Behind the Agency

You're 30 episodes in. The audio is clean, the guests are good, and you can't point to a single deal that came from it. So the show sits in the marketing column, gets judged on downloads, and loses.

John Tyreman founded Red Cedar Marketing and has spent more than a decade in agencies, including Hinge Marketing and Silverback Strategies, where he launched The Visible Expert and The Digital Marketing Troop. His argument is that you are measuring the wrong asset. A podcast can be a sales tool, a recruiting tool, or a wedge into named accounts, and each of those is judged differently from an audience play.

What's in this one

• The format worth stealing: put a client and their account manager on the same episode, so a prospect hears what working with you is actually like
• Why that beats a written case study, and why the sales team can send it instead of explaining
• Recording a pilot on your phone in a conference room, because a prototype exists to make the idea real enough to react to, not to sound good
• Measuring ROI in stages: assets produced per episode, then guest quality, then which topics resonate, then whether it enables sales, recruiting or ABM
• Why comparing one clip to the last is a bad resonance signal, and the three or four person listener focus group he uses instead
• The cobbler's children problem: agencies market clients brilliantly and freeze when it is their own turn
• Treating the recording as a source asset that yields audio, video and text, and the workflow he runs to get all three
• Why a podcast lowers buying friction on high-ticket services: people get to research you at their own pace

John Tyreman

Red Cedar Marketing: redcedarmarketing.com
">https://www.redcedarmarketing.com/">redcedarmarketing.com

He also hosts Breaking BizDev and Podcasting in Professional Services, and LinkedIn is where he spends his time.

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/podcast-case-study-move">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

The revenue chart looks great. Headcount is up, the client list is longer, and the profit line has barely moved in two years. Somewhere in there you added complexity that nobody priced.

Sam Tomlinson is a partner at Warschawski, a boutique agency founded in 1996, and he came to this from finance, where he modelled real estate transactions between $50M and $500M. Agencies were something he hired, not worked for, and that view never left. Top-line growth is easy and profit is hard, so the number he works in is contribution dollars: revenue minus every cost of winning, delivering and servicing the account.

What's in this one

• The founding idea behind Warschawski: build the agency you would actually want to hire, which starts by sitting on the client's side of the table
• Why 75 to 80% of the team has five or more years of experience, on the view that clients should not be paying for your training program
• The arithmetic that reframes a client list: $500K of billings costing $480K to serve is worth less than $100K costing $40K
• The rule of 1 and 3: everything breaks at 1 to 3 people, again at 3 to 10, again at 10 to 30, and documentation is the only way through
• The referral ceiling he hit at roughly 20 people and 25 clients, and why referrals are fragile: people change roles and companies get acquired
• Building the pipeline before you need it, because you do not hunt when you are hungry
• His three-legged stool for standing out: thought leadership, operational proof, and financial accountability, with the third doing most of the work
• Why impressions and clicks are table stakes, and profit is the language executives actually care about
• Quoting ranges rather than single outcomes, and modelling the funnel so problems get diagnosed instead of argued about
• Saying no to bad-fit clients as a growth strategy rather than a luxury

Sam Tomlinson

His newsletter: samtomlinson.me/newsletter

">https://www.samtomlinson.me/newsletter">samtomlinson.me/newsletter

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/profit-not-pixels">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

You raised your rates. Revenue went up. The margin came out about the same, and you're working more hours than you were before the increase.

Mike Koziol trained as a lawyer in Poland and worked as a fraud investigator before building and running agencies across Europe, Canada and the US. He has since worked with more than 900 businesses, and he brings the same habit to all of them: follow the money rather than guess why things feel stressful. His view of growth is blunt. It's a vanity metric if it doesn't reach your take-home profit, and plenty of large agencies can quote revenue, cash flow and headcount while having no idea what they earn per client.

What's in this one

• The three dials on agency profit, pricing, cost and efficiency, and why almost everyone turns the first one and almost nobody touches the third
• Eight people on a kickoff call for a $3K a month client, and why that is an efficiency problem rather than a generosity problem
• Be the orange, not another apple: if your service compares like for like, the cheapest one wins
• Why cutting your price tends to buy you stressed clients with small budgets and large expectations
• Financial hygiene before strategy: clean the P&L and the card statements, and cancel the Black Friday software nobody opens
• The two classic time sinks, overbuilt onboarding and over-reporting, and recording onboarding once so it can be reused forever
• DAD, the cleanup method: delete the step, automate it, or delegate it to the fewest people who can do it
• Why "we rely on referrals" usually means hoping, and his four-part system: be proactive, incentivise, give people the words, and follow up every 60 to 90 days
• Profit per client and per service line as the number you cannot make decisions without

Mike Koziol

mikekoziol.com
">https://mikekoziol.com">mikekoziol.com

His weekly newsletter and his workshop on scaling activities by revenue stage are both on his site.

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/profit-isnt-a-vibe">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

You gave away the audit. A proper one, with findings and a plan, because you figured the quality would speak for itself. They thanked you and went quiet.

Ben Zettler ran that experiment properly and counted: five detailed free audits, zero clients. The people who want free work were never buying, and the hours spent on them are the hours not spent where buyers already are. He never set out to run an agency either. He wanted to work in sports, found Shopify in 2013 while building a sunglasses store, and kept saying yes to the next thing until he realised he had a business.

What's in this one

• The accidental origin: college athletics, then Steiner Sports, then a sunglasses store on Shopify around store number 41,000, which turned out to be the luckiest decision he made
• The question from his Shopify partner manager that flipped the switch: "What would it take for you to do this full-time?"
• Why he says agency growth is squishier than the neat staircase most strategy content sells: try things, double down on what works, fix what breaks, repeat
• Responsiveness as a moat: more than 6,000 inquiries answered in the Shopify Experts Marketplace over two to three years, and being told he was the most responsive partner in the ecosystem
• Spotting a distribution channel that lets you give a little to get a lot, and why most agency owners ignore those windows
• One W-2 and roughly 20 contractors: the flexibility it buys, and the bottleneck it creates when sales and partnerships both run through the founder
• Why his CRM is a colour-coded Google Sheet, and why Loom replaced the free audit in his sales process
• The clients who leave for cheaper and come back, and what that forced him to do about pricing and packaging
• His advice to anyone early: make the work visible with a portfolio and case studies, and get into partner ecosystems before they are crowded

Ben Zettler

Zettler Digital: zettlerdigital.com

">https://zettlerdigital.com">zettlerdigital.com

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/take-the-opportunity-in-front-of-you-partnership-first-growth-and-why-free-work-doesnt-convert">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

You started a show because it seemed like the thing to do. A few guests in, the conversations are pleasant and the episodes are fine, and nothing has come of it.

Joe Casabona is a podcast coach and automation specialist who has been at this for over a decade. His diagnosis isn't audio quality and it isn't booking. Two people talking isn't a format anymore, it's table stakes. What sets a show apart now is a story with a problem, a tension and an ending, and that conclusion is uncomfortable for most agency owners: the interview show you're running is likely the wrong shape for what you want out of it.

What's in this one

• The panic attack in his kitchen that made him redesign a business that depended on him doing everything
• Why more than 70% of new podcasts stop after 7 episodes, and why it's a buffer problem rather than a discipline problem
• The story arc he wants every episode to have: problem, then tension, then resolution, with the listener as the hero and the host as the guide
• His pre-launch structure: name the ideal listener, write a mission statement for the show, plan 25 to 30 episode ideas, record 7 to 10 before launching, then stay 2 to 3 months ahead
• The habits that guarantee pod fade, including not researching guests "because I want to be surprised" and editing your own audio
• Where the founder still belongs: crafting the message, clarifying the story, deciding what matters, and delegating the rest
• His split on where the time goes, 70 to 80% on the content itself and the remainder on editing, scheduling and distribution

Joe Casabona

casabona.org
">https://casabona.org">casabona.org

His automation database and podcast resources are on his site.

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/stop-overcomplicating-your-podcast">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

Marketing says the leads are there. Business development says the leads are junk. Both have a dashboard that proves it, and the founder gets to referee the same argument every quarter.

Joseph Lewin is Director of Growth at Proofpoint Marketing, a go-to-market firm for technical professional services, and he has sat on both sides of this. His read: it is almost never effort. The two teams are graded on different things, and the word lead means something different to each of them, so nobody is wrong and nothing gets fixed.

What's in this one

• Why "growth" is marketing and biz dev as one engine, reporting to one leader, on one plan
• The two scoreboards, and the argument they guarantee: more leads, can't pull them out of a hat, these are garbage, you're not nurturing them
• Defining a lead so both sides mean the same thing, and keeping the CRM clean enough that neither needs a weekly trial to prove it
• Putting your marketer on sales calls to take the customer's exact words, instead of a whiteboard in a back room
• Helping biz dev make content out of what they already read and attend, rather than asking them to write an article
• Why most of this is change management wearing a marketing costume

Joseph Lewin

Director of Growth at Proofpoint Marketing.

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/your-leads-problem-might-be-a-language-problem">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

You sell the thinking and you also sell the doing. Even if you'd never pad a recommendation, the client still has to do the extra mental work of wondering. Kevin Whelan's analogy: the dentist telling you which procedure you need, the vet reaching for the vaccines.

He'd been building websites since the early 2000s and running it as a real business since about 2014, so he had a decade to watch that pattern before he changed it. What he built instead he calls a deconstructed agency: he sells strategy, advisory, analytics and vendor selection, then introduces clients directly to execution partners at cost. No markup, no referral fee. What's left is a higher-profit advisory business with no delivery payroll under it.

What's in this one

• Why scaling an agency is not "more clients", it is becoming a different kind of business: more people, more projects, more scope friction
• The deconstructed agency in full, and why it moves you from across the table to the same side of it
• The trust problem with selling advice and execution in one deal, and why being ethical does not dissolve it
• How to narrow or productize without blowing up your site: spin the new offer off as its own lane, owned by the agency
• The ladder Kevin sees, and where the leverage is: execution, management, advising, education
• Why services marketing is mostly de-risking, so proof and case studies beat clever messaging

Mentioned

Alan Weiss, Value-Based Fees

Mike Michalowicz, Profit First

Kevin Whelan

kevin.me
">https://kevin.me/">kevin.me

He also runs Mindshare, his membership for consultants building solo practices.

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/the-deconstructed-agency-model-how-to-sell-strategy-without-scaling-a-team">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

There's a target list somewhere in a slide deck. Fifty logos you'd love to work with, picked because they'd look good on the website. Twelve months on, you've closed none of them, and nobody has ever asked why.

Mason Cosby's fix is to swap it for one you can actually reach. He calls it the Reality 50: fifty accounts where you already have a way in, whether that's people you know, old colleagues who moved, or past clients sitting in new seats.

What's in this one

• Why ABM is a growth strategy, not a campaign, and why it mostly isn't your game if you're B2C
• Dream 50 versus Reality 50, and why the aspirational list survives planning cycle after planning cycle
• How to find where your accounts already gather: what they list on LinkedIn, what they mention, and how to just ask
• The four sales activation plays that use data you already have: closed-lost, pricing-page visitors, missed meetings, win-back
• Why ABM fails, which is almost always that sales and marketing never agreed on what winning means
• Why Mason wasn't running ABM for Scrappy ABM yet, six months and roughly $500K in revenue in

Mason Cosby

Scrappy ABM: scrappyabm.com
">https://scrappyabm.com/">scrappyabm.com

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

His show: Scrappy">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scrappy-abm/id1693508482">Scrappy ABM on Apple Podcasts

Behind the Agency

Full write-up and takeaways: hausadvisors.com/podcast
">https://www.hausadvisors.com/podcast/abm-without-the-fancy-tech-the-reality-50-playbook-for-agency-pipeline">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