The Digital Agency Growth Podcast

Most agency owners treat legal as a tax — a slow, expensive speed bump between the handshake and the kickoff. Sharon Toerek thinks that's exactly backwards. Sharon is a marketing and intellectual property attorney who has spent over a decade working exclusively with independent agencies through her firm Torek Law, which operates in the agency world as Legal + Creative. In this episode, she breaks down how agencies leave real money on the table by treating contracts as admin rather than levera...

🎯 Referrals already work for your agency, but you've never optimized them. Get our 30-minute video crash course on how to turn referrals from reactive and random to proactive and systematic: https://go.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine/?utm_source=podcast_dag -- Buying patterns have changed - fast. If you're still pitching the same offers the same way you were two years ago, you're probably hearing "let's talk in three months" a lot. Mandi Ellefson returns to the s...

Learn the small shift that makes referrals repeatable. Check out our new video training: https://hey.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine?utm_source=podcast -- Most agencies treat the RFP as the cost of doing business. Chris Rose has built a career out of sidestepping them entirely — landing clients like Hilton, Planet Fitness, and NBC Universal along the way. Chris serves as Executive Director of Growth at Cylinder Studios, a design and production studio within the Cheil Agency Networ...

Learn the small shift that makes referrals repeatable. Check out our new video training. -- What happens when years of planting seeds finally meets the right market moment? Alexis Trammel is Chief Growth Officer at Stratabeat, a B2B SaaS organic growth agency. She recently transitioned from account management into a biz dev role. But the real story is how timing and preparation collided. For years, Stratabeat was doing the unglamorous work: niching down, building LinkedIn pr...

Looking to build a repeatable, referral-focus biz dev system inside of your agency? Check out our new video training: https://hey.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine -- What if successful agency business development isn't about having the perfect system, but about showing up consistently in the right conversations? John Caruso is the Director of Business Development at Vendilli, where he's spent the last six years navigating the messy reality of agency growth. With a decade of BD experi...

New Video Training. Referrals already work for your agency, but you've never optimized them. Learn how in our latest video training: https://hey.salesschema.com/opt-in-mw-referral-engine -- This year-end review distills the most important lessons from a year of conversations with agency owners, researchers, and growth experts who've been in the trenches. What You'll Leave With: Why trust has replaced awareness and differentiation as the scarce resource in agency growthThe counteri...

if you're using the holiday break to plan for a strong Q1, this conversation will reshape how you think about pipeline. [this is an Encore Episode originally aired December 3, 2025] Nick Petroski, founder of Promethean Research and the industry's go-to source for agency market data, spent years studying what actually drives growth for digital agencies. Not best practices or guru advice, but real numbers from real shops. What he found challenges conventional wisdom. The agencies getting th...

What if the agencies that crush Q1 aren't working harder in January, they're making one or two critical decisions right now, in December? In this solo episode, Dan reveals why Q1 consistently catches agencies off-guard and what separates those who stumble into the new year from those who hit the ground running. The secret isn't about working through the holidays or setting ambitious goals—it's about installing a systematic referral system during Q4's quieter moments. What You'll L...

Most agencies try to fix pipeline by working harder, but not by working smarter. This conversation digs into why outbound has gotten tougher, what’s changed in the last decade, and how agencies can build a healthier, more defensible acquisition motion. We cover the shift from brute-force outreach to signal-driven, trust-based systems, why TAM size changes everything, and how sales and marketing need to operate as a single unit for mid-market deals. It’s a clear look at the mechanics behind wi...

👉 Want to build referrals systematically instead of relying on luck? Grab my book 📘 Relationship Sales at Scale: https://salesschema.com/book -- In this episode, Dan Englander talks with Brooke MacLean, CEO of Marketwake, one of the Southeast’s fastest-growing digital agencies and a five-time Inc. 5000 honoree. Brooke shares how she bootstrapped Marketwake from a solo consulting gig into an 80-person powerhouse serving clients like Yamaha, University of Georgia, and Machete Jewelry — all thr...

Every few months, I like to pause and look back at the ideas that resonated most with agency owners on LinkedIn — the ones that got people talking, DM’ing, and quietly saying yeah, that’s been my experience too. This episode isn’t about tactics. It’s a quick tour through the lessons that seem to keep coming up again and again in our world, the stuff we all wrestle with if we’ve been selling complex services for a long time. Stuff I cover The trouble with the awkward commission pitch and...

Most agencies don’t have a lead generation problem—they have a leverage problem. In this episode of The Digital Agency Growth Podcast, Dan Englander dives deep into how agencies can grow faster by amplifying what they already have: past clients, case studies, frameworks, and relationships. Forget chasing the latest marketing fad or new sales channels; sometimes the fastest path to growth is working smarter with the assets already in your hands. What You’ll Learn in This Episode: What “leverag...

In this episode of the Digital Agency Growth Podcast, I’m joined by Brock Murray, co-founder of seoplus+, a digital marketing agency he launched back in 2012 that has grown into a 50+ person team serving clients across North America and beyond. Brock shares the arc of his journey, from launching his first web hosting business at 14, to building seoplus+ with his partner Eddie, to scaling through multiple growth stages while navigating the challenges of delegation, client specialization, and l...