🎙️ Episode Overview:



In this episode of The Creative Agency Podcast, I sit down with Mike Brevik, founder of Cyberdogz Marketing, to explore how he’s built a thriving full-service agency using an all-contractor model. We dive into the operational strategies, client strategies, time-tracking, and company culture that allow Cyberdogz to remain agile, profitable, and effective—without W2 employees.









🔍 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:



• How Mike started Cyberdogz and grew it into a full-service agency



• The pros and cons of running an all-contractor agency



• How Cyberdogz positions itself as a specialized team rather than a loose network of freelancers



• The role of culture and collaboration in a fully remote, contractor-driven business



• The strategic advantages of not hiring full-time employees



🛠️ Key Takeaways & Insights:



• Building an agency without employees requires strong processes and leadership



• Why communication and trust are essential when working with independent contractors



• How to balance flexibility with structure to maintain efficiency



📚 Resources & Mentions:



• Cyberdogz Marketing – [Cyberdogzmarketing.com]



• Brand Retro Podcast – [https://www.brandretro.com]



🎧 Listen & Subscribe:



Don’t forget to subscribe to The Creative Agency Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to stay updated on the latest episodes. If you enjoyed this conversation, leave a review and let us know what you think!



🔔 Join the Conversation:



Are you running or considering an all-contractor agency? Join the discussion in [Grow Your Agency Slack Community] and connect with other agency owners!

In this podcast episode, I spoke with Jody Sutter, the owner of The Sutter Company, a business development coaching and advisory firm. Jody brings over two decades of experience leading business development teams at renowned agencies like R/GA, OMD, and Havas Media. She now helps small marketing agencies take control of their sales journey through her innovative BUILD WIN SCALE™ system, a step-by-step approach designed to harness natural sales and marketing strengths for sustainable growth.

Jody shares her insights on guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey and discusses practical strategies for agency owners to win more of the right kinds of clients. Don't miss out on this timely episode of The Creative Agency Podcast.

Join our free slack group for agency owners, growers, and freelancers: https://growyouragency.group

Podcast Interview With Karl Sakas



Karl Sakas (@KarlSakas) helps digital agency owners ‘Work Less’ and ‘Earn More’… while rewarding their best employees. Drawing on his background in agency operations, Karl has personally advised hundreds of agencies on every inhabited continent. An international speaker, he is the author of three books—including Work Less, Earn More—and more than 400 articles on agency management. Karl joins us for a timely interview about optimizing your agency sales process. We talk about using “strategic friction” to pre-qualify leads before spending valuable time on sales calls as well as tips and tactics for modifying and enhancing your sales process in uncertain economic times.





As mentioned on the show get a discount on Karl’s Diversify Your Lead-Gen workshop by using “CAPVIP” at checkout.





Free Resources Karl offers on his website:



Raise Prices at Your Agency with this Step-by-Step ApproachFree resources for agencies from Karl SakasNegotiate what you want using “Reason-Options-Choose” (R-O-C)Need vs. Want: When clients need help… but don’t want to payPre-qualify your sales prospects… before you get on a callCustom vs. Productized services: Pros & Cons for agenciesGet paid to “create a proposal,” via Paid Discovery

Rachel Gertz, Co-Founder of Louder Than Ten, has a profound way of framing the challenges agencies face in the current climate and a keen sense of how we must adapt and focus on building sustainable systems and relationships to foster growth.

The Creative Agency Podcast is back! I’m thrilled to introduce August Shah from Partnered Management Group. Partnered MG is a fractional project management agency that specializes in supporting agencies like ours with tailored project management solutions. Whether you need to augment your current team or outsource your entire project management function, Partnered MG offers flexible, effective options. I personally hired Partnered MG to assist my agency, Murmur Creative, and the results have been transformative. Join us as we dive into the world of fractional project management and explore how it can benefit your agency.

Blair Enns is CEO of Win Without Pitching and the author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto and Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour. Blair joins the Creative Agency Podcast to talk about both books and strategies creative agencies can use to improve their effectiveness, autonomy, and bottom line.



Get your copy of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto



Get Your Copy of Pricing Creatively: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour

Jared Mirsky is CEO of Wick & Mortar, a branding and marketing agency specializing in the cannabis industry. Jared started out as a freelancer working with local nightclubs on branding and marketing.  He used a combination of Yelp and SEO tactics to grow his client base. His work with nightclubs led to the cannabis industry and legalization became a catalyst for business growth. Jared has used his personal brand, as well as deep insights into the cannabis industry, to put Wick and Mortar center stage. Jared and Wick & Mortar have been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, Forbes, CNN, Geekwire, The Dieline, HighTimes, and more. Find out how narrowing your focus can take your agency even higher.

Can you imagine hiring a new employee every month? Bajillion Agency is doing it. Andrea Engstrom president and founder of Bajillion Agency is setting goals and achieving them at a rapid pace. Established in 2015, Bajillion is now a 26 person agency. Andrea goes into detail about how they’ve grown and maintained a vibrant culture. She shares tips on winning new business and hiring new employees. If you want to grow your agency, you’ll want to listen in!



Mentioned on this show:



The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni: https://www.tablegroup.com/books/ideal-team-player

In this episode, we explore the benefits of using The Entrepreneurial Operating System to grow your agency. And who better to interview on this subject than Mike Paton (pronounced Payton) the Visionary at EOS Worldwide. Paton has spent most of his life learning from entrepreneurs.  Today, he spends all his time giving back – as an Author, award-winning Speaker, certified EOS Implementer.  Specifically, Paton helps entrepreneurs clarify, simplify and achieve their vision – by mastering the simple concepts and practical tools he’ll be sharing with us today. Paton gives an overview of EOS and how creative agencies can use it to grow their businesses.



 Books mentioned in the show:



Start with this:



Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business



Then:



Get A GripRocket FuelHow to be a Great Boss



Thanks for Listening! Join us on Slack!

Ryan Watson is the founder of a unique accounting agency, Upsourced Accounting, that focuses on creative agencies.  Ryan discusses pricing strategies, profitability, taxes, and much more. He also explains how his business integrates with agencies and helps agencies through automation and financial strategy. Don’t miss this episode and be sure to stick around for the end where Ryan discusses his top 3 takeaways for agencies looking to up their financial game.



Did you know that some agencies can save 20% on their 2018 taxes? Listen in to learn more.

Once again we turn the mic on ourselves and talk about our own agency journey. Headquartered in Portland, OR (in an office located in a renovated high school), Murmur Creative is a branding and web agency with big dreams and humble beginnings. 2017 was an exciting, nail-biting adventure in agency growth for us.  It was a tumultuous year, but we made it out the other side stronger and better prepared for the future.



Join the brother’s Bolton as they reveal the trials and tribulations Murmur faced in 2017. Learn if we finally reached our million dollar goal, and listen in to what we have planned for the future.



Are you an agency owner? Join our Slack group.



(Picture courtesy of Chris and Andrew’s mother)

One of the most important things about running successful digital projects is cultivating effective collaborations. Ellen De Vries, Content Strategist at Clearleft and author of Collaborate: Bring people together around digital projects joins us to talk about how you can optimize collaborations at your agency.



Ellen talks about the challenges that groups face on digital projects and how to develop a shared understanding of values and goals in order to alleviate stresses and roadblocks. Ellen shares highlights from her book and offers keen insights from her work at Clearleft.



Be sure to download Ellen’s book for free here.



Also mentioned in this episode: Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers



******



As mentioned in the introduction to the show, we have a new Slack group for agency owners called Grow Your Agency. It’s free. Join here!

Ann Kaufman is a partner at Fuzzco. She runs their Portland, OR office. Ann cut her teeth in the agency world as an account director and recently put on an event in Portland called Not Not Creative. Not Not Creative featured the voices of account directors and project managers from across the agency spectrum.



Ann talks about the account director role and why it’s important to agencies. She explains the dynamic between project managers and account directors.  She also explores how an account director at an agency needs to put the client’s goals first. Listen in!



Follow Ann on Twitter



Connect Ann on LinkedIn

Brad Flowers is founder of an agency called Bullhorn. Brad and his partners have taken a proactive approach to growing their business by focusing on integrating new systems and using inspiration from a very useful book called Traction by Gino Wickman. Brad also refers to Get a Grip, another book by the same author that inspired him and his team to make some big changes at his agency.



Brad and Chris talk about the challenges of going from creative to entrepreneur and the importance of establishing concrete values that inform your business.



Books mentioned in this podcast:



Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business



Get A Grip: How to Get Everything You Want from Your Entrepreneurial Business



The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Justin Dauer is a designer and author who just published a book called Cultivating a Creative Culture. The book comes from Justin’s experience working at a variety of creative agencies and focuses on the importance of creating a human-centric culture.



Justin has some really amazing tips for onboarding new employees. Some of which we have already begun implementing here at Murmur Creative.



Pick up Cultivating a Creative Culture today on Amazon.



About Justin



Justin Dauer is multi-talented, multi-tattooed, multi-pierced designer, author, and user advocate from Chicago. Through bloodshot tunnel vision, he’s drawn from career experiences across agency side, client side, design studio, and pure tech to foster healthy, dynamic, supportive creative cultures. Crafting as the Vice President of UX & Development for bswift (http://www.bswift.com) by day, his personal creative outlet by night (…and day) is pseudoroom (http://www.pseudoroom.com), the same moniker by which he tweets (http://www.twitter.com/pseudoroom).

Julian Leighton started his career as a consultant driving around in an orange bus. The name “Orange Bus” stuck. Julian partnered with Mike Parker to begin building an agency that they would eventually sell. Parker and Leighton grew their agency to over a hundred employees in just ten years. But it wasn’t easy. And it involved a lot of sacrifice and risk.



Parker and Leighton knew that they wanted to eventually sell their agency, and they took many calculated risks to keep the agency growing–often at their own expense.



At one point Orange Bus took out a loan so they could strategically offload the majority of their clients and focus on a select few. This move, as well as others, helped them stay nimble and grow.



Follow Julian on Twitter: @julianleighton



GatherContent is the sponsor of this episode.



GatherContent is a software tool that allows you to easily collaborate with your clients in the content gathering and writing/editing phases of a website project.



You can get a free 30-day free trial if you go to https://gathercontent.com/cap

You can’t build a website without some form of content strategy.  Rob Mills of GatherContent joins us to talk about “all things content strategy.” Rob worked as head of content at an agency for many years and now works for GatherContent. He’s a writer, blogger, author, and all-around smart guy. Rob does a great job of defining the role of Content Strategist and emphasizing the importance of content strategy in general.



Rob also explains his “content first” approach to design and explains a hybrid “proto-content” approach.



Check out Rob’s articles about content strategy here.



GatherContent is also the sponsor of this episode. GatherContent is a software tool that allows you to easily collaborate with your clients in the content gathering and writing phases of a website project.



GatherContent also allows you to export content directly into a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, and much more.



You can get a free 30-day free trial if you go to https://gathercontent.com/cap

Rachel Zimmer co-founded 5Crowd, a unique agency that uses a vetted network of freelancers to accomplish creative work for fortune 500 companies. Rachel and her co-founder Bram Warshafsky both worked at Johnson & Johnson out of college and founded 5Crowd a few years later (while they were both still in their twenties).



Rachel shares how their unique agency model works. She also reveals “The Orbital Framework,” a system for hiring and developing successful relationships with remote freelance talent.



You can download 5Crowd’s eBook “The Orbital Framework” here.



This episode is sponsored by GatherContent. Get a free 30-day trial here.

Forbes contributor and agency veteran Will Burns joins us to talk about how agencies are changing and whether the “Agency of Record” model still exists. Will discusses his experience working at big agencies like Weiden & Kennedy, Arnold, and Mullen.  He also talks about the agency he founded: Ideasicle. Ideasicle is a unique agency that sources experts for idea generation. Because they focus on ideas and not execution, Ideasicle is free from biases that most agencies are subject to.



Will wrote an article for Forbes called: “The Advertising ‘Agency Of Record’ Model Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Being Reinvented.” Will shares his thoughts behind the article and provides a vision for what agencies of the future might look like.



These articles by Will Burns were also mentioned in the show:




* “Find Your Agency’s Obsession”



* “Lose Early. It’s Cheaper.”




Sponsorship



This episode is sponsored by GatherContent–an awesome program for managing the content process on web projects. We love this tool. You can try it free here! https://gathercontent.com/cap

CODO brilliantly targeted their ideal clients by creating an online resource called The Craft Beer Branding Guide. Not only does this website bring thousands of web visits and new business opportunities weekly, it’s allowed them to publish a print version of the book.



Isaac talks about how he and his business partner started CODO just out of college and grew it into a 5 person agency with a stellar reputation for branding strategy and design–especially in the food and beverage space. Learn how CODO uses content marketing to keep their pipeline full and avoid dry spells and don’t miss Isaac’s takeaways at the end of the show.



Digital Agency Summit



As mentioned in the show Chris Bolton will be speaking at Digital Agency Summit which takes place online April 3rd-7th 2017. It’s a virtual conference, so you don’t have even have to get up from your desk to attend and it’s free so you don’t have to pay anything.



The conference is all about growing your agency. The conference also features Karl Sakas who recently appeared on our show in episode 28.



Chris Bolton’s session is called Don’t Specialize. Evolve and it’s all about the complexities of specialization and how agencies end up specializing.



Don’t miss it. Sign up for free!