Jen Buzza: All right, welcome back. We have an amazing panel for you all. I know you were here doing the activity and you had your fingers, now your fingers can rest. I want you to absorb and think. When we sit through a panel or anything like this, we’ve already invested our time, we’re already here. So stay committed to that and get ready to learn from some genius human beings. We are talking about, AI can build it, can your agency deliver it? So that’s what this panel is about. And we’ve got amazing humans.

First up, we’ve got the magical, the mystical, the fantastic, the genuine, beautiful, loving human being, and I love everybody on this panel, but I know this one really well, we’ve got Brent Weaver in the house. If you don’t know Brent Weaver, where have you been? He is the original and the most phenomenal agency coach, in my opinion. No, I love them all, don’t get me wrong, but Brent, I am glad that you are here. Brent digs deep. He digs deep and he thinks and he gives you answers. He’s not just reading off of some script. Look at all these people who are excited you’re here. And then, we’ve got another amazing human in the house, we’ve got Jason Swenk here today, from Agency Mastery. Oh, I didn’t mention that Brent is actually the CEO of E2M now, just throwing that out there, with lots of years of experience. Jason Swenk is also here, founder of Agency Mastery, also a brilliant human being. We are so lucky to have you here today, Jason, thank you for being here. And last, definitely not least, though I’m new to Christian Banach, I like his last name, Christian, glad you’re here. He is the founder and Chief Growth Officer of NextBigWin, y’all. So we’ve got a powerhouse panel here for you all today. Thank you for being here, Christian, I’m so excited. And Jason, so excited. Brent, so excited. You all are brilliant, phenomenal human beings, and we are going to get started.

So we’ve got a lot of good questions for you all today, and the audience out there is wondering, will I get value? Why are you wondering that? I just told you you’re going to get value. I know Jason’s not wondering that. All right, Brent, first question I’ve got for you. And we’ve gotten these questions from a lot of different people, so, Cloudways really knows digital agencies well, a lot of these questions came straight from actual questions that are being asked by digital agency owners out there. So Brent, AI tools can now build all sorts of stuff, not a house yet, but you know what I mean, they can build websites, application prototypes, incredibly quickly, we all see. I know you all sit there and you’re like, well, Cloudways is actually a little bit slow, but in relation to how we used to do things, pretty quickly. What happens to an agency’s delivery model when production becomes dramatically faster? Brent, let’s hear it.

Brent Weaver: I think in the short term, agencies have an opportunity to probably be a little bit more profitable, run a little bit leaner of a business and still serve the same number of customers and charge similar rates that they did six months ago, a year ago, two years ago. I think in the medium and long term, I do think that customers are going to become a little bit more sophisticated in terms of what they expect for how much money they’re willing to pay, and we are seeing some of that right now. I think agencies will need to do the work to figure out what else can they deliver to their clients. They’re going to spend less time producing creative, less time producing websites, less time writing code, it’s going to happen much faster. And so I think it’s going to open up an opportunity to deliver new services to your clients. So I think agencies should be thinking about what’s next for them and what else can they do to help their clients.

I don’t think, even with AI, I’ve never met a client that wants fewer things than they have money to pay for. Like, clients always have an, I think most savvy business owners have kind of an infinite appetite for solutions to problems that they have. When you solve one problem, it just opens up another problem to solve. Hey, instead of taking three months to build your website and then doing SEO, we can build your website in three weeks and we can start SEO within the first month of service. So I think it could move some future projects up to the present more effectively. But I think that customers are going to want more, they’re going to want more value, they’re going to want more solutions, they’re going to be bringing more problems to the table. And we also have a whole new set of tools to solve those problems.

I don’t think most small agencies really wanted to ever get into the custom software development game, because custom software development was time intensive, it was costly to hire developers, and now it’s made it much more accessible. So I think we have this whole new set of tools to solve problems that were always there, but maybe clients didn’t have the budget to solve them, and now they can build a robust, self-hosted SaaS solution for five or $10,000, whereas that solution three years ago would have cost a quarter of a million or a half a million dollars to develop. So it was really out of reach for most businesses. So I think production is going to become faster, you’re going to have to offer more solutions to your clients if you want to get the same value for your agency.

Jen Buzza: I love it. So what I heard there was a whole bunch of stuff. One thing I just want to call out is, it is inherently human to build and to want more. So the fact that we have these spectacular tools does not alleviate the fact that, like you said, once you open up something, other things open, other problems, opportunities arise. So that’s fantastic, Brent. Thank you for that perspective. Jason, talking about all these agencies and they’ve all got these tools, and really all the agencies have access to pretty much all the same AI tools. So where does an agency’s competitive edge come from now? Since we all have access to the same tools, what makes us all unique?

Jason Swenk: It’s all the data that we have personally. So if you think about, I have to go back to when I was training a salesperson. So for years and years when I was bringing on salespeople, I didn’t really know how to train them, I was just, go sell. I wasn’t giving them who to sell to, I wasn’t giving them, the most important part was all the stories I had in my head as an owner. And so when you can start thinking about connecting AI into your CRM, connecting AI into all the success stories that you have, so what we’ve done in Agency Mastery and at my previous agencies is we would think of our methodology. So at Agency Mastery, we have Attract, Convert, and Scale, in order for agencies to be able to sell. And so I created a Trello board when I was bringing on a salesperson, and I thought about, what are all the success stories under Attract? So everybody that’s struggling with lead generation, what are all the success stories that we had, what are all the ones about helping them build the sales team, what are all the ones about selling? And then I started training the salesperson on those stories. The same thing is with AI. Give it the context, all your data. What makes us unique is all the atoms, and I’m not a science person obviously, but all the atoms and the DNA, is it DNA, I think, I was trying to think of, I guess.

Jen Buzza: Love it, I’m a web dude, right.

Jason Swenk: And so give it the context, connect it into all your technology, your time tracking tools, your project management tools, everything, and that gives us a competitive advantage and also makes us unique.

Jen Buzza: I love it. So the history, the knowledge, the wisdom, the experience, and using AI and making sure that all of that is incorporated, that’s our competitive edge, that we are unique. I love that. That kind of gets to this question, Christian, for you, of, from the business development side, do you see clients actually asking for AI, or are agencies selling it before the clients really understand what it is and what they need?

Christian Banach: Yeah, sure. So I would say I’m seeing it from both sides. I think agencies and brands, everybody’s still trying to figure a lot of this out. There’s still a lot of hype that’s out there, there’s a lot of experimentation. I think what I’m seeing is that there are real things happening with research and content writing, parts of production, media planning. So there’s a lot of things happening, but then when you get into more advanced uses, the picture’s maybe not quite as settled, when we’re starting to talk about using it for creative ideation, I think the verdict is not really out yet on where it stands there. So I think at the end of the day though, what it all still boils down to, from a business development perspective, you still need to understand what is the client trying to solve, what is the problem that they’re experiencing, and where then could AI potentially fit in to help solve that problem for them. So I think it’s more about leading still with the basics, of understanding your audience and their problems, and then trying to figure out and fit the, if AI could be a part of that solution.

Jen Buzza: I love that. So not just seeing a nail everywhere because you have a hammer, but actually finding out what the problem is and seeing where we can be efficient and more effective with AI. I love it, fantastic. That definitely goes into this idea of pricing and the business model. Jason, I wanted to ask you, if AI is reducing delivery time by 50%, let’s just say AI is or will soon be reducing this delivery time, it comes to this concept of, should agencies be charging less? I literally had this conversation two days ago. Should agencies be charging less, delivering more, or should they change their pricing method altogether? What do you think?

Jason Swenk: I think they need to change it altogether. And I’ll use an example like this. Let’s say your refrigerator breaks, and you call a repairman. The repairman comes in, he fixes your refrigerator in about five minutes, and gives you an invoice for $1,000. You’re going to be like, dude, refrigerator man, why did it cost a thousand bucks? He’s going to break down the invoice for you this way. He’s going to say, here is $100 for turning the screw, here’s $900 for knowing which screw to turn. So basically what I’m saying is, you need to separate the commodity work from the strategy work. So what I would tell the agencies to do is use AI to handle the commodity delivery tasks, and that frees up your team to do more of the thinking work that actually can move the needle for the clients.

So rather than, if you think about, God, I’m going to do some math, this would be pretty scary, so bear with me. So let’s say the first agency does 10 projects a month, they charge $5,000 each, and AI cuts 50% of that. Now they can deliver 20 projects at $2,500 each. Well, revenue is unchanged, but the chaos increased, because now we have more work, we have more to manage. Rather than the agency that doesn’t do it that way, they deliver five projects at $15,000 each. Now AI cut the delivery time by 50%, so now they can do more, but they’re charging more because they’re more of that specialist, if you think about it. So that’s kind of how I look at it, is you can do more, you can do it faster, but if you charge based on the outcome rather than charging on the task, it kind of fixes that and avoids the bad prospect. Like, I think I told Brent this at our experience, I was like, there’s no such thing as a bad client, there’s only a bad prospect or a bad process. And so avoid the bad prospects.

Jen Buzza: Oh, that gets, we could just stop right there and go into that, right, that’s a whole lesson on humanity in general, but I love that, Jason. So basically we’re changing the model. We’ve got to change the model, and in this time right now, when agencies are figuring out how they’re going to work with AI and what they’re going to do, it is time to put that pricing model back up on the drawing board to figure out how we’re going to do this, to where it creates good outcomes for everybody. Love it. Brent, when we talk about agency leaders, how should they measure whether AI is actually improving profitability, rather than simply increasing output? So kind of like what Jason was just talking about, how do we think about this and how do we measure it?

Brent Weaver: Fortunately, it’s a good question. I mean, fortunately profit is a pretty easy thing to measure, it’s revenue minus expenses equals profit. And so I think agencies should certainly be looking at profit as a measure of whether AI is helping. I’m seeing a lot of people expend a huge amount of energy, both in their own time and tokens, but the business fundamentals aren’t really changing. And so it’s something I’ve really encouraged agencies to look at, their profit and loss statement. Is revenue going up? You’re putting this huge investment into AI, are you seeing new clients, are you seeing new streams of revenue? Are you seeing, when people say, oh, this task is so much more efficient to do this, but is it actually showing up in your costs?

And let me give you an example. Let’s say you’ve got a copywriter on your team, and they’re able to deliver something twice as fast because of AI. If you’re still serving the same amount of clients, if you’re still serving the same amount of projects, and your copywriter went from working 40 hours a week to working 20 hours a week, but they’re still a full-time copywriter, you’re actually going to see zero impact to your actual business. You’ll have the exact same revenue, you’ll actually have increased expenses, because you’ll have the same full-time copywriter on your team except now you’re paying for them to have access to a Claude Pro or a premium subscription. So you’ll actually see your profit go down, because you have the same, if the process is slightly benefited by AI and you don’t change anything about your business, you’re actually going to see your profits go down, because you’re going to have to buy the AI tools, which is an increase in your overall business expenses. You’re not taking on any more clients, and so there’s no benefit to the business.

So I’ve seen a lot of agencies, they put a lot of work into making their delivery process more efficient, and that benefit actually goes to their team being able to work less, not to the business. And so unless an agency decides to increase their marketing spend and acquire more customers, add new lines of service, at some level we have to increase the average order value, we have to increase the number of transactions that are coming through our business, or we have to increase the number of customers. And if we don’t do that, but we just make things more efficient and we keep the exact same team, then you’re going to have no impact to the business. Now of course, if you have, let’s say, three copywriters, and now you make the processes twice as efficient, maybe there’s a decision the business has to make as to whether maybe they only need one copywriter now, maybe they need two copywriters. And so if that’s the case, then you do see an increase in profit, if they are able to run a more efficient and lean business. Which, I know that when I say run a more efficient lean business, it might mean running the business with fewer people. And that’s sometimes a challenging conversation to have, in a room full of agency owners, everybody values their people, they cherish the teams that they have working for them. But ostensibly, if you’re going to invest in making things more efficient, the only way you see that increase in profitability is really two ways. One is you reduce your costs, and that means you have to reduce your headcount, reduce your contractors, or you’re going to increase your profit and keep your costs the exact same they are today.

Now I personally prefer door number two. I personally prefer, create that efficiency and then take on more clients. Now the challenge of course is, if you make a copywriting process more efficient, and the agency owner themself is still bogged down with the exact same amount of work, if it’s founder-led sales, they’re not actually going to be able to go out there and find more clients. So you want to really strategically look at what are you going to focus on optimizing, and how is that time going to be used in your business. If you have a developer and you cut their time to build a WordPress site by 60, 70%, but not 100%, you still have to have that developer, you didn’t actually replace their whole job. So you still have to have that human in the seat that’s running the agent, and then if that doesn’t free you up to do more marketing and sales, then your business actually is worse off, unless of course you change that team member to a contractor. So in the last two months I’ve probably talked to close to a hundred agency owners about how they’re adopting AI, and one of the key things that I’ve heard, that I’ve taken from this conversation, is the importance of prioritization of where in your business you are implementing AI first, because it can certainly touch every aspect of your business, but where you choose to implement it first, there’s definitely a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. So that’s my piece on that.

Jen Buzza: What are you seeing around when agencies are starting to see profit? Because that’s one of the things, there’s this research and development phase, and for some of the agencies that I get to work with, they’re still heavily in it and they are not in a growth phase right now because they’re in an investment phase. And I’m starting to feel, Brent, that we’re getting to the side where I’m like, okay, now let’s focus back on increasing the profit, year over year, growing. Because I’ve seen that now with a handful, or more, agencies that are pretty happy to run the same level the last two years, more or less, because they’re investing so heavily.

Brent Weaver: Yeah. I mean, I think the fundamentals are still true. How do you grow your business? You have to increase the number of clients you serve, you have to increase the value of those clients to the business, or the frequency in which those customers purchase from you. There really is no other way. So when you think about increasing profitability, the only way you increase profitability is you cut your expenses, or you reduce the ratio of your expense to revenue. And so if you are creating efficiencies on the team where, like, we have a lot of developers and we were able to implement a lot of AI that did reduce the amount of time that developers were spending, but all that benefit went to the developers, it didn’t actually go to the business, because we didn’t change the number of developers that we had on the team, because we had other things that they were doing. And so you have to find ways to then go, okay, look, if we’re going to keep the same number of people, the same number of tools and systems, then we’ve got to have a really good plan to grow revenue.

And I think a lot of agencies, unfortunately, in the last two years, have spent a lot of time on AI, and they’ve kind of, and I don’t know, Jason and Christian probably have their own views on this, but they’ve kind of in some cases neglected maybe some of the marketing fundamentals of building their brand and building traffic and building awareness. They’re hanging out with OpenClaw, they’re creating really cool stuff, they’re spending so much time building all these really cool agents, but then they’re not remembering, oh yeah, I’ve got to get myself out there, I’ve got to go to events, I’ve got to shake hands, I’ve got to invest in marketing, I’ve got to make some bets.

Jen Buzza: Yeah. And on that, Christian, I wanted to ask you, we’re seeing this, that agencies are working with AI and they have more capacity, and especially if they’ve got a, not a white label team, but a team that can’t go up and down quickly with you, if they’ve got employees, all of a sudden they’ve got this more capacity to deliver. So how should they turn it into new business, versus simply taking on some more busy work, or as Brent said, it benefited the developers because they were working less but being paid the same because they’re on the employee model?

Christian Banach: Yeah. As I think about this, I’d almost challenge the premise a little bit. From what I’m hearing from a lot of agencies, is it necessarily, oh my gosh, we have all this extra time, we don’t know what to do with it? I’m hearing a lot that they’re just being asked to do more with their existing clients. So that’s a challenge, and that’s something that everybody is still trying to figure out, and how does that actually translate into more profit, like Brent was talking about. But let’s say there is a situation where you do free up some meaningful capacity, and I certainly have had some conversations with agencies that have started to figure this out. But really where I would focus the effort is first looking at your existing clients, and what more could you potentially be doing for them, what other problems are they experiencing that you’re not currently solving, and maybe it’s something that you’re doing in AI could help, or maybe it’s something outside of AI. But I’d first really start there, and then if you’ve sort of tapped your existing clients already, then I would start to look, obviously from more of a new perspective. And to Brent’s point, losing that capacity to not forget about building your own brand and getting to events and all of these things that we all should be doing, but unfortunately agencies are usually so busy that they are the cobbler’s kids who have no shoes, right. So that’s how I’m thinking about it.

Jen Buzza: I like that, and I want everybody who’s listening right now to just take a note, because I think what you said, Christian, was really important, and I think it’s one of those things that we’ve heard a lot, this idea of, go to your existing clients and find out what other issues you can solve for them. And I think it’s one of those things that we say as mentors, and it just kind of washes over people like a wave and goes away. So take your pens out, and pencils, and make a note, like, which clients do you have that you could serve in a different way, that you could bring other solutions to. I love that, and you emphasized it, don’t forget, that’s a great place to start. So on this topic of selling AI, Christian, as agencies are selling more AI-related services, what separates a real client problem from an AI solution looking for a problem? And I know we touched on this earlier, so would love for you to dive into that a little bit deeper.

Christian Banach: Well, you rewind a couple years ago and where AI was and where it is today. I think everybody was so excited to slap on, we have an AI this or an AI that, and I think today it’s becoming noise. It’s almost like saying, you know, we have internet, or we have email, and that’s some sort of differentiator. I think it’s becoming, in some regards, table stakes. And I’m going to kind of stick to the same theme, it’s really about sticking to the basics and what is the client experiencing and how can you help them solve that faster, cheaper, or better, ideally it’s a combination thereof. And if AI is a part of that, that’s great. But at the end of the day, it’s about the results, and technology is not what’s going to ultimately sell yourself to the client, it’s going to be them believing that you can solve a problem for them better than the next agency. So I think you need to be thinking then about what are you adding, are you adding expertise, are you adding judgment, implementation, those types of things is where I would focus more on, than just slapping AI on something and thinking that that is going to knock the socks off of whatever prospect you happen to be talking to.

Jen Buzza: I love that. So kind of what all three of you are saying is this, like, fundamentally, and Brent, I think you used that word, fundamentally, business is the same, it’s people buying from people at this point. And they need to believe, and we need to actually solve actual problems. I love that. Jason, what would you say people, agencies, should not sell? Which AI service would you say, don’t sell this? And Christian just touched on this, maybe we stop calling them AI services and this is the service, this is the problem we solve. But what do you think, Jason?

Jason Swenk: I think the generic or the commodity stuff. And that’s going to keep changing as the months go by. The websites I used to sell for a couple hundred grand, I can do in 40 minutes and it’s just as good. Now, I have 30 years of experience of building websites, that’s a little cheat code. So my dumbass neighbor across the street can’t do that, it’s not going to come out as good. So, anything generic right now, like the generic AI writing tools, or the commodity image generation. So what we really should be selling is the AI-powered strategy. And think about taking all that data that we talked about before, because now AI can put all this stuff together a lot faster. I was interviewed yesterday on a podcast, and after the podcast, I think it was just a selling thing, honestly Brent, like, you probably get these all the time too, and afterwards he was like, I got this AI bot for coaches and it can be smarter than you. I’m like, yeah, it’s called Claude or ChatGPT. I’ve been doing a podcast for 13 years, it has all my stuff out there, you can just go ask it. He’s like, but it knows that person. I’m like, that’s the generic stuff that we shouldn’t sell.

And so, but if you can put strategy behind it, and then people, like we talk about in the mastermind all the time, we want to talk to people. When I call to change a flight and I’m talking to AI, and I think Brent’s seen me do this, I’ll be like, operator, operator, and I’m just screaming at the top of my lungs to get to a person to feel better. Account management is not going anywhere, but the evolution of people’s roles are going to change, and that’s the fun part. So rather than, like, when I started in ’99, there wasn’t really web designers or web developers, we were graphic artists, and then we had to morph, and this same thing’s going on right now. So sell the AI-powered strategy, build the custom systems that solve your client’s biggest bottleneck. So if your client’s bottleneck is coming up with video ideas and doing video editing, well, come up with something to help them with that.

Jen Buzza: Love it, love it. Thank you. So Brent, I was thinking about, E2M, CEO of E2M now, is building an AI-enabled delivery organization. What has AI changed inside the delivery operation itself?

Brent Weaver: It’s hands down made it much faster, and I think it’s also opened up this, we use the term AI native. It’s a little bit of a, sometimes I feel like I say that and I might get some eye rolls, like AI native process, and I actually pushed my team on this a lot this last week, of, when you say that, what do you mean, why is an AI native process different than just using AI in a process. And I think what I understood was, when you can deliver something kind of end to end in AI without having to take something out of an AI process, it really makes something possible that wasn’t really possible before. And so, like, that might mean that if you’re building a WordPress website for example, you really can’t build that 100% end to end inside of AI. At some point a robust WordPress site that you’re building, it’s complex, there’s front end, there’s backend, there’s WordPress, there’s a lot of moving parts, and you can’t necessarily build that site purely inside of AI.

Now, there’s things that you can do to accelerate the development of that code, there’s things you can do inside of Figma that are AI powered to make designing a site faster, and then there’s things you could do to take a Figma site and build that into an ACF WordPress site. You can definitely enhance a current existing process with AI. But if you were to go to AI and say, okay, what would a process need to look like if it was just 100% AI, well, we wouldn’t be able to use WordPress. So we’ve got to use some other type of CMS that’s more AI native. We probably would have to build a website that might need to be a headless build where we’re able to publish just the front-end code without necessarily having that CMS, or have a CMS that can support a headless environment. And so by building what we call an AI native website development process, we’re taking custom branded really high-end websites with the AI native process from start to finish of a, let’s say like a Fortune 3000 website, a very large website, needs to be hyper secure, that might have taken a team six months and a thousand hours to build kind of pre-AI. And now we’re rolling out those types of projects in less than a month at a fraction of the build hours. And most of the build time is actually human-in-the-loop time to refine design, refine aesthetics, refine content.

But we have clients who literally gave us their URL of their existing site, and we use an AI native process to completely overhaul their brand, their website, their content, not just the text content, but creating videos, creating animations, creating product walkthroughs. So expanding the scope of what we’re delivering for them, but delivering that in a fraction of the time, in a matter of two or three weeks for that company. And what I’m hearing from the agencies is, right now they’re still charging the same as they were for the five or six month website project, but they’re leveraging this new AI native process, and they’re coming back to us very quickly for more, they’re asking us to do more of these AI native builds, because their profit margins have shot up massively. Whereas they might have been making 40 or 50 or 60% profit on a project, they’re making 80 or 90% profit on a project, because they’re doing it in an AI native way. And to do AI native, you have to really reimagine the entire build process. So that’s something where initially AI was just helping us to do things faster, but now it’s totally changing our entire approach.

Jen Buzza: Wow, those were some big numbers right there. So that’s what you’re seeing on profits, going up to 90%?

Brent Weaver: Well, I don’t know if you’ll continue to be able to charge the same, but what we’re hearing from agencies is, right now, because it’s so new, most agencies are not able to do work at that level of client for those types of prices. And so the competition of people that are using a fully AI native build process, it’s very limited. So let’s say you’ve got a website you’re charging 50 or $100,000 for, and our team used to spend five or six months building that site, tens of thousands of dollars in the back end, plus you’ve got to have a project manager or strategist, all that kind of stuff. Our team is able to build that now in a matter of two or three weeks with a single AI native developer. So less than three or four thousand of hard costs, and the agency is able to still charge relatively the same kind of prices. So I think it’s opening up some new possibilities and new opportunities.

Jen Buzza: Love it. And talking about the team and the founders, I love agency founders, I think we’re wild, crazy human beings. Jason, you’ve built a lot of your world right now around agency founders and getting them from the seat of operator, which we all start in because that’s how we got here, over to the owner seat. When we look at AI, do you think that it’s making that transition easier, or is it creating just another layer of technology and brain work that the founder needs to come back and manage?

Jason Swenk: It’s making it easier. Because a lot of times, if you look at AI, a lot of people don’t understand where to start at first. They start thinking about, well, I’m doing this task, this small little task, like a $10 task, let me have AI do it. I’m like, oh, that’s all good, you’re limiting a little task. But what if you thought about, what is my biggest bottleneck, and start there? So for example, a couple months ago, I would spend a ton of time on research of what should be my next topic for a video, and then a lot of times I would do the video editing of that. And so I was like, well, let me create an agent that goes out and researches all these different websites and presents back three ideas, and then after I go, I like that idea, what’s the hook that I can start on the video, I do that, then I go record it, and then I give it to the agent to do the editing.

So I’m auditing my week. So rather than being an operator now, maybe I can go up to a manager level where I’m managing people, doing their job, my job, and managing them, which sucks, you got to get out of that. You got to get to, how can I use AI in order to develop systems, so then people in my organization can make decisions? And AI can help you with that. So if it was something else, let’s say you were spending a ton of time on QA, or a certain process that no one else can do, well, record it on a Loom video or QuickTime, like you’re training someone else, put it in AI, and say, create an SOP for this, and how would you train people on this? Then you can start moving up the ranks, because right now the agency owns your ass, you’re the operator, and no one wants to be at an operator or manager level. You want to at least be at an architect or a CEO level, and then that’s when the agency really starts getting profit. I’ll say one thing too, the one other place to increase profit, charge more. If you’re too busy, I have a t-shirt I made, it says, if you’re too busy, you’re not charging enough. So it gives you back more time. And three words, go check out the book Operator to Owner.

Jen Buzza: Love it, love it. I want to ask you all a question. With AI adjusting and changing the way agencies are going to be making decisions on size and where they’re going, you can see AI could either create smaller, more specialized agencies, or it could go into this larger agency that can deliver more, and different, with the same team. What are you guys thinking is going to happen, or what do you see happening? Christian, would you mind starting?

Christian Banach: Sure, yeah, happy to jump in. So I think it’s going to help both, but I would actually lean towards more of the smaller specialized agencies being able to really gain some more ground. They’re resource constrained, so I think AI certainly opens them up to being able to do things faster, cheaper, things that maybe they weren’t able to do before. So I think they’re going to probably benefit the most. Now I think it would be naive to say that the big agencies are just sitting around and not going to use AI and not going to try to figure it out, but I think the bigger advantage right now I see coming with the smaller agencies.

Jen Buzza: Interesting. Brent, what do you think?

Brent Weaver: Whether they’re smaller or bigger, I think specialized agencies benefit much more than non-specialized agencies in the age of AI. And probably one of the biggest reasons for that is because of data. I think data is something that helps you differentiate. Data helps you to create a service level that people that don’t have that data can’t do. So if you work with dentists, for example, and you have 150 dentists that you do search marketing for, or lead generation for, you’ve got all those sales calls for all those dentists you’re talking to every single day, that’s tons of data. You’ve got all your calls with your actual customers about what are their top pain points, what are their issues, you also have a ton of data across what’s working, what’s not working. And AI thrives on data, especially when that data can be structured and labeled and there’s a systematic approach to that.

And so agencies that are highly specialized, what I’ve seen them do is, because the cost to develop custom SaaS has dramatically reduced, those agencies have started creating some very powerful tools, and those tools are helping them to leverage their data more effectively, help their customers get more value, but those tools are essentially becoming competitive advantages, they’re building moats by building these tools that non-specialized agencies aren’t going to be able to have. So I think specialized agencies are certainly going to benefit much more from AI regardless of their size. Like in E2M, we’re a highly specialized agency around digital agencies, and I get comments all the time from small agencies, because I’ll mention that we have a dedicated AI innovation team that just works with our web team, we have a team of full-time people that are building agents to help make our web process more efficient, we have a full-time AI innovation team working with our search and pay-per-click team, I have a couple AI engineers that just work with me building CEO dashboards and CEO intelligence stuff. And smaller agencies will say, well, we can’t do that because we don’t have those resources, we’re not as big of a company as you guys.

So I think even the big companies, as long as you’re specialized, you have some really good opportunities to create these competitive advantages. I think small teams that are generalists, they’re resourced, they can’t make the investment they want in AI, they also don’t know where to make the investment, because they’re serving everybody, you kind of go to wherever the squeakiest wheel is. So my advice to agencies, it might sound like the same advice I gave to them 10 years ago, would be to find your niche, find your specialization, and I think when you do that at a strategic level, you’re going to benefit 10x from AI than you would have a couple years ago.

Jen Buzza: I love it. Jason, what are you seeing, is it creating smaller specialized or larger?

Jason Swenk: I honestly, I think it’ll surprise some people, I don’t think it matters. I think it matters on the leadership team. So the leaders leading the company will make the decisions. I used to work for Arthur Andersen, huge, one of the biggest consulting firms in the world. Well, the leadership team wasn’t that good, and especially in this time, if they were leading the company on committee, they’re going to go really slow. But for, let’s say, a bigger company, their leadership team has a clear direction, we’re going to go this way, and all the teams on board, they have a thousand people to implement all this, they can do it a lot faster than a smaller agency. Now a smaller agency can do the same thing, specialized, same thing. Like even when I look back at the first agency I had, we had multiple specializations. Now, we had over a hundred people, so it was a little bit easier, but I could designate a practice director for each, like the automotive or the healthcare, and then they could lead the team. So there’s specialized agencies in each. But honestly I think it’s the leaders, they’re the biggest anchors, they’re the biggest bottlenecks for everything, whether they’re going to grow or die.

Jen Buzza: I love it. All right, so last rapid question for each of you, and then we’re going to close out this awesome panel. If you were an agency owner right now watching this, and you had not yet brought AI in in any meaningful way to your agency, what would be the first thing that you would change? Jason?

Jason Swenk: Just start trying to do something, like pick that biggest bottleneck and just experiment with it. Look, I was scared of AI when it first came out, and I had to put myself back in the place when the internet came out, I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t scared because I didn’t have anything to lose, I didn’t have anything in ’99. Right now people have something to lose. But as soon as you start experimenting with it, you realize it needs a director, and it needs expertise. And so I would just say, start messing around with it.

Jen Buzza: Amazing. Christian, what would you say?

Christian Banach: Yeah, to kind of piggyback off that, not everybody is AI native, but I guarantee somebody on your team probably is. So I think it’s, you as not just an owner, but I want to say as a leader, you need to be able to lead your team and find those people on your team that are AI native and can help you advance that within your firm.

Jen Buzza: Love it, leverage your team, leverage their talents. Brent, what would the first thing be that you would change?

Brent Weaver: I think you need to start playing. I don’t think any number of videos or white papers or X feeds will actually help you learn AI. I think you have to use it. I took up the piano earlier this year, and you can’t learn the piano unless you sit down and play the piano. You can watch YouTube videos, I can watch the Instagram reels, I can watch content about it all the time, and it’s good, it educates you, it might help you think about what you might want to play, but ultimately nothing actually helps you get better at piano except for playing the piano. And I think I see that with AI tools. There’s nothing that’s going to help you get better at AI tools than actually using the tools. You can’t read about it, to actually get better at AI, understand how it works, you’ve got to use it. And you’ve got to use it beyond just the chat applications and the Claude workspaces, you’ve got to go and create stuff beyond those, with some of the new tools and technologies coming out. So get in there, use it, be willing to make some mistakes, and I think you’ll do just fine.

Jen Buzza: Fantastic. Oh, the three of you are brilliant and amazing. It’s so nice to sit in the same room with the three of you. Thank you for being here. Thank you to the audience for being here, having some really good questions, and listening up and taking good notes to make important, meaningful change for you and your agency. We are going to take just a very short break, and we’ll be back with an amazing LinkedIn makeover. So stay tuned. Thank you to the three of you for being here. Wonderful job, appreciate your knowledge. Thank you. All right, everybody, stay put, we’ll be right back.