PODCAST · business
Behind the Agency
by David Hoos
Candid interviews with agency founders on positioning, pricing, pipeline, and what it actually takes to build a business that runs without them.
Episodes
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Episode 76: 4 Bids, 5x Apart. He Built It Himself in 3 Months.
Tatum Bisley ran an RFP to four agencies. Bids came back 4-5x apart, none could evidence their AI, and the client built it himself in three months.
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Episode 75: 90% First-Time Buyers From the Channel Most Brands Dismiss
Reid Colson of Revit Digital on why affiliate traffic is over 90 percent first-time buyers, converts 25 to 50 percent higher, and now feeds the AI answers your buyers read first.
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Episode 74: $3M to $8M in One Year. Here’s What He Stopped Doing.
Jason Hennessey of Hennessey Digital shares how replacing himself function by function took the agency from $3M to $8M in a year, and what made it worth buying at $22M.
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Episode 73: The 3-Legged Stool: Why Agency Partnerships Fail Without All Three Relationships
Adam Weil of White Rabbit Group shares his framework for turning one-off white label projects into long-term agency partnerships, and the three stakeholder relationships that make or break them.
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Episode 72: Why Your LinkedIn Ads Aren't Working (And What Thought Leader Ads Change)
Dylan Ciaccio explains how agencies use LinkedIn thought leader ads to communicate differentiated positioning, without niching down your whole business.
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Episode 71: How a B2B SaaS Agency Runs Its Own Demand Gen Playbook (and What Agencies Can Steal From It)
Brian Koffler of D.I.G.S. Marketing shares the LinkedIn paid ads playbook for agencies: positioning first, 70/30 budget split, and a 6-month runway.
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Episode 70: He Sold a $24M Dev Agency. Now He’s Building the Ops Tool He Wished Existed
Joe Conway grew a dev shop to $24M, sold it, and came back with Treya, software built to close the operational gaps between the tools agencies already use. The technical-to-CEO shift, the 18-month enterprise deal, and the forward metrics every dev shop should track.
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Episode 69: The Agency That Grew Revenue Without Adding Clients
Tommy Chang of Kreativa Group explains how his 8-person agency grew revenue through upselling alone, why they sell outcomes instead of services, and how staying generalist (and obsessing over retention) beat the niche-down playbook.
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Episode 68: "We're in the '94 and '95 Era of the Internet. Well, for AI.": 26 Years Building Orases with Nick Damoulakis
Nick Damoulakis on 26 years building Orases, landing the NFL from a Ritz Carlton lunch, and why AI is the 1994 moment most agency leaders are missing.
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Episode 67: Why "Do You Know Anyone?" Is the Wrong Referral Ask and What to Say Instead
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...
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Episode 66: The Partner Buyout, the $4 Billing Error, and Why "Do More With More" Beats Cutting Heads
Ben Fox on the 13-year partnership that split, the $4 Cloudflare billing error that built ZeroArc, and why he's growing headcount instead of cutting it.
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Episode 65: He Built a High 7-Figure Agency With Zero MRR. And Your Gross Margins Are Probably Wrong.
Sam built a high seven-figure agency almost entirely on project revenue, because MRR is a billing mechanism rather than a growth strategy. He has also never seen an agency P&L with correct gross margins, and thinks 50% is the floor before you spend anything on marketing.
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Episode 64: She Had Near-100% Contractor Retention for 11 Years. Here's the Actual Method.
Natasha Golinsky kept her 14-person contractor team intact for 11 years. The method is simpler than you think, and most agency owners never do it.
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Episode 63: 28% of Revenue Came from AI Recommendations
How Sembit generates agency leads from AI search. Learn how ChatGPT, citations, and prompt strategy now drive real client demand.
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Episode 62: Pay People Like Adults
Founders want to pay good people more and freeze on the question of when it's safe. James Kwon's answer is Slices: split every dollar that comes in into fixed percentages, so you see profit before you celebrate hitting a billable target on a project that blew up.
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Episode 61: Win Better Clients by Going Narrow
Saying yes to everything turns you into a vendor that gets shopped on price. Chris Morbitzer on why quality isn't positioning, the filter he uses to start from industry problems rather than services, and why scaling a services team for future demand is a SaaS habit that doesn't transfer.
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Episode 60: The Collective Model (and Why This Founder Stopped Hiring Full-Time)
Chris hired on a hope: full-time people, on the assumption he would figure out lead gen next. He rebuilt around a collective of trusted freelancers instead. Also the content day that filled sixteen slots in about twenty-four hours.
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Episode 59: Kill the Dead-End Thank You Page (and 5X Your Webinar Conversions)
Learn how Logan Lyles turned “okay” B2B webinars into a 5x effective lead generation engine using a 2-step signup flow, better CTAs, and smarter follow-up.
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Episode 58: How a 4-Person Shopify Agency Builds a Partner Engine That Actually Pays Off
Marcus started designing band websites for beer money and it turned into a four-person Shopify shop. A tight ICP of DTC merchants under $5M means sharper work, and most clients arrive reactive, after the cheap theme hit a wall.
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Episode 57: 25 Years of Agency Survival (What Actually Kept the Lights On)
Longevity in agency life isn't about chasing trends. Twenty-five years of adapting early, staying clear, and keeping the relationships that outlast the work.
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Episode 56: Stop Selling Services and Start Solving Million-Dollar Problems
Most agencies lead with what they can do. Michael learned to lead with the problem instead, and Caxy went from selling apps to solving million-dollar inefficiencies. The bandwidth check-in with existing clients now drives more than half their growth.
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Episode 55: Why Your Agency Is Great at Marketing (Everyone but Yourself)
Agencies drift into silos and scattered tactics, and it surfaces as messy work and frustrated clients. Kate Hamilton on why departments with separate KPIs leave nobody owning the walk between teams, and why strategy is a source of truth rather than a deck.
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Episode 54: How a Dev Agency Built Demand Through Content and Community
How Headway turned a be-helpful habit into a growth engine: content, community, and an industry spin-off that came out of the work rather than a campaign.
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Episode 53: How a WordPress Agency Wins Enterprise Publishers Without Enterprise Headcount
Ndevr tried being broad across Drupal, Laravel and React, then narrowed to WordPress and found both delivery and the marketing story got easier. Meeky Hwang on enterprise defined by traffic and publishing complexity rather than by headcount.
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Episode 52: Founder-Led Sales Is a Growth Ceiling (Here's How to Escape It)
Paul Wilson of Massive Growth Partners on replacing founder-led selling with a sales and strategy team that wins. Behind the Agency, episode 52.
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Episode 51: How a Python Agency Turned Engineer Preferences Into a Market Position
Ivy and her husband came back from vacation to find their startup shut down overnight. Fusionbox niched into Python and Django almost by accident, because the engineers wanted it and clients didn't care, and it became a magnet for both. Why engineers now join the sales calls.
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Episode 50: Building Software With Clients, Not For Them
Dev agency growth isn't a numbers game, it's a quality-of-conversations game. Steve Hennigan on winning the clients who want to whiteboard alongside you rather than hand over a spec, and why productization is clarity for the buyer rather than convenience for you.
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Episode 49: Weekly Client Calls, Referral Networks, and 15 Years of Retention
Oyova kept one thing constant since 2009: more human involvement, not less. Weekly client calls cost more, and they're how you keep a client for fifteen years. Jon Tsourakis on why he won't use the word packages, and how the vertical focus came from wins they already had.
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Episode 48: Best Practices Isn't a Differentiator
We use best practices is like saying I eat vegetables. True, and mostly not done. Mike Stone on packaging the work into Ideate, Ignite and Embed, the first-year bug-free warranty almost no dev shop offers, and shipping production code in week one.
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Episode 47: Why Most Software Projects Fail Before a Single Line of Code
Most failed software projects don't fail in development. They fail before development starts, when everyone jumps straight to estimates and requirements. Jeff Francis on creating clarity before code, and why a smaller first step converts better than a big-build pitch.
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Episode 46: How an 18-Year CMS Agency Keeps Clients for 5+ Years (Without a Sales Team)
Most of Oomph's growth across eighteen years came from clients it already had. Matthew O'Bryant on why outsourced cold outreach failed where conferences worked, and the next problem he's chewing on: separating account growth from net-new sales.
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Episode 45: Stop Saying Yes to Everything (Before It Kills Your Agency)
Saying yes to everything early is how you build a business with no identity. David Wall on standardizing the process rather than productizing the outcome, and why that's outside scope has to become a normal sentence in your agency.
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Episode 44: Sequencing Your Way Past the $2M Referral Ceiling
Andrew's agency DNA comes from academia: share what you learn, and don't attach strings to advice. He deliberately tries to make himself unnecessary to clients, which caps hypergrowth and has still produced 20 to 30% growth a year, almost all of it referred.
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Episode 43: Why This Mobile Agency Tells Leads They Do Not Need an App
Steam Clock wants to stay at fifteen people and grow profit instead of headcount. Nick Wilkinson on knowing the ways you don't want to grow, refusing to add services just to feed the beast, and why telling a lead they don't need an app builds trust fast.
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Episode 42: How to Run an Agency for 20 Years Without Blowing It Up
Karla calls herself an accidental entrepreneur. Her employer shut down, she inherited the clients, and it snowballed into a twenty-year company. Why Blend went deep on large, complex, compliance-heavy builds, the boring hard problems other agencies avoid.
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Episode 41: Why Deal Flow Matters More Than Recurring Revenue
Peter Kang on why deal flow matters more than recurring revenue, and how optionality, de-risking and a portfolio mindset make an agency worth acquiring.
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Episode 40: How a 65-Person Agency Broke Through the 20-Person Wall
Word of mouth and fast quoting got fjorge to about twenty people, then it stopped working. Joe Barsness on the outbound they had to build, why partnering with creative agencies that needed dev capacity carried them for years, and what follow-up looks like when it isn't asking for work.
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Episode 39: How to Stay Relevant When Your Tech Stack Gets Commoditized
Hunter's motto is lean into the hard stuff: regulated, complex, high-stakes builds nobody else wants. Barefoot has stayed relevant by riding three-year tech waves from web to mobile to medical IoT to machine learning, and he thinks you either specialize or stay ahead of the next one.
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Episode 38: Why Two Out of Three Agencies Have a Right-Fit Client Problem (and How a Book Fixes It)
Henry isn't in the book business, he's in the authority-making business. Why roughly two of every three agencies have a right-fit client problem rather than a lead problem, and the three book formats that actually pay off.
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Episode 37: Why Clients Rejected the Self-Serve Model and Paid More for a Human
Alloa built the slick, low-touch platform founders were supposed to want. They didn't want it. They wanted a human product expert to walk them through roadmap and product-market fit, so the team changed the sales message first and watched close rates before touching the website.
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Episode 36: Stop Letting Clients Pick Your Tech Stack
Let clients pick the tech and you'll end up supporting a dozen stacks and a burnt-out team. Why differentiation is your approach to the problem rather than the tool or the output, and what everyone is in sales actually means in practice.
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Episode 35: How to Win Clients Who Got Burned by Their Last Agency
Competitive research turns dangerous the moment it becomes a checklist. Brett Snyder on hunting for white space instead of copying what already works, and why quantifying ROI is what keeps a client relationship healthy after the honeymoon.
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Episode 34: How Fan Emails and Case Studies Built a 25-Year Agency
Plank started the usual way, with a bit of freelance momentum and an office they hoped they could afford. Twenty-five years on, case studies are still the conversion engine, and Warren's best cold outreach isn't cold at all. It's a fan email.
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Episode 33: The Financial Hierarchy Most Agency Founders Skip
Most agencies don't have a predictable enough revenue engine to forecast, so the forecast just manufactures false confidence. Ryan Watson on separating budgeting from forecasting, and why cash reserves exist to bridge timing gaps rather than fund months of losses.
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Episode 32: Why This Agency CEO Caps Every Week at 40 Hours
Engenius didn't start as an agency dream. It started as a people-first business that happened to do marketing, and it still caps the week at forty hours. Chris Manley on bringing big-agency thinking to small-business budgets without burning anyone out.
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Episode 31: Why "Always Be Closing" Is Killing Your Agency Pipeline
Adam Kurzawa of Infinum on why always-be-closing is killing agency pipeline, and how to build outbound that survives slow seasons and strange markets.
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Episode 30: How a Front-End Agency Grows Without Selling
TJ Pitre left Martha Stewart to freelance and it turned into a firm almost by accident. His first year was one client and forty hours a week, which he knew was a risk. Why the network that actually fed him got built at happy hours rather than in meetings.
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Episode 29: What Happens When Your Inbound Pipeline Disappears Overnight
Bram Van de Ven never planned an agency. AR filters he built for fun pulled millions of views, and inbound carried the business for four years. Then it stopped, and he had to learn outbound from scratch.
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Episode 28: Why Referrals Beat Every Other Growth Channel (If You Track the Right Metrics)
Jetfuel runs on referrals alone and is aiming for 150 clients without an outbound team. Edwin Choi on treating results as a distribution channel rather than an outcome, narrowing services to paid media and retention, and the four metrics he runs the business against.
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Episode 27: The 4-Direction Partner Framework That Turns 3 Deep Relationships Into a Referral Engine
Most agencies believe in referrals and almost none treat it like a system, so both sides wait for the other to go first and nothing happens. Mike Wilner on why you start by making referrals rather than asking for them, and why three deep partners beat a long inactive list.
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Candid interviews with agency founders on positioning, pricing, pipeline, and what it actually takes to build a business that runs without them.
HOSTED BY
David Hoos
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Behind the Agency have?
Behind the Agency currently has 76 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Behind the Agency about?
Candid interviews with agency founders on positioning, pricing, pipeline, and what it actually takes to build a business that runs without them.
How often does Behind the Agency release new episodes?
Behind the Agency has 76 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Behind the Agency?
You can listen to Behind the Agency on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Behind the Agency?
Behind the Agency is created and hosted by David Hoos.
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