 9 months, he tracked and validated that 28% of Sembit's revenue originated from prospects who found them through LLM recommendations. That discovery led him to develop a citation-first methodology for testing and improving AI visibility. He now helps other agencies understand whether they are visible to AI models and what to do about it.

Shaun's approach is data-driven and practical. He does not sell hype about the future of AI search. He measures what is happening right now and builds systems to capitalize on it.

Visit sembit.com and zerochannel.ai -->

Episode Summary

1. The 28% discovery

Shaun started noticing a pattern in how new clients were finding Sembit. Prospects were booking calls and mentioning, unprompted, that ChatGPT recommended the agency. Not that they found Sembit through Google and then used ChatGPT to validate the choice. ChatGPT was the starting point. The discovery channel.

He began tracking these leads specifically. Over nine months, he measured the revenue from prospects whose buying journey started with an LLM recommendation. The number was 28% of total revenue.

This was not a marketing experiment. Sembit did not set out to optimize for AI visibility. The discovery was organic. Shaun noticed the pattern, measured it, and then reverse-engineered what was driving it. The agencies appearing in AI recommendations shared specific characteristics that Shaun then codified into a methodology.

The implications are significant. A channel that no one on the marketing team was managing was producing more than a quarter of the company's revenue. For most agencies, this channel does not exist because they are invisible to it.

2. The citation-first methodology

Shaun developed a systematic approach to understanding how LLMs reference agencies. The method starts with identifying the prompts your ideal client would type into ChatGPT, Claude, or similar tools.

What would a mid-market ecommerce founder ask when looking for a digital marketing agency? What would a SaaS CEO type when searching for a development partner? These are the prompts that matter. Not generic queries about what agencies do, but specific, high-intent questions from buyers who are ready to hire.

Once you have your prompts, run them 100+ times. Document which agencies appear. Note how they are described. Track what sources the model cites. Look for patterns in which agencies appear consistently and which never show up.

This gives you a baseline. Without it, you are optimizing blind. You do not know whether you are visible, invisible, or mentioned but described poorly. The baseline tells you exactly where you stand and what needs to change.

"A prospect spent 30 minutes with ChatGPT, got our recommendation, searched us on Google, and booked. No comparison shopping."

3. Why directory profiles matter more than you think

Clutch, DesignRush, GoodFirms, and similar directory profiles carry outsized weight in AI model training data. These directories are structured, regularly updated, and densely linked. LLMs draw heavily from them when generating agency recommendations.

Shaun says agencies that ignore their directory profiles are leaving one of the easiest AI visibility levers on the table. The profiles are often free or low-cost. The information is within the agency's control. And the impact on AI recommendations is disproportionate to the effort required.

Complete profiles with reviews, case studies, accurate service descriptions, and up-to-date contact information improve your chances of appearing in AI-generated recommendations. Incomplete profiles, or profiles with outdated information, reduce your chances. The directories are effectively training data for AI models. Treating them as a low-priority marketing task is a mistake.

4. High-intent prompts over broad queries

Not all prompts are equal. Shaun focuses on high-intent queries. These are the specific questions a prospect asks when they are close to a hiring decision.

"Best Shopify agency for mid-market DTC brands" is more valuable than "what is a digital marketing agency." The first prompt comes from someone ready to hire. The second comes from someone doing general research. Optimizing for the first type concentrates your effort where it produces revenue.

Shaun recommends building a library of high-intent prompts specific to your agency's specialty, target market, and geographic focus. Then test each one repeatedly to understand where you stand. The prompts that matter most are the ones your ideal client would actually type when they are ready to make a decision.

5. The 5-prompt test

Shaun offers an actionable test any agency can run in 10 minutes. Write the prompt your ideal client would type into ChatGPT. Something like "recommend a [your specialty] agency for [your target client type]."

Run it 5 times. The results will vary because LLMs generate different outputs each time. If your agency appears in most runs, you have visibility. If your agency never appears, you have found the gap. If a competitor appears consistently and you do not, study why. Look at their directory profiles, their content footprint, and their online presence.

This simple test tells you whether you are visible or invisible in what may be the fastest-growing discovery channel for professional services. It takes 10 minutes. The information it provides is worth far more than the time invested.

6. What this means for the buying journey

The traditional agency buying journey started with Google, referrals, or industry events. A prospect identified a need, searched for options, compared agencies, and made a decision. Each step involved multiple touchpoints and significant time.

A growing share of buyers now starts with AI. They ask ChatGPT to recommend agencies. They get a shortlist. They research only the agencies on that list. The comparison shopping phase collapses because the AI already filtered the options. The prospect arrives at the agency's website with a recommendation in hand.

Shaun's example captures this perfectly: a prospect spent 30 minutes with ChatGPT, received Sembit's recommendation, searched them on Google to verify they were real, and booked a call. No comparison shopping. No evaluating five agencies. The AI did the shortlisting.

If you are not on the AI-generated shortlist, you never enter the consideration set. This is not replacing Google or referrals. It is adding a new layer before them. And most agencies have done nothing to show up in it.

Notable Quotes

"A prospect spent 30 minutes with ChatGPT, got our recommendation, searched us on Google, and booked. No comparison shopping."

"Run the prompt your ideal client would use. Five times. If you never appear, that's the gap."

"Directory profiles are not just for SEO anymore. They are training data for AI models."

"Twenty-eight percent of our revenue came from a channel nobody on the team was managing."

Related Episodes

If this one resonated, you'll like these:

• Ep 10: Corey Quinn on specialization and why narrow focus makes you findable in every channel, including AI.

• Ep 54: Jacob Miller on new client acquisition channels and adapting to how buyers actually find agencies.

• Ep 15: Eddie Saunders Jr on visibility, consistency, and showing up where your buyers are looking.

Learn More / Get in Touch

Visit → sembit.com

Tool → zerochannel.ai

LinkedIn → Shaun Davidson

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Episode 62: Pay People Like Adults

David Hoos

Interview: How Figmints Built “Slices” to Make Pay Fair, Performance-Based, and Predictable

Behind the Agency Podcast with James Kwon, CEO of Figmints

Watch

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

• Core pain: Agencies want to pay great people more… but cash flow and “when is it safe?” makes founders freeze.

• Unexpected insight: A lot of agencies track the wrong “health metric” (billable hours can look great while you’re actually bleeding profit).

• Framework:Slices = split every dollar that comes in into clear percentages (lead source, sales, account mgmt/strategy, fulfillment, ops, profit).

• Mistake to avoid: Celebrating “we hit our billable target” when the project is blown up and you’re basically paying for lunch with your profit.

• Second mistake: Hiring sales when the agency isn’t packaged well (too broad, too many services, too hard to teach a salesperson what the founder knows).

• Notable tactic: Make compensation a “winnable game” with a visible path: “If you want $150K, here’s exactly what you’d have to do.”

• Real-world impact: A designer who thought $50K was the ceiling used Slices, took on more “slices,” learned new roles, and grew to $140K–$150K+.

• Big bet: James is productizing this (cohorts now, book + app coming) because spreadsheets won’t carry the idea far enough.

Does This Sound Familiar?

Someone good on your team asks for a raise, and you want to say yes. You also can't see three months out well enough to promise it. So you say something vague about revisiting it, and they hear a no.

Meanwhile the dashboard says the team is hitting its billable target, and the projects are still losing money. Both of those can be true at once, which is why billable hours makes such a comforting and useless health metric.

James runs Figmints, a fifteen-to-twenty-person shop he started fifteen years ago. He rebuilt pay around something he calls Slices.

Every dollar that comes in gets cut into named shares. Lead source, sales, account work, delivery, ops, profit. Whoever does the work owns that slice.

So compensation stops being a negotiation and starts being a game with visible rules. One designer joined thinking $50K was the ceiling, took on more slices as she learned account management and strategy, and now earns $140K to $150K.

And his warning is worth as much as the framework. Hiring a salesperson before your offer is simple enough to teach just moves the problem.

Take the free Bottleneck Score →

Meet the Guest

James Kwon is the CEO of Figmints, a full-service digital marketing firm (15–20 people, fully virtual) originally based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He started in UI/UX, was employee #5 at CBS.com, and has worked on major brands like Mini Cooper, Virgin Mobile, and Puma. These days, James helps agency owners and service firms build compensation systems that are fair, transparent, and tied to real dollars, not vibes.

(Before Figmints, James was deep in UI/UX and large brand work. He’s always been “agency by day, product R&D by night.”)

Episode Summary

1. Backstory: a designer who fell in love with business

James didn’t start as a finance guy. He came up through UI/UX and brand work. But once Figmints got into HubSpot and marketing automation, he got hooked on the “levers” of business and started building systems (EOS mindset).

The big tension showed up fast: how do you retain top people when they want (and deserve) more money… but the agency doesn’t have predictable margin?

2. The main tension: hiring + growth turns into a stress cycle

If you’ve run an agency for any amount of time, you know this treadmill:

• you sign work → you hire

• you hire → work slows

• work slows → you panic-sell

• panic-sell → you take anything

• then you’re back to “we’re not niched enough” and everything gets harder again

Slices was James trying to get off that treadmill.

“We were tracking… almost a vanity metric.”

3. Their unique way of solving it: tie pay to the dollar, not the hour

James basically calls out a common agency trap:

A lot of us treat billable hours like the truth. But you can “hit the hours” while being totally upside down on a project.

He had a moment where the team celebrated hitting a weekly billing target… and then realized they were triple over budget on a project.

That’s when the lightbulb went off: stop worshiping time. Track the dollars and allocate them on purpose.

4. Framework: how Slices works (in plain English)

Here’s the model James described:

Every dollar that comes in gets split into buckets as percentages:

• Lead source / marketing (how the work got here)

• Sales (who sold it)

• Account management + strategy

• Fulfillment / production

• Operations

• Profit

Why this matters: it creates a dynamic budget that scales with revenue and gives people clear upside.

If someone wants $100K, $150K, $200K, you can map the path:

• what work they need to take on

• what roles/slices they need to add

• what “winning” looks like

It also forces reality: if someone can only handle 2 clients, either those clients need to be big enough… or the math doesn’t work.

5. The cringe moment: celebrating the wrong thing

The “Super Bowl” lunch story is the perfect example.

They’d buy lunch if they hit the weekly billables by Thursday. Everyone’s pumped. Founder feels like the business is healthy.

Then James realized: some of those billables were just them eating project overruns.

So they were rewarding performance using a scoreboard that could lie.

Slices was built to make the scoreboard harder to fake.

6. Where the founder still belongs: designing the game

One thing I liked here: this isn’t “set it and forget it.”

The founder’s job becomes:

• define what “good” looks like

• make the rules visible

• make the game winnable

• then let motivated people run

This is the opposite of the typical agency fog where comp is mysterious and raises feel like emotional negotiations.

7. Hiring + scaling lessons (especially sales)

James has hired 6–7 salespeople and called it: none were terrific successes.

His diagnosis was blunt and honest:

• selling Figmints is hard when the agency is broad

• the founder knows too much context to easily transfer it to a salesperson

• consultative sales is harder to teach when the offer is basically “we can do a lot of stuff”

What he’s doing differently now:

• a specific product

• a specific target market

• hire sales to sell that, not the whole “full-service agency”

• use Slices to make comp predictable and performance-based for sales too

That’s the practical bridge out of founder-led sales: package the thing.

Notable Quotes

“Profit First… might help operationally, but doesn’t help people along the way.”

“We were tracking… almost a vanity metric.”

“Slices is designed to teach people how the game is played.”

“Surprise, you already have Slices whether you think you do or not.”

Related Episodes

• Ep. 6: The Three Dials of Agency Profitability

• Ep. 13: If You Are Not Tracking Time, You Are Flying Blind

• Ep. 7: Profit Is Where the Real Work Is

Learn More / Get in Touch

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamkwon/
Slices → Join the Slices cohort (James mentioned new cohorts launching soon)
Figmints → https://www.figmints.com/

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Episode 61: Win Better Clients by Going Narrow

David Hoos

Interview: How NorthBuilt Escaped “Yes To Everything” and Built a Values-Led Niche in Midwest Manufacturing

Behind the Agency Podcast with Chris Morbitzer, CEO of NorthBuilt

Watch

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

• Core pain: Saying yes to everything turns you into a replaceable vendor that gets shopped on price.

• Unexpected insight: “Quality” isn’t positioning. Buyers don’t care about your craft unless it ties to a business outcome.

• Framework: Chris uses a simple filter: start with industry problems first, then match them to what you solve, then differentiate in that intersection.

• Mistake to avoid: Scaling your team for “future demand” in a services business like it’s a SaaS company.

• Second mistake to avoid: Treating values as a poster on the wall instead of a decision system (clients, hires, vendors, all of it).

• Notable tactic: Choose vendors based on values alignment (he switched CRMs to CapsuleCRM because trust mattered more than features).

• Real-world impact: Narrowing to Midwest manufacturing + “100% US” made sales/marketing clearer, increased trust, improved lead quality, and made event marketing actually make sense.

• Go-to-market change: Instead of trying to market everywhere, he goes deep in a few industry associations and becomes “the tech/AI person in the room.”

Does This Sound Familiar?

You say yes to almost everything, because the pipeline can't afford a no. So the case studies point in nine directions, the pitch gets rewritten for every call, and the buyer's only clean way to compare you to anyone else is price.

Chris Morbitzer's phrase for it is an inch deep and a mile wide. He learned the expensive version first.

NorthBuilt went from 2 people to nearly 10 in a year, betting on demand the way a software company does. And he'll tell you plainly that a services business grows but doesn't scale like that.

His filter runs the other way round from most positioning advice. Start with the problems an industry actually has. Then find which of them you solve, and stake your ground inside that overlap.

Quality doesn't count as positioning. Buyers don't pay for craft unless it's tied to money.

Now, what landed for NorthBuilt wasn't the industry alone. It was being 100% US-based in front of Midwest manufacturers who compete on made-in-America themselves.

And the payoff he cares about is small rooms. In a few industry associations, he's the technology person people know by name.

Take the free Bottleneck Score →

Meet the Guest

Chris Morbitzer is the CEO of NorthBuilt, a custom software agency that builds, supports, and maintains software applications—especially for Midwest mid-market manufacturers. After learning the hard way that “yes to everything” leads to chaos, low differentiation, and painful cash crunches, Chris now helps values-aligned companies get reliable software built by a team that understands their world.

(Before NorthBuilt, Chris and his co-founder Aaron were software developers who had worked in other agencies and wanted to do the work with more care and excellence.)

Episode Summary

1. From Craft Coterie to NorthBuilt

NorthBuilt started in early 2020 (right as COVID hit) under the original name Craft Coterie. The idea was craftsmanship: better code, more care, higher quality.

The market response was basically: “Cool… but I can’t see your code. I just need the app to work.”

That was the wake-up call: they were differentiating on something buyers couldn’t really feel.

2. The main tension: generalists get commoditized

They took whatever paid—mobile apps, browser games, random integrations—because the work was there (especially during early COVID contractor demand).

But it came with two costs:

• Constant context switching meant they couldn’t go deep.

• No industry focus meant they couldn’t become trusted advisors—just hourly labor.

“We were just the software vendor… always being shopped and compared.”

3. Their unique way of solving it: specialize around outcomes + values

Once they noticed a pattern—better delivery and fit in manufacturing and life sciences—they leaned into it. Not just “we do software,” but “we understand your world.”

The differentiator that landed was 100% US-based, which mattered to their Midwest manufacturing audience (because many of those companies also compete on “made in America”).

That’s important because it’s not a generic “we’re great” claim. It’s a belief their buyers already have.

4. Framework: how they found the right positioning

Chris described the consultant-led process in plain steps:

• Start with the industry’s big problems (don’t start with software).

• Identify where those problems intersect with what you’re actually good at solving.

• Decide what makes you meaningfully different inside that intersection.

• Build messaging by using the customer’s language, not agency language.

He said it created a full “messaging architecture” they reuse everywhere.

5. The cringe moment: scaling like SaaS

They grew fast and assumed they were headed for a hockey stick. So they staffed up from 2 people to nearly 10 in a year.

Then Chris came back from parental leave, checked the financials, and realized they were out of money. They cut back down to a team of 3.

The lesson: services businesses grow, but they don’t scale like products—and getting bigger can actually make margins worse.

6. Where the founder still belongs: values and market presence

Chris got super direct about a founder’s job after the reset: be the one who guards the values and shows up where your people are.

They stopped making money-first decisions and built around three values:

• Family

• Craftsmanship

• Conscientiousness

He even applies that to vendors (including choosing CapsuleCRM over bigger tools).

7. Serve a few thousand people deeply instead of everyone shallowly

Once positioning got tight, the day-to-day GTM got simpler:

• Pick a few highly specific industry associations.

• Don’t just sponsor—participate deeply (committees, boards, volunteering).

• Become a familiar face over years.

• Prefer smaller rooms where you can be “the expert in the room” (especially around tech/AI).

He summarized it well: serve a few thousand people deeply instead of trying to market to everyone shallowly.

Notable Quotes

“We were an inch deep and a mile wide.”

“This business grows, but it doesn’t scale.”

“We had given lip service to values.”

“In the small room, I’m the expert in the room.”

Related Episodes

• Ep. 10: If You Market to Everybody, You Market to No One

• Ep. 14: Specializing Is Scary. Not Specializing Is Worse.

• Ep. 45: Stop Saying Yes to Everything (Before It Kills Your Agency)

Learn More / Get in Touch

Visit → northbuilt.com
LinkedIn → Chris Morbitzer

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Episode 60: The Collective Model (and Why This Founder Stopped Hiring Full-Time)

David Hoos

Interview: How Chris LaFay Rebuilt His Agency With a Collective Model, Partnerships, and a Test-Drive Offer

Behind the Agency Podcast with Chris LaFay, Founder & CEO, Classic City

Watch

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

• The core pain: Agency owners hire too early and too permanently… then panic when the “guaranteed overhead” kicks in.

• The big mistake: Chris “hired on a hope” — hired full-time expecting he’d magically figure out sales/lead gen next.

• The pivot: He rebuilt with a nimble collective model (trusted freelancers + a few key roles), instead of stacking full-time payroll.

• The growth engine: He’s betting on agency partnerships + community-style events, not random referral luck.

• A practical tactic: Host a “content day” (video crew + time slots). He filled 16 slots in ~24 hours and ran 14 sessions in a day.

• A smart “foot-in-the-door” offer: A 2-week homepage prototype (test drive) that de-risks the big website project.

• Transparent pricing as a filter: Put pricing right on the homepage so bad-fit budgets self-select out early.

• Contrarian move: While other agencies ditch websites because they’re messy, he’s leaning in and trying to make weirder, more textured sites that stand out in an AI-search world.

Does This Sound Familiar?

You're stuck between two bad options. Hire now and hope the work shows up, or turn away a project because you don't have the hands. Both feel like a decision you'll regret in about four months.

Chris LaFay has a phrase for the first one. You don't hire on a hope. He did it himself, brought on full-time people expecting to figure out lead generation right after, and then met the overhead.

So he rebuilt Classic City as a collective. A few key roles on staff, trusted freelancers around them, and capacity that moves with demand instead of ahead of it. But the interesting part is what he noticed about where the work was already coming from.

An accidental network of 4 to 6 agency partners, with nobody being deliberate about it, drove 30 to 40% year-over-year growth for four years. So he made it intentional. He runs content days where a video crew books time slots for partners, and filled 16 slots in about 24 hours.

And he de-risks the big project with a small one. A two-week homepage prototype, with a $15K starting price published on his own homepage so the wrong budgets leave before the call.

Take the free Bottleneck Score →

Meet the Guest

Chris LaFay is the Founder & CEO of Classic City, a web design and development studio focused on building websites (and making that process feel a lot less confusing and risky). He’s been doing web work since he was a kid, and after a painful “growth phase” where he scaled the wrong way, he rebuilt the business with a lighter team model, a partnership-first growth approach, and a test-drive offer that helps clients try before they buy.

Episode Summary

1. The “hire on hope” origin story

Chris walked through a few phases of his business. The one that matters most here is 2016–2019, when he finally had money in the bank and did what a lot of founders do:

He hired full-time people fast, delegated aggressively, and assumed he’d “figure out sales” once he had time.

Spoiler: it didn’t work. Over about three years, the money ran out.

2. The main trap: overhead raises your minimum survival number

Chris describes the moment where payroll turns from “exciting growth” into “holy crap, I have to feed other families now.”

“You don’t hire on a hope… once you go into that full-time and that guaranteed money… your minimum to survive is that much higher.”

This is one of those agency misconceptions I’ll push on a bit:
A lot of founders think hiring reduces stress because it removes work. In practice, it often moves the stress into a different place: you’re now carrying fixed costs that don’t care if leads dry up.

3. His unique approach: the collective model

Instead of trying to keep every seat filled with full-time staff, he prefers “drafting” the right team per project:

• A small set of dependable designers (with different styles)

• A small set of dependable developers (with different strengths: WordPress, Shopify, etc.)

• A project manager

• A couple strategic leads for discovery

The key detail: these aren’t flaky moonlighters. He wants people who do this professionally, so when a project comes in, the answer is “yes” most of the time.

4. The method: rebuild, then delegate the right things

In the 2019–2025 rebuild phase he:

• Took more work back on himself

• Added a project manager (promoted someone already close to the business)

• Hired part-time contractors (dev + design) to handle overflow

• Avoided massive overhead while regaining stability

It’s like upgrading a house one room at a time instead of taking out a massive loan and hoping the remodel pays for itself.

5. The partnership playbook (that doesn’t collect dust)

You called out a real agency-world failure mode: “let’s do a referral agreement” … then nobody does anything.

Chris’s answer is basically: stop making partnerships theoretical. Make them shared experiences.

Examples he’s actively running:

• Content Day: video crew + coworking space + 16 time slots, founders show up and walk away with clips

• Agency owner hangout day: small, intentional, in-person, “talk shop” without the conference vibe

• Co-hosted events: one partner brings 70% of the room, the other brings 30% — split the cost, both meet new people

That’s way more real than “hey keep me in mind.”

6. Why he chose websites (when others are ditching them)

He noticed a trend: a lot of agencies were trying to get away from websites and go narrower into SEO/PPC/branding.

Chris basically said: “Cool. If nobody wants the messy job… maybe that’s the opportunity.”

Also: doing marketing retainers made it hard to tell a clean story. Websites let him simplify the offer, simplify pricing, and simplify delivery.

7. The test-drive offer: a homepage prototype in 2 weeks

He wanted a way to reduce risk for buyers who hate the “we won’t know until we start” problem.

So he created a prototype offer:

• Design a homepage in 2 weeks for a smaller price

• If they move forward, credit that cost toward the full project

• If not, they still keep the work (Figma files + notes) as a launch pad

This is also a partnership tool: branding agencies with no web team can bridge from brand → site without committing their client to a full build immediately.

Notable Quotes

“You don’t hire on a hope.”

“I’m putting a lot of my eggs in the community basket.”

“The entire structure of the homepage is what a proposal is.”

“Rather than spending thousands on ads, why not get people in a room together?”

Related Episodes

• Ep. 11: Stop Hiring Avengers (Build the Mickey Mouse Club Instead)

• Ep. 43: Why This Mobile Agency Tells Leads They Do Not Need an App

• Ep. 25: One-Page Proposals, 4-Day Weeks, and a 90% Faster Close Process

Learn More / Get in Touch

Visit → classiccity.com
LinkedIn → Chris LaFay

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Episode 59: Kill the Dead-End Thank You Page (and 5X Your Webinar Conversions)

David Hoos

Behind the Agency Podcast with Logan Lyles, Founder of Demand Shift

Watch

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

• Most B2B webinars “feel fine” but quietly fail at the only thing that matters: turning registrants into actual sales conversations.

• Logan went from a 1–2% conversion rate from webinar signup → booked call to ~10% by redesigning the signup and follow-up flow—not by chasing bigger attendance.

• The core fix is a 2-step signup process: registration → short qualifying survey → instant option to book a call if they’re a fit.

• Moving the CTA up (in front of Q&A and even into the signup flow) dramatically outperforms the classic “hard pitch in the last 2 minutes” move.

• Webinars still work: Logan’s survey of 250+ B2B marketers found a ~35% live attendance rate and an effectiveness score just over 7/10—but only when you tweak the format and funnel.

• Email is still the #1 driver of webinar registrations, but most teams only tap their own list. Logan uses cold email and partner newsletters to get net-new registrants.

• Platform doesn’t matter as much as two things: owning your registration flow (to run the 2-step process) and sending real calendar invites (ICS) to boost attendance.

• Logan gives away the full framework on purpose—because people who DIY often become referrers, future clients at their next job, or ideal buyers for a lighter “show you how” product.

Does This Sound Familiar?

You ran the webinar. A few hundred registered, about a third turned up, and the follow-up sequence went out on schedule. Nobody booked anything.

So the natural read is that the content wasn't good enough. Logan Lyles would point at the plumbing instead, and there are two separate leaks.

Roughly 65% of registrants never attend. And under 1% of them ever book a call.

The second one is where the money is, because 100% of registrants see the thank-you page and almost every B2B team treats it as a dead end. Logan rebuilt the flow into two steps: register, then a short qualifying survey, then an immediate option to book a call if they're a fit.

That single change took signup-to-call conversion from 1 or 2% to roughly 10%.

He's run it with a dozen clients now. He expected people to resent being asked so early, and the opposite happened.

Now, he gives the whole framework away on purpose, which tells you something about the offer. The people who do it themselves were never buying done-for-you, and a good share of them refer him later.

Take the free Bottleneck Score →

Meet the Guest

Logan Lyles is the Founder of Demand Shift, a boutique agency that helps B2B teams turn webinars into a reliable engine for qualified sales calls, instead of a vanity brand play.

After 10+ years in B2B tech sales, Logan helped grow a podcast production agency, then ran podcast + webinar programs in-house at Teamwork.com, and later led sales and marketing at an agency called Business Builders. There, he built the webinar framework that 5×’d conversion from signup to booked call.

Now, Logan helps B2B marketing and sales teams fix their “conversion cliff” and use webinars as a serious pipeline channel, not just another content checkbox.

Episode Summary

1. From “Okay Webinars” to a 5× Conversion Breakthrough

Logan didn’t set out to be “the webinar guy.” He spent a decade in B2B tech sales, joined a fast-growing podcast agency in 2018, then took his first in-house marketing role at Teamwork.com, running both podcasts and webinars.

The webinars worked on the surface; good attendance, strong brand lift, engaged audiences, but when he looked at direct pipeline, the numbers were underwhelming.

Later, back on the agency side at Business Builders running sales and marketing, he asked:

“What would it look like if webinars were actually designed to create sales calls, not just content?”

He experimented, built a new approach, and 5x’d conversion from webinar signup to booked call. That became the seed of Demand Shift.

2. The Main Pain: The Webinar “Conversion Cliff”

Most marketing teams have the same pattern:

1. Promote a webinar.

2. Get a decent number of registrants.

3. Watch 65% of them never show up.

4. Then convert a tiny slice of the live attendees into a next step.

Logan’s research with 250+ B2B marketers found:

• ~35% average live attendance (65% no-show)

• Webinars ranked just over 7/10 as a lead gen tactic—promising, but underperforming for most teams.

The big problem?
There’s a conversion cliff at two points:

• Registrant → live attendee

• Registrant → booked sales call

And on top of that, follow-up is usually weak and generic—“Thanks for attending” vs “Sorry we missed you”—with almost no meaningful segmentation.

“If only 35% show up live, and your CTA is buried in the last 5 minutes, most of your registrants are never even seeing your offer.”

3. His Unique Way of Solving It: Design for Sales Calls, Not Just Attendance

Logan’s angle isn’t “get more registrations at all costs.”

It’s: make the existing demand way more efficient.

He does that by:

• Moving the CTA earlier in the webinar (before Q&A, like a mid-roll ad break).

• Redesigning the registration flow into a 2-step sign-up that includes qualification and a direct path to booking a call.

• Using webinars as both thought leadershipandlead gen, not one or the other.

• Treating webinars as a series, not one-offs—building trust over time.

Real example:
One client went from zero calls booked from their webinars to almost two dozen from a single small change, moving the CTA before Q&A instead of bolting it on at the end.

4. The Webinar Fast Track Framework

Logan’s core framework has five parts:

1. Promo Tactics That Work

   • Email is still the top driver of registrations.

   • Most teams only use their own list.

   • Logan also uses:

     • Cold email: inviting ICP prospects to a helpful webinar instead of pitching a demo.

     • Partner newsletters or strategic partners: paying or swapping access to the right email audiences.

2. 2-Step Sign-Up Process

   • Step 1: Simple registration form (name + email).

   • Step 2: Instead of a dead-end “Thank you” page, send them to a short survey with 5–7 questions:

     • Qualifying (company size, role, industry, etc.)

     • Discovery (problems, priorities, current tools)

     • Ending with: “Do you want help with this? Want to book a call / demo?”

   • If they qualify and say yes, show the calendar right there.

   That shift alone took Logan’s signup → booked call rate from 1–2% to about 10%. Across a dozen clients, he’s seen some hit 18–19%.

3. High-Value Live Show

   • Mix thought leadership and lead gen.

   • Webinars work best as an ongoing series, not random one-offs.

   • Use live Q&A, chat, and interaction to build trust and familiarity.

4. Personalized, Segmented Follow-Up

   • Use survey answers to segment follow-up beyond just “attended vs didn’t attend.”

   • Speak directly to their role, pain, and readiness instead of sending one bland sequence to everyone.

5. Repurposing & Amplifying

   • Every webinar becomes:

     • Short clips

     • LinkedIn posts

     • Blog content

     • Email content

   • Push people back to the on-demand replay for those who prefer to binge later at 2× speed.

5. Common Mistakes Logan Sees (and How to Fix Them)

Mistake #1: Dead-end thank you pages.
You send every registrant to a page that basically says “Cool, you’re in.”
No next step. No value. No qualification.

Fix: Turn that thank you page into a qualifying survey + offer to book a call for those who are ready.

Mistake #2: Burying the CTA at the end.
By the time you pitch your offer, half the live audience has already dropped.

Fix: Move the CTA before Q&A—treat it like a natural “if this was helpful and you want more, here’s the next step” moment.

Mistake #3: Only emailing your own list.
You’re not adding new people to the funnel—just re-warming the same ones.

Fix: Use cold email and partner newsletters to reach net-new ICP audiences with a low-friction invite: “Join this webinar” instead of “Get on a demo.”

6. “I feel like I’ve been on this call a hundred times”

Webinars are basically “founder or SME time at scale.”

Logan’s story about the prospect who said:

“No, we’ve never been on a call… but I feel like I’ve been on this call a hundred times.”

That came from watching Logan host webinars for years—live, on video, in chat—before they ever had a 1:1 conversation.

For agencies, that means:

• Your founder / senior expert on camera builds trust way faster than another AI-written blog post.

• You can still scale your time by packaging that face-time into a repeatable series, not random one-offs.

7. Hiring, Scaling, and Productizing the Framework

Logan isn’t just doing this as a pure done-for-you service.

He’s already thinking in “offer ladder” terms:

• Done-for-you implementation (for teams that want him to run the whole thing)

• A downsell / DIY course + light coaching for teams that can execute but want the playbook

• Generously sharing the framework publicly to:

  • Help non-buyers who’ll never be a fit anyway

  • Create future referrals and “we used your framework and crushed it” testimonials

  • Stay top-of-mind when those same people change roles and suddenly have budget

He encourages agencies to think the same way:

“There are people you can show how to do it, people you can do it with, and people you can do it for, and there’s probably an offer for each.”

Notable Quotes

“Most people treat the thank you page like a dead end. But 100% of your registrants see it. Why wouldn’t you use that moment to move them forward?”

“I thought people might be annoyed that I moved the CTA way up in the process. After testing it with a dozen clients, the opposite has been true.”

“One prospect told me, ‘We’ve never been on a call. But I feel like I’ve been on this call a hundred times,’ because he’d watched so many webinars live.”

“The people who DIY with my framework were probably never going to buy done-for-you anyway—but they become some of my best referrers and testimonials.”

Related Episodes

• Ep. 1: You Do Not Need More Tactics

• Ep. 23: LinkedIn Live as a BD Engine for Relationship-Driven Agencies

• Ep. 46: How an 18-Year CMS Agency Keeps Clients for 5+ Years (Without a Sales Team)

Learn More / Get in Touch

Visit → https://demandshift.co
Join the B2B Webinars for Lead Gen Report Waitlist → https://demandshift.co/report Download the Audience Research Prompt → https://demandshift.co/prompt
Connect on LinkedIn → Logan Lyles

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