41% profit margins. Sounds good. Right? That's exactly what one marketing agency has been able to drive with a results-oriented workplace & corresponding compensation model. Courtney Tarrant, Owner & COO of The Ad Girls shares in today's episode that when they went away from this model for a short period, profit margins shrank closer to typical industry norms.

What happens when you’re faced with an upset client…and it’s actually your team’s fault? Kyle Duford, President and Executive Creative Director at The Brand Leader, and author of Twice Found, joins the podcast to talk about leading with grace and learning through failure. He also discusses balance in all things — how to balance challenges, healthy vs. unhealthy failure, and transparency in the face of furious clients.

Clients who are “happy” may still leave you. But clients who are seeing results–and seeing them fast? Now, that increases the value you deliver and decreases the chances that new clients will churn. So, how did this digital marketing agency drive client results 70% faster, increase customer satisfaction scores and start getting glowing feedback from more clients? It was all about strategy.

What if we told you there was a way to improve your client relationships and reduce churn before retention is even a concern? Jonathan Ewing, Director of APCO Worldwide, joins the podcast to talk about how agencies can foster positive relationships with clients and reduce churn even before the onboarding process is finished. He discusses the importance of predicting and acting on client needs, and how adjusting your services and strategies accordingly improves retention and keeps clients happy and satisfied from Day 1.

How can you balance your agency’s workload in a way that benefits both the productivity and health of your team? Amber Kemmis, COO of Instrumental Group and Remote Culture Advisor at CULTURISH, joins the podcast to talk about the key components of capacity management for agencies of all sizes: revenue management, time estimates, and individual capacity assessments. Drawing on her experience within multiple agencies of different sizes, she shares a unique approach to leveraging all three of these data points when analyzing your team’s capacity within the agency.

Learn the top hiring secrets from 8-figure agency CEO, Eric Siu, in the latest episode of the Agency Life Podcast.

When you find yourself spread thin across multiple services and client needs, it’s time to ask yourself—is niching down the right choice for your business? Mike & Gaby Grinberg, dual founders of Proofpoint Marketing, join the podcast to talk about finding their niche in the face of the pandemic and how their business has flourished in the aftermath. They discuss the importance of building a strategic narrative around your core business beliefs, and how to use that narrative to drive both growth and client connection.

Today he runs an agency doing $25MM in ARR with around 150 employees. But–as the story usually goes–this success didn’t come overnight & started with much more humble beginnings. From not getting paid by one of his first clients to gaining traction with small monthly retainers on Fiverr to now running a successful performance marketing agency for SaaS companies, Garrett Mehrguth, CEO of Directive, has learned a forecasting model that’s allowed him to scale his agency well beyond those humble beginnings.

It can be terrifying to allow your clients to “see how the sausage is made,” and this is one of the main concerns related to handling client communications within your project management or professional service automation software. While there are benefits to streamlining your client communications and inviting them into the system that runs your agency–benefits like visibility, client perception & efficiency–each of those benefits comes with some pretty intimidating risks.

Wanna know how a 200-person agency reduced churn by 50% from one year to the next? Even though Hawke Media is one of the most successful marketing agencies in the United States and they’ve scaled to hundreds of millions in annual revenue, their journey hasn’t been without bumps in the road. At the beginning of 2022, they saw client churn on the rise and their CEO, Erik Huberman, knew he had to adjust their strategy to address a new challenge.