Agency Bytes

Ep 029 – Brandon Wetzstein, In8Create

Featuring: Brandon Wetzstein, In8Create

In this episode, Brandon and I talk about how playing with Legos can help explore any topic within a workshop. Brandon talks about how building and reverting back to your childhood playtime can build metaphors to answer prompts. By exploring what creativity means to each person, Serious Play can be implemented in an agency, corporate environment, or any other space, to dig into a business’s challenges. Building strategy and exploring values with Legos allows the process to remove the emotion from the results through a flow state under the facilitation of Brandon's expertise. This process allows the process to get at the nuanced insights from a group of people, without the meeting after the meeting.

Brandon Wetzstein is an energetic founder with a futuristic mindset. He believes that everyone has the capacity to be innovative and creative when given the right tools, support, and environment. He is driven by curiosity, makes a mean chili, and loves a good book that shifts his mindset.

Connect with Brandon on his website and on LinkedIn.

Ep 028 – Nikki Rausch, Sales Maven

Featuring: Nikki Rausch, Sales Maven

In this episode, seasoned sales maven, Nikki Rausch shares some of the secrets in B2B sales, how to show up in opening relationships that lead to sales, and the full-circle benefits of asking for and making introductions and referrals. Her experience in setting up sales systems and guiding sales leaders in their systems is invaluable for agencies and salespeople alike. Nikki shares some secrets about how to create curiosity in account-based marketing, so we can learn to grow current accounts and increase the lifetime value of clients and offers.

With 25+ years of selling experience, entrepreneurs and small business owners now hire Nikki to show them how to sell successfully and authentically.

Nikki has written 3 books, all available on Amazon. And she has a podcast called Sales Maven which you can find on your favorite podcast platform.

Connect with Nikki on Sales Maven, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and grab her free video training gift for listeners.

Ep 027 - Marcel Petitpas, Parakeeto

Featuring: Marcel Petitpas, Parakeeto

In this episode, Marcel talks about how Parakeeto was born – how can smaller agencies leverage their data without enterprise software. Marcel talks about the value of the democratization of data within an organization where the cost of creating data has gone to zero and how to develop data management practices. We dug into systemic profitability issues in small agencies and the key metrics agencies should be watching out for to track predictable profitability. Marcel details the differences between delivery margins or the fundamental profitability of the offer and the cost of your services and what causes your delivery target to be below your goals. Similar to my coaching style, Marcel and his team don’t have a cookie-cutter approach to how an agency tracks numbers and defines success within an agency.

Marcel Petitpas is the CEO & Co-Founder of Parakeeto, a company dedicated to helping agencies measure and improve their profitability by streamlining their operations and reporting systems, a problem he discovered while running his own agency back in his early 20’s.

He’s also the fractional COO at Gold Front, an award-winning creative agency in San Francisco working with brands like Uber, Slack, Keap, and more. As well as the head strategic coach at SaaS Academy by Dan Martell, the #1 coaching program for B2B SaaS businesses in the world.

In his work as a speaker, podcast host, and consultant, specializing in Agency Profitability Optimization, he's helped hundreds of agencies around the world measure the right metrics and improve their operations and profitability.

When he’s not helping agencies make more money, he’s probably watching “The Office” or “Parks and Rec” on a never-ending loop and eating breakfast foods for every meal of the day.

Connect with Marcel on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Twitter.

Ep 026 – Veronica ”Niki” Fielding, Digital Brand Expressions

Featuring: Veronica “Niki” Fielding, Digital Brand Expressions

In this episode, I got to talk to Niki about how she intentionally transformed her agency prior to covid, and how these changes have helped them be more selective on client acquisition and more successful with client retention. She shares the secrets behind their team structure and how they win with company culture.

Veronica “Niki” Fielding is the founder and president of Digital Brand Expressions. DBE excels at delivering quantifiable success against goals for middle market B2B and B2C companies through paid search, paid social, and search engine optimization. They’re all about setting goals with their clients, defining clear pathways to success, and then delivering on, and surpassing those goals.

Connect with Niki on her company website or LinkedIn.

Ep 025 - Jody Grunden, Summit CPA

Featuring: Jody Grunden, Summit CPA

In this episode, I got to talk to Jody about what it’s like running one of the first fully distributed CPA firms, and their acquisition process by Anders CPA + Advisors. He talks about how they set out to launch the firm as a change agent in the space and how they flipped the billing model on its head in the creative agency CPA and advisory space. While Jody doesn’t run a creative firm, he lets us in on the immense value of niching down into vertices and how it proves to scalability. Learn the secret of when owners should really start leaning on outsourced CFO services and why. Finally, Jody shares some of the trending KPIs they see agencies actively monitoring.

Jody co-founded Summit CPA Group (Summit) in 2002, which merged with Anders CPAs + Advisors (Anders) in 2022. Summit, now a division of Anders, was the first fully distributed accounting firm. As the leading provider of Virtual CFO Services in North America, Summit provides professional Virtual CFO Services for over 100 companies across the United States, helping business owners dive deep into the financial side of their business to maximize profits, minimize taxes, and increase cash flow.

Jody is also an industry speaker and a published author. He literally wrote the book on helping digital companies create a financial roadmap to success, Digital Dollars and Cents.

Connect with Jody on his website, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Ep 024 – Jasz Joseph, Jasz Rae Digital

Featuring: Jasz Joseph, Jasz Rae Digital

In this episode, Jasz and I talk about the age-old tale of agencies treating their marketing and business development efforts as if they were their own client – and why that doesn’t work. She breaks down why a CRM is so vital to an agency, some of the most vital aspects of a good CRM, and various tricks on how to dig into your pipeline and stages of a business development process. We talk about at what point an agency should outsource their sales and marketing, vs. keeping it in-house and what the differences between the two options are. Finally, we explored various ways agencies can leverage ChatGPT to expedite some of our marketing research efforts.

After spending years working in the agency space and starting her own agency, Jasz quickly realized that the old saying "the shoemaker's kids never have shoes" holds true. Agency owners and consultants spend so much time focusing on growing their clients' businesses that their own sales and marketing goals often fall to the back burner. Not anymore! Jasz partners with boutique agency owners and consultants to develop the systems and growth strategies they need to start generating an influx of sales-ready leads.

Connect with Jasz on her website or on LinkedIn.

Ep 023 – Carl Smith, Bureau of Digital

Featuring: Carl Smith, Bureau of Digital

In this episode, Carl shares his passion for people who run shops and create things and how he shifted from employee to running his own shop to now running Bureau of Digital, the greatest community of agency leaders. The biggest takeaways of this episode are some of the gems on how Carl ran nGen, his dev shop, but Carl also shares how hindsight really was 20/20 in understanding what he saw after opening nGen and some of the decisions his previous boss had made. He talks about how his agency model led to rapid growth by having clients pitch them and having the team choose the work they wanted to do and the type of clients they wanted to work with. Finally, Carl talks about the value of community in the agency space and how agency leaders should embrace their peers and not cut them off as competition.

A theater major who decided to act like he understood business, Carl spent 14 years in advertising before launching his digital agency, nGen Works, in 2003.

nGen ran for 12 years, constantly experimenting with different models of management and team structure, including the Jellyfish Model which was flat before flat was cool.

Towards the end of nGen’s run, Carl attended the very first Bureau event and fell madly in love with the concept of building community in the web industry. So much so that a few years later he closed nGen to take over the Bureau in 2016. Now Carl spends every day connecting digital professionals to give them the support they need.

Connect with Carl on the Bureau of Digital website.

Ep 022 – Monica Dema, MDinc

Featuring: Monica Dema, MDinc

In this episode, Monica and I spoke about what it’s like running a global team of content creators and project managers, and how they manage culture with intention as a remote team for more than 12 years. Her agency has scaled in a healthy way over the years, and as a leader, she talks about how important it has been to work smarter, not harder, and how they lean heavily on processes. Monica gave some insight as to how her team and clients prioritize human-made content for humans over leveraging robots for the sake of profit.  

Monica manages global content for MDINC, a content creation company. Her goal is to help make small companies grow, and large companies painlessly maintain their digital presence.

Connect with Monica on her website, LinkedIn, or Instagram.