Nick Westergaard is a strategist, speaker, author, and educator. He is the chief brand strategist at Brand Driven Digital, where he helps organizations build better brands online. He teaches at the University of Iowa in the Tippie College of Business, is a regular columnist on The Cedar Rapids Gazette, and is also the host of the popular podcast, "On Brand."

• How Nick took his traditional agency and transitioned it to becoming a digital powerhouse
• The differences and similarities between traditional and digital marketing and why they really aren't all that different
• Social Brand Forum: Brand Driven Digital's yearly live event
• The business strategy behind having a live event
• Why you should get out and attend events
• The importance of prioritizing your agency as a client
• Why experimentation is so important for your agency's success

• Website: www.branddrivendigital.com
• Twitter: @NickWestergaard

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Lee McKnight Jr. is the Director of Business Development for RSW/US in Cincinnati, Ohio. They are a new business development firm that works solely with agencies and marketing services firms. After graduating law school, he ran away as fast possible from that profession and worked for an internet healthcare start-up until the bubble burst and his magical stock options disappeared in the late 90s.

Fast forward through some interesting marketing and sales positions to RSW/US where Lee has spent the last 8 years working with agencies of all types to help drive their new business efforts. A big fan of history, comics and horror novels, he's currently in a few bands in Louisville and Cincinnati and likes to pretend that chicks dig married, 44-year-old guys with kids that play in cover bands.

• How to prevent your agency from making the major mistakes that agencies make all the time
• Why agencies need to specialize instead of generalize
• New business: how to develop a better, simpler process
• How to use a delicately balanced process that uses all different kinds of marketing
• Why patience is so key in closing on new business
• The importance of having one person who is the leader on a project
• Why there needs to be a balance between showcasing the figurehead and the agency
• The tools you're going to need to put into practice the objectives discussed in this episode

• Website: www.rswus.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Twitter: @LeeMcKnightJr

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Drew McLellan is the Top Dog at Agency Management Institute. He has also owned and operated his own agency over the last 20-years. And all through the year, he straddles the fence of working in his agency and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies in a variety of ways.

AMI works with agency owners:

• By leading agency owner peer groups
• Offers workshops for owners and their leadership teams
• Offers AE bootcamps
• Conducts individual agency owner coaching
• Does on site consulting.

Because he works with a lot of agencies every year -- he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog "One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read."

• Stale employees: how to recognize them and why they're holding your agency back
• Can these employees be saved? It's a firm maybe.
• How to have the necessary conversation with stale employees -- you owe them honesty
• The kinds of goals to set to see measurable change and growth before determining their place inside your agency
• The costs to you as an agency owner for working with stale employees to up their game
• How to recognize if you really do have to let the employee go
• How to make a decision while realizing that you aren't the only person it affects

• Email: [email protected]

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Art Boulay is the owner of Strategic Talent Management and offers common sense solutions for hiring better employees and making current employees stronger. Art has partnered with AMI for years and has created (through testing A players) profiles for the ideal candidates for most agency specific positions.

• Assessment tools for hiring the right employee lead to more objective and effective hiring
• How Art's tools can assess agencies, what makes them unique, and how that will help to find the right future employees
• From hire to retire: what employers and employees should do to ensure that employees don't leave right away
• How to use assessments to counteract biases that we bring to the table during the hiring process
• Why asking specific types of questions and having at least two people conducting an interview will reveal what you actually need to know about interviewees
• Tips for making ads as attractive as possible to the people you want to hire and unappealing to people you don't even want to interview
• Why age is not an indicator of knowledge and skill: hire leaders, not experience

• Website: www.strategictalentmgmt.com

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Ann Handley speaks and writes about how you can rethink the way your business markets. Cited in Forbes as the most influential woman in Social Media and recognized by ForbesWoman as one of the top 20 women bloggers, Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, a training and education company with the largest community of marketers in its category. Her book, "Everybody Writes: Your Go-to Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content," is a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

She is a monthly columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, a member of the LinkedIn Influencer program, and co-author of the best-selling book on content marketing, "Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, eBooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business." She currently has 290,000 followers on Twitter and writes about content, marketing, and life at AnnHandley.com.

A pioneer in digital marketing, Ann is the co-founder of ClickZ.com, which was one of the first sources of interactive marketing news and commentary. She started her career as a business journalist and editor.

• How agencies can educate their clients
• The MarketingProfs B2B Forum
• Strategies for working on better content instead of lots of content
• Why you need to focus on writing during the hiring process and throughout your agency's work
• Resources for editing whether you have the budget for a human editor or not
• Why you need to find writers with an audience-centric point of view (and the pros and cons of hiring journalists)
• Tips for creating spaces for creating your best writing

• Website: www.annhandley.com
• Twitter: @annhandley
• Twitter: @marketingprofs
• Company website: www.marketingprofs.com
• B2B Marketing Forum: mpb2b.marketingprofs.com

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Jami Oetting is the editor of Hubspot's Agency Post, which is a blog for advertising and marketing agency professionals. She led the launch of the publication in 2011 and its growth before Hubspot acquired it in 2013. Hubspot works with about 2,500 agency partners and about 15,000 customers worldwide. Now, Jami's blog is one of the largest blogs for agency professionals. It offers incredible content to help agency leaders grow their business.

• How agencies can and should be getting clients now that we're not bound by geography
• Why getting business through referrals is still viable -- but why the source of those referrals is changing
• Why buyers have as much if not more information than sellers and what that means for your agency
• Using inbound marketing to attract the right kind of clients (and turn away the wrong ones)
• Why you need to stick with inbound marketing content creation
• Why you absolutely must specialize on a niche if you want to survive
• Why you will struggle to attract great employees if you don't have a strong new business plan
• Why you need someone on your team who is responsible for marketing your agency
• How to come up with content for your blog
• Why interviews are a great way to create content
• What agency owners can do right now to get the ideas from this podcast into place

• Website: blog.hubspot.com/agency
• Email: [email protected]
• Twitter: @jamioetting

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Gavin is a marketing technologist, strategist, and advisor. He is the founder of the Disruptor's Handbook, a network of entrepreneurs and innovators that help businesses innovate like startups, which Gavin calls "marketing lead innovation."

He has led new venture startups for organizations like PwC, developed digital strategy and execution for global brands on both the agency and client sides, and spent some time as an analyst in digital transformation for award-winning analyst and advisory firm, Constellation Research.

He also has extensive international experience in driving measurable outcomes via digital customer experience platforms, digital strategy, and executing innovative content driven campaigns.

• Gavin's long road that ultimately led him to become a marketer
• Creating value for customers by working on their problems
• The evolving role of agencies
• Why you have to be transparent about what it is that you do
• How to get your employees to become better strategic thinkers
• A "lean canvas" and creating a business out of the problem that has an idea as a solution
• How to have better business conversations
• Improving your business by bringing together your best advocates and harshest critics
• Getting past the fear that comes with working transparently
• What agencies can do today to become better at honing in on their clients' problems
• Tips for fostering innovative thinking throughout your entire organization
• Why you need to start thinking like a startup

• Website: www.servantofchaos.com
• Handbook website: disruptorshandbook.com
• Twitter: @servantofchaos

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Drew McLellan is the Top Dog at Agency Management Institute. For the past 21 years, he has also owned and operated his own agency. Drew's unique vantage point as being both an active agency owner and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies throughout the year, give him a unique perspective on running an agency today.

AMI works with agency owners by:

• Leading agency owner peer groups
• Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
• Offering AE bootcamps
• Conducting individual agency owner coaching
• Doing on-site consulting
• Offering online courses in agency new business and account service

Because he works with those 250+ agencies every year — he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog "One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read."

• The things we say about our agencies that make them all sound the same
• The terms every agency uses to describe themselves
• Why you can't say you're good at everything
• Finding clients that are the right fit
• Understanding who you are as an agency
• The benefits of defining your "why"
• Remembering that hiring your agency is a huge risk for the person making that decision and what you can do to alleviate that person's fears
• An example: how my agency McLellan Marketing Group defines itself

• Email: [email protected]

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Brian Shea is the founder of Shea Consulting where he helps companies streamline their business development systems so they can enjoy consistent, sustainable success. Most business owners flinch at the word "systems" but in reality a system that is simple and repeatable helps free business owners to be more creative, more successful and more profitable.

• Brian's background in consulting
• What is keeping smaller companies from utilizing processes and systems
• Why systems and processes are so crucial for scaling
• Freeing up capacity through delegation
• Why processes and systems can often fail inside agencies
• Making sure the system or process matches the actual problem
• The four-step assessment Brian uses with his clients for finding the right systems
• The importance on getting clear with specific goals
• Who in an agency keeps systems from succeeding
• How to bring processes to agencies that pride themselves on their creativity
• What happens when systems aren't put in place
• How to solve the scope creep problem
• What systems every agency needs to have
• What you can do today to begin being more process driven

• Consulting website: www.sheaconsulting.biz
• Blog and newsletter: www.sheaconsulting.biz/blog

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Adam Carroll is quickly being recognized as one of the top financial educators in the country based on his core message of "you are the architect of your own life." Adam has presented all over the globe. Over 500 universities have been lucky enough to host him and he has presented some amazing TedTalks all over the world.

In 2014, Adam successfully crowdfunded a documentary on student loan debt titled Broke, Busted & Disgusted, and he raised nearly $70,000 for the film in 45 days. The mission of the film is to start a national debate about changing the way we fund college and not crippling 20 something's with mountains of debt.

• Adam's documentary "Broke, Busted, & Disgusted"
• Accountability and business owners: why you need accountability partners
• What agencies should be doing at the tail end of the year
• How Adam saves time for his family by using a Power Priority List
• What to look for (and look out for) in an accountability partner
• What different kinds of accountability partners you should have (hint: they shouldn't all be entrepreneurs)
• Mastermind groups vs. accountability partners: do you need both? If not, which one is right for you?
• The commitment required for mastermind groups and accountability partners
• What you can do right now to act on the ideas from this episode

• Book: Essentialism by Greg McKeown
• Book: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Podcast: Dream, Think, Do by Mitch Matthews, episode: "Masterminds"

• Business Website: www.adamspeaks.com
• Podcast: www.buildabiggerlife.com
• Film: www.brokebusteddisgusted.com

We're proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!