Agency Bytes

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.

Ep 021 – Nick Deck, Agency Sidekicks

Featuring: Nick Deck, Agency Sidekicks

In this episode, Nick and I speak about his evolution from launching an agency to it exploding without the proper systems and people in place, and how he was able to turn that growth into both a sustainable and healthy agency and a booming side business of offshore talent. That side business eventually became his main focus as he helps agencies match with amazing offshore talent to help them scale their agencies.

Fellow marketing industry veteran, agency owner, and offshore delegation enthusiast, Nick Deck has a deep understanding of the intricacies of building a highly profitable, low-stress digital agency.

Nick says the secret largely comes down to who you have working for you, which is why he launched Agency Sidekicks a few years ago to support his peers in the achievement of their business AND personal goals (he's all about balance after having experienced some serious burnout in his own agency).

Agency Sidekicks helps you source, train, onboard and manage true offshore marketing rockstars (not just your average VA's) so you can delegate 80% of your operations to dedicated or fractional team members that cost up to 70% less than comparable local talent.

They also provide A TON of other hands-on support and bonuses for their agency clients.

Originally from San Diego, California, Nick now lives in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico with his family while helping business owners get time back into their calendars with the support of smooth delegation processes and offshore help!

Connect with Nick on his website or LinkedIn.

Ep 020 – Patrice Embry, Project Menagerie

Featuring: Patrice Embry, Project Menagerie

In this episode, Patrice and I talk about the winding path that she took to get into the world of digital project management, how being fired (twice) set her on her way to mastering her destiny, why college may or may not be for everyone and some of the things agencies do (and don’t do) that are mind-boggling.

Patrice started managing digital projects 20 years ago, starting with a pioneering e-commerce music company during the .com boom in the 90s. Since then, she’s managed projects big and small for companies, agencies, and now as a freelance project manager - projects ranging from mobile apps to large-scale CMS-driven websites, and even print projects on occasion. An active member and writer for the larger Digital Project Management community, she’s always willing to talk about the operations aspect of project management and how agencies can better use PM to strengthen client relationships.

Connect with Patrice on her website.

Ep 019 – Mark Miller, Historic Agency

Featuring: Mark Miller, Historic Agency

Having recently published a book, Culture Built My Brand, Mark and I spoke all about the driving force behind the book and how it helped define the success story of an agency previously in trouble. We spoke about how he and his agency took action to create intentional culture, drive out the negativity from the team, and build processes to deliver work for clients that were previously unheard of. Mark shares his and his team's bravery in how they faced tough times and as a result of an actual culture, are stronger than ever.

Mark is the author of Culture Built My Brand: How to win more customers with company culture, and the founder of Historic Agency, a branding and design thinking agency for nonprofits.

Connect with Mark on his agency website, on LinkedIn, and grab his book here.