Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You know, for years I listened to every podcast on selling your business and everything I could read and soak up. And I almost thought it would be a negative thing because everyone says due diligence is going to be the most stressful time of your life. And, you know, you don't know what people are actually like until you start working with them after the acquisition. And I was really kind of going to this thinking it was going to be terrible, but it was a breeze for me at least. And Brent might say different, but, you know, for us it was great.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, the most helpful podcast on the planet for digital agency owners. That's right. This is the first episode for 2026 and we've switched things up a little bit. We've reinvented our North Star here at Agency Mavericks. Of course, Agency Mavericks is the company behind the AgencyAWL podcast and I just want to share it with you guys publicly here so that you can get used to the new verbiage, as they say. Our vision here at Agency Mavericks now is to be the most helpful team on the planet for digital agency owners. Which means the purpose of this podcast is to be the most helpful podcast on the planet for digital agency owners. Our mission is to find one digital agency owner every single day, every working day of the year. 240 working days in a year that we can help. That is our mission and our values are very simple. Share the love, tell the truth, and get it done. So having said all of that, our very first episode of the agency, our podcast for 2026. Our feature guest today is Taylor McMaster, who is the founder of Dot and Company, who are a fractional account management agency for marketing agencies. So if you're a marketing agency and you have too many clients and you're not ready to hire a full time account manager and you don't really know how to do it, and you want to hire an experienced account manager who's already got a proven process and knows how to do the job, but you don't want to recruit them. You don't want to go through the process of trying to figure that out. Then just go and talk to Taylor and the team at DOT and Company and they'll help you out because that's what they do. And more excitingly, they were acquired last year, late last year by our good friends at E2M, who of course are our sponsor here and our partner. They are part of the reason that this podcast is possible because they partner with us every year. Of course. Brent Weaver, ex U Gurus X Probably my biggest competitor of all time is the CEO of E2M. So now we are partners, and it's been amazing to be able to present some online events with Brent and to be able to spend more time with Brent. It's. It's been awesome. And so Taylor was on our podcast last year before they got acquired with Johnny. This is the first time I got to meet her. We talk a little bit about her entrepreneurial journey, her mindset, her desire to go premium from day one, and what that meant about some of the choices that she's made, what the acquisition looks like, how the integration is going with E2M and where agencies are getting stuck. I mean, Taylor's team get to see inside lots of agencies, so they see the patterns. They see what a successful agency looks like and what a struggling agency looks like and the difference. And so we unpack all of that in this episode. So stay with us. I'm Troy Dean. Let's go and meet Taylor McMaster.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the Agency Hour podcast, Taylor from DOT and Co. Hey, Taylor, how you doing?
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Hey. Good. Thanks so much for having me and finally got to meet you.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Yes, thanks for being here. You were on the podcast last year with Johnny, which was a great episode. For those that don't know and those that missed it, who are you? What does DOT and Co do and what are you doing here?
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah, so my name's Taylor. I am the founder of Dot and Company, which was recently acquired by E2M Solutions, which we're going to get into on this episode. But DOT and Company, we help marketing agency owners remove themselves from the day to day seat. We provide full service account management services.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: Wow. Okay, so this is.
I don't know that there are many companies like you in the space. Right? There's plenty of companies, you know, like, plenty of companies like E2M that do, you know, white label development and design and copywriting and, you know, WordPress maintenance and all that kind of stuff. But this is. You're interacting with agencies, clients.
So is it like fractional account management? Is it white label? How does it. How does that work?
[00:04:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So we are the only ones in the industry who. Who do this. We are. Yeah. Fractional white label account managers. And we actually place an account manager from our team within marketing agency so agencies don't have to go out and, you know, hire, train, coach, manage an account manager. They just get one of our amazing team members and they get to work within their agency.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Okay, so that's a, that's a fast track to.
Because account management is, you know, whether you call them account managers or account strategists or whatever the term is, that's like one of the hardest roles to hire for because you need someone with a specific type of mindset and experience and communication skills. I want to unpack a little bit of this, but I feel like before we do that, I feel like we need to sort of understand a little bit about who you are and where you came from and like how you got to this point. Are you an ex agency owner?
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Just.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Just kind of talk me through your journey.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I worked in marketing my. For my whole career and I kind of have different roles that are very similar to an account manager, account manager role. So I was, you know, an account manager at a liquor corporation and I. I learned a lot of skills really quickly. And then I was a marketing manager. And so I was a marketer first for a number of years. I really understood marketing strategy and clients and, and how that works. We worked with a lot of marketing agencies through that journey. And so when I decided to go to my own, just like we all do, we're like, let's start a marketing agency and you know, I can do this. So I was doing that for a little while and I had clients and, you know, I was doing everything.
And I kind of had this moment where I was like, this is not for me. You know, I do not want to run a marketing agency. I don't want to know what I'm doing. This is just not the energy that I'm looking to bring to the world.
And I was invited to this mastermind, this marketing agency mastermind where you go and learn how to improve your marketing agency. And it was in Fiji. And I'm in, I live in Atlanta, Canada. Like, that is probably the furthest place I could go from home.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: And so I was like, okay, I'll go, I'll go to this mastermind. And before the trip, I was second guessing, like, should I even go? I don't want to run an agency anymore. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't. You know, this just isn't for me. But I, I ended up going. And at this mastermind, I had this great conversation with a mentor of mine where I was telling her, I said, I don't want to run an agency. I just love the account management part. I love talking to my clients. I love the project management. I love organizing things. I'm a marketer, so I can actually speak the strategy and things like that.
She said, well, why don't you just do that?
And I. Something clicked, and I was like, oh, maybe this is what the industry needs. Maybe agency owners need me, and maybe I could do this. And so at this event, I just started telling everyone that I own a account management agency. And this was in 2019. And I got a couple clients, and I went home and I was like, okay, sweet. I'm a freelance account manager, and I'm living my best life. I can work remote. I can, you know, do whatever I want. And I had to decide, you know, am I going to continue down this path by myself, or am I going to grow a team and build this into something real?
And so here we are. 2026 built a pretty, you know, large team and a system and process, and now the business was acquired. So kind of congratulations. Yeah, it was a crazy journey.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: What was it about building a marketing agency that you didn't want to do, but building an account management agency? Because in my mind, I'm like, all right, you're a marketer, so you've already got the chops.
The two business models are very similar. Like, what is it about building a marketing agency that just. That didn't resonate with your energy and didn't allow you to be your best self? What was the roadblock there?
[00:08:39] Speaker A: That's a good question. No one's ever really asked me that.
I think it was. I was not doing something I actually loved. Like, I. With account management, I was just like, so in flow, I was like, I can do this. I know what I'm doing. Like, I was just so confident where running a marketing agency felt like I was just doing something that everyone else was doing. And I was in this comparison, like, am I doing it right? Could I be doing it better? This is what this person's doing with. This is what that person's doing. But with the account management thing, it was like I was creating a category, and I couldn't look to anyone else to see what anyone else was doing. I wasn't listening to podcasts. I wasn't reading books. I was just doing what I felt was right.
And I think that just allowed me to stay really focused and stay in my zone of genius.
Although I was still growing an agency at the same time. Like you said, it's very similar business models, but I just felt like I was doing. Doing the work that I felt like I could just do with my eyes closed.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: You know, I often talk about category of 1. Positioning agencies are a commodity. Let's Be honest, right? I mean, it's. And it's just getting worse because it's such an. Like, it's such an easy business to start.
It's very difficult to scale, and it's very difficult to remain successful for a long period of time. But because it's so easy to start, because the barrier to entry is so low, because if you basically got a laptop and an Internet connection, you can start an agency. And because.
And I say this respectfully, and I've been doing this a long time, and Brent has been doing this a long time. And so mentoring and educating and coaching agencies is something that I take very seriously. And I get a lot of.
In. I get a lot of intrinsic worth out of doing the work that we do. And I've. I have a real passion for helping agencies, and I believe that the agents. What I like about the agency business model is, for me, it's a distribution channel for abundance. If I make an agency successful, they can make 50 small businesses successful. Right? That's what I like about it. And I mean this respectfully, so please, if anyone is listening, please don't be offended, but there is an agency coach on every street corner these days. And so what that means is that there are, you know, and again, I mean this respectfully. There are young people and old people with no idea what it takes to grow a successful agency starting agencies every day of the week and failing because they don't realize they might, you know, succeed for three months or three years, but they don't realize how much work is involved. It looks great on the, you know, on the Instagram highlight reels, but you don't see, you know, the. The rest of the day where people are screaming into the pillow and where, you know, people are pulling their hair out, wanting to burn the whole thing down. I see that because I'm on calls with agency owners who are in tears wanting to burn the whole thing down several times a week.
And so the challenge, I think, is, you know, you talk about being in flow.
I think the challenge that I see in the agency space at the moment is that, like, you have to have.
For me, anyway, this is what the prime thing that we teach everyone is. You have to have a framework. You've got to have a point of difference. You've got to have some IP and a playbook and a framework and a way of doing things. I certainly would not be. And I'm in the process of starting another agency from scratch for the first time in a long time.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Exciting.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Which is, you know, don't tell my wife because she'll divorce me.
But we do one very specific thing, which I'm not going to talk about yet because we're not ready to launch, but we do one very specific thing, right? We don't do what clients ask us. We. The client will do what we tell them to. And that's just because we have the experience that we know that that's what they need. Right? So we don't run ads, we don't post pictures of your Christmas party on Instagram. We don't do any of that kind of stuff.
So I'm curious what you've seen after kind of trying to start a marketing agency and now you're an account management agency and you're working inside all these agencies.
What are you seeing that's working and what are you seeing as the common roadblocks that agencies are coming up against that are really preventing them from growing to the next level?
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Man, there's a lot of things, as you know, but, yeah, coming back to that category of one, the successful agencies that we've worked with over the years, I mean, this, this is a generalization. You know, there's, there's ones that are, that are outliers, of course, but it, it's the ones who know exactly who they serve, and they serve those people well. And that is what they're known for in the industry.
They get referrals because of this, and they're just really, really good at serving one specific niche.
And I think what happens when you do that is your business creates such efficiency.
And from an account manager perspective, when we work in an agency that does one thing, it's so much easier for us because we know how to onboard them, we know how to speak to them, we know what the pain points are. We know how to manage those clients. Like, it just becomes so much more efficient, and we see those agencies scale way faster.
So I'd say that is what's differentiating people, especially today. You know, like you said, there's a million different agencies you can work with, but the ones who are specialists are the ones who are successful.
And I think that teams get really excited about that. You know, especially what I see through my account managers when they step into an agency. There's a level of competence when you're working with an agency that does, you know, one specific thing. They serve one audience and they, maybe they, they help with one pain point. You know, it's just, it creates just such a ripple effect within the agency.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I want to, I want to Talk about specialization and niche and icp. Because the.
Brent and I had this conversation all the time. I think, you know, the, and he wrote a book about it, like Get Rich in the Deep End.
The, the word niche or niche, as you guys say, on your side of the planet. I think a lot of people misunderstand. A lot of people hear that and go, okay, I just have to focus on accountants or coaches or financial planners or how do you. When you say agencies that specialize and solve a particular pain point, what's the advice if you're, if someone's just starting out and they're doing, you know, maybe they've got to like 30 grand a month in revenue and they've, they've kind of got through startup phase, what's your advice to them? Is, Is niching like picking an industry or a vertical? Like, how do you think about this? And, and what are you seeing, you know, that's, that's working in the cause? I, I would love to be a fly on the wall when your account managers are deployed into an agency. And I'm again, I mean this with all due respect to agency owners, but let's be real. When your account manager is deployed into an agency that is a shit show and don't know what they're doing and they're running around like a headless chook, and your account managers come back to, you love to be a fly in the world. Meetings, right? So what with the whole like, niching down thing, how do you unpack that?
What's your take on it?
[00:15:52] Speaker A: I mean, I can speak from my experience of niching down and what that meant for me, what it allowed me to do is.
And I mean, I still get the feeling sometimes you might be on a sales call and it's like, oh, they really, they don't need what I offer here, but I could help them and I could, you know, spin this, this service off and, you know, just help this one client. You know, like we, as I think human beings, but especially entrepreneurs, we love a shiny object and we love the dopamine hit of, of, you know, helping this one client and doing this one thing. But it just, I don't know, like having a niche and being able to say no to clients and being able to say, I'm sorry, I don't, I can't help you there, but maybe go talk to this other person.
It just creates so much momentum. And for me, you know, being able to be such a. Specifically, you know, we, we work in a niche for sure. We work with marketing Agencies, and we only do account management. But within that, we have tons of different types of agencies we were. We work in. So even though we're very niched and we're very specialized, within that, we still have creativity.
So I think for agencies listening who are thinking they need to niche, it doesn't need to be so specific in terms of you can only work with lawyers and do SEO. Like, it can be still a creative arm within a specialization. But you just. The way I think of it is, and I'm a marketer, so this is how I think. But if someone comes on your website, what is it that you. Who is it that you serve? Speak to that one person, and then anybody who comes there or comes to, comes through any of your marketing channels, you're speaking directly to them, and those are the people you're going to attract. And that's kind of how I took it from day one, is like my website copy, my social media copy was speaking to one, basically three different pain points, like over and over and over and over again.
And that is kind of what I, I drilled down to. So I would say if you're an. If you're thinking about niching down, it. It could be maybe just a certain product or like a specialized service that you offer that's very unique to you, or maybe it is a.
A vertical within the industry, but it doesn't have to be so, you know, black and white.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people hear niching down and they think they just need to go after a particular industry, like a vertical. And I think that's a misunderstanding.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Your niche can also be the service and the way that you provide that service.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: You know, growing a podcast is a niche, but you could work with a whole bunch of different types of industries and different types of thought leaders. But all you do is you take someone's ideas and their experience and their IP and you turn that into a podcast and you share that and you help them grow their authority. Right. That's an example of niching down. You know, what I love about what you said is the creativity. Because as a creative, what I've learned over the years is that, and this is a very common sort of school of thinking around creativity is the more boundaries you give a creative person, the more creative they can be because they know the parameters.
The worst thing is looking at a blank page.
Create me something. And my daughter, who's 5, who is a prolific drawer, she gets out of bed in the morning and she'll draw 10 pictures before breakfast. Right. She'll draw everything. She'll draw family, she'll draw princesses, she'll draw unicorns. And sometimes she'll be frustrated at school and I can see what's happening. She wants to draw something, but she needs some parameters. So I'll say, draw me a prince, and straight away she'll be off and she'll be drawing a prince. Right. Because she now knows what the bound, what the, you know, the parameters are, like, what the guardrails are. Whereas if you don't have those guardrails and you're trying to be creative, it's too broad. It's. There's too much space to play. And so I love that you mentioned that, because. And also, if you, if you become a specialist, you get really good at copy, you get really good at ads, you get really good at content because you know who you're talking to, you know their pain points. And also the other thing that happens is you become easily referable. Right.
Like, if I'm talking to anyone in our space now and each of them are a big partner of ours, and so it makes sense. But even if they weren't, if I'm talking to anyone in our space now and they say, well, we're having a problem with account management, I would say, hey, just go and talk to Taylor and the guys at DOT and company, because that's what they do.
You're instantly referable. If I'm talking to an accountant who's having a problem with account management, I'm not going to refer them to you. Exactly. You know what I mean?
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: So specializing in solving a specific problem for a specific group of people makes you instantly referable.
Okay, I do. We do need to talk about the acquisition. Right.
Obviously you're not going to tell me how much they paid you for it, which I would love to know, but you're not going to tell me, so that's fine. But what I do want to know is, like, are you. Do you have to work there for the rest of your life? What does that look like? What's the.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Just till I die. I just signed away my life.
No, for a year, for sure.
But I can see it going longer. I love.
I absolutely love the team at E2M. Obviously, I love my dot team.
And it's interesting because as I was growing the business, I always knew I wanted to sell was just a goal of mine. You know, it's for some people, they want to grow a business and keep it forever. And for me, I knew there would be a point where I wanted to sell it, and that was just my goal. And through that process, I was building it so that I didn't have to stay on with the people who bought the business because I couldn't see a world in which I would want to do that now, because it's E2M, because it's Brent, Minouche, the whole team, I'm like, please don't get rid of me. I love you guys. I want to be a part of this. So it's really been.
It's been a really interesting process, which I'm. I'd love to dig into how that went, but, yeah. Yeah, I just. I'm having the time of my life. It's so fun.
[00:22:05] Speaker B: I know I don't want to talk about numbers, and I'm fully respectful of everyone's privacy, but I do want to. There's one question I want to ask. Is there anything in the deal that you didn't get that you wanted, or is there anything that surprised you? It's like, oh, wow, I hadn't even thought about that as a parameter.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: I mean, your business is always worth less than you think it is.
At the end of the day, everyone tells you that, but then in reality,
[00:22:29] Speaker B: a bit like your children, actually.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Your children are worth more to you than anyone else.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: Right. Like, you kind of. I don't know, you have this number in your head, and then you have to negotiate. So I don't know that that was a surprise, but everyone tells you that.
Yeah, I would say.
I don't know. Like, it's. It's just kind of a blur to me now. You know, what I expected versus what happened. But, like, we were negotiate. I'll call it negotiating, like, in talks for over a year.
So the conversation just kind of evolved, and it was just kind of like a.
You. You take some. You'll. You give some. You. You just figure it out to make sure it works, because we both wanted it to work.
And it was kind of like a marriage, you know, at the end of the day, it was like combining two households.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: So, yeah, it was. It was a really positive experience. You know, for years, I listened to every podcast on selling your business and everything I could read and soak up, and I almost thought it would be a negative thing because everyone says due diligence is going to be the most stressful time of your life. And, you know, you don't know what people are actually like until you start working with them after the acquisition. And I was really kind of going to this, thinking it was going to be terrible, but it was a breeze for me at least. Brent might say different but you know, for us it was great.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I know Manish and Brent very well and I know Vishal and I know Khushboo and I've spent time with them, I've had dinner with them, we've been at events together.
Except Brent. I've never met Brent in real life but we will at some point. And all that, all that might be true, that due diligence could be a nightmare. It depends on who's on the other side of the table, right?
[00:24:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: And so when you're dealing with Manish and Brent and that team, like I've never had anything but a great experience dealing with a 2M and I'm not. I don't say that because.
I don't say that because they're our partner. They're our partner because I can say that.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Right. Like we are just so aligned in values and they're just good people. And so I, it doesn't surprise me that due diligence was painless. It might have been a bit painful from an admin point of view, but I don't, you know, if you're dealing with a private equity group that values your company.
I get this all the time, right. I get people reach. I get.
Drives me nuts. I actually realize now it's like a, it's a cold email sequence that happens, right? It's like, oh, we're representing this family office that are looking to acquire companies like yours and jump on a call and it's a $25,000 retainer set up fee to do due diligence. Hang on a second. You've reached out to me, right? These private equity groups, they will dangle a carrot just for anyone listening. If you ever get an email from a private equity group, what they do is they dangle a carrot. They overvalue your business massively to get you on a call.
Then they will do due diligence and they will find every reason to bring down the value of your business. They will offer you small amount of money up front. They'll put you on a buyout deal where they'll promise that you can earn three times what they're paying you now. This is lived experience. I've been through this process a few times. I'll promise you three times what you, what they're paying you now. If you meet these numbers over the next three years and then what happens? And I've had colleagues go through this experience, you get your P and L after the first quarter and realize there's all these expenses on your P and L that they're amortizing across all their other companies. So they make it impossible for you to hit your numbers, so they never have to pay you out. Right.
Happens all the time. That's how private equity groups work. And so due diligence with a private equity group can be torturous. It can be because you end up feeling like that. You end up feeling like you've built something that's worthless. Like they're picking holes in all of your work and they're ruthless, but they're still dangling this big carrot that keeps you on the hook. It can be an incredibly stressful situation. So I can't imagine you went through any of that with E2M and I'm glad that it was a positive experience.
What's the integration looking like now? Like, how like is Dot and Company just a completely owned subsidiary of E2M? Like, do you work with their team? What's the integration looking like?
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Yeah, so DOT and co will still be its own brand, its own company, completely separate from a legal, from a marketing perspective. But we are working together on a lot of fronts. So as you know, E2M, they sponsor a lot of events, they attend a lot of events. So we're piggybacking on that. So we as DOT will be at the majority of the events this year that they are sponsoring. So there's a lot of that collaboration.
We are leveraging their team a lot. So for example, they have recruiters, they have full time recruiters on their team. They're helping us with some of some recruiting work or you know, we already worked with the same cmo, fractional cmo. She worked in both companies. Joe Williams is amazing. And you know, we get to now like cross like work all together.
Our sales manager and their sales manager, they're helping each other when they're on vacation now, which is really cool. So I'd say integration is.
We're working more with the E2M team than I thought we would in a very positive way.
Yeah.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Still running separate P and ls and separate contracts and everything. Okay, interesting.
And how big is your team? How big is the dot and co team?
[00:27:47] Speaker A: We have just over 30 people.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:27:50] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: And where are they based? Are they all in Canada or.
[00:27:55] Speaker A: Yeah, so the majority of our team is in Canada. We have a couple people overseas, backend team, but all of our account managers are Canadian.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: So how do the economics work? If I'm an agency owner, and I'm looking at hiring a fractional. I haven't checked out your website or your services or your pricing. I should have maybe. I don't know. Is it publicly available? Like, is it.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: Is it.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: So it's. You get on a call and you kind of work it out with each agency.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's one of these things where most agency owners don't know what this role should look like in their agency. You know, they don't know what a really great account manager looks like. You know, a lot of people have had poor experiences in hiring, and they're just not sure what they need. The biggest question is, how many clients can one account manager manage?
So we definitely want to.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: What's the. What's the answer to that?
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Well, it's a range. As you. Yeah, it depends.
So we want to chat with an agency owner and see a. Are they a good fit? But what can this look like within their agency?
And is a fractional account manager the right fit or is it not? So, you know, every agency is so unique.
Yeah, but our range is around 4,500plus for an account manager. Yeah.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: Okay, cool. Per month. Yeah.
I've had. So just on that question, I had an agency once who joined our program, who failed in our program because it was a solo operator. Solopreneur. We have a rule now that we don't take on anyone who's a solopreneur. They have to have at least one team member. Because of this experience. The guy was doing over a million dollars a year in revenue, was managing 150 Google Ads accounts for clients, had 150 active clients all running Google Ads. He'd built this incredible, like, this is pre AI. I'm talking, like, I don't know, 2022. Right. He built this, like, these incredible automations and this kind of custom software to help him manage one person managing 150 Google Ads accounts. He was working seven days a week, like, 10 hours a day.
Him and his wife were planning on having a family. And he was like, dude, you need to help me, otherwise I'm gonna die. I'm like, literally, I'm gonna work myself to death. Right?
And so the reason he failed is because he didn't have a spare half an hour to interview candidates that we were putting in front of him to help him. And so it was like, dude, I can't help you. Like, it doesn't matter how much. Like, I just can't help you because, like, you just need to stop. You just need to like. And he and his expectation was to bring on an account Manager to manage 80 Google Ads accounts. I'm like, dude, like no, ethically I won't put a candidate in front of you. If you want them to run 80, no, that's not gonna happen. So we had this conversation internally and a lot of the really experienced agencies that we work with, multiple seven figure agencies, I've got teams of, you know, 20, 25, 30. I was saying, well, you know, somewhere between 20 and 30 is kind of like the average client load that one of our account managers might handle. Ours I think is, I think ours is 30 to 34. Like we, our client success managers, any more than 34 and we're like, okay, you need to stop. Like we need to, you know, not give you any more clients. I wouldn't handle that many clients. So I don't expect anyone on our team to do it.
So it's just interesting that, and you must see this as well that people's expectations, if they haven't built a team of account managers in the past, and they've never run a team of account managers, their expectations are just like, how do you set or reset those expectations at the beginning of an engagement? Because I think, I'm guessing the biggest challenge you've got is setting those expectations at the start so that you can then meet them. That's gonna, that's going to result in a successful client engagement.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. And I think most agency owners, we all do it. We, we think we're doing a great job when it comes to managing our clients. So we pack them on, right? We're like, we can handle 50, why can't you? But we don't realize that we're actually not doing a good job. Like we're not the best account manager.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: We're doing the bare minimum.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Yeah, you're doing the bare minimum. So I think one of the expectations that agency owners need to understand is that we have the systems, we have the process of what makes a really excellent account manager. And we need to get in there and put them in place.
And so let's start slow. We're not going to take on 80 clients in the first week. That just doesn't make any sense. Let's, let's start with the first five to 10 and we're going to build the systems and we're going to, you know, if we can get up to that number, let's do it. But realistically we want to get in there and figure out what does excellent account management mean in this agency.
And then let's build the plane for that. Let's not fly the plane that you built. That is really not flying. Well, you know, we need to make sure we're, we're putting in the right processes and systems and SOPs and ensuring that we're set up for scale.
Right. Because an 80 client agency, 150 clients, they probably want to scale. They want to keep those clients happy and they want to grow. And so let's put in our systems that we've proven over the years to allow you to scale.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the biggest problems or biggest mistakes I see agency owners make, and it's not their fault, they just don't know any different, is that when you first start out and you get to a point where you're at capacity and you literally just like running around with your hair on fire, you can't do any more.
You hire people to do tasks that you do, you go, okay, well I just need you to do that thing. Right.
And then you get to a point where you realize that if you've got more than three team members, you are now just the conduit through which every decision needs to be made. And so you get home from work and you can't decide what you're gonna have for dinner. Cause you've got decision fatigue. Right. You've just made too many decisions in a day. Yeah. And so then you start saying to your team members, like, you decide like, you've been here long enough. You know how it works. Like, you just make the decision, it'll be fine.
And then you get to a point where you try and document processes before you hire new team members because you want to make sure your processes are right before you hire people. And then you realize you just don't have time to do that because there's one of you and you've got three team members and you literally like, the math just doesn't math. Right. And so the smart agency owners, well, you kind of get to a point, I mean that respectfully, but you get to a point where you're like, ah, I just need to hire someone who's done the job before and they bring their process with them.
Right. And then they teach me how to be in a good account manager, or they teach me how to edit podcast videos, or they teach me how to do email marketing. Right. Like, I don't need to know all the details as an agency owner.
[00:34:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Right. Like I, if I'm flying the plane, I don't need to know how they serve the food in business class.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:34:38] Speaker B: Right. Like, I can't be across all the details. So I guess what I'm saying here is, like, flying your flag a little bit. Is like, you guys have already got the sops in place for successful accounts management.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: Agents, owners should be looking at going, huh? This is a fast way for me to document how to run my agency. By just hiring people who already know how to do the job.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Exactly. Yes. And learn from other people's mistakes. You know, we've made plenty of mistakes, and you get to learn, like, you get to get that, you know, by just working with us. And it seemed like if I.
If I want to do an excellent podcast, I go find a producer who has the studio set up, who already knows how to record and. And do all the things, and I just show up because I don't want to invest the time, energy, and to make those mistakes. That's going to take me 10 years of experience that he has. And it's like, that an accountant is. You do that with every other area of your business and your life. Like, it's the same thing with account management.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: What's the mindset there, though? Because, you know, you. You joined us here on the podcast, and we were instant. And I remember we were going back and forth with the scheduling, and you were like, I need to talk to my podcast team. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. You got podcast team. It's rare that we hear that you turn up, you're in a studio, you've got professional mic, great lighting, professional headphones, all good.
A lot of people turn up. They're on their laptop, right? Like, the camera's up their nostrils. I've got airpods in. It's really echoey. It's really roomy. What is the mindset there? Like, what is it about your mindset as an entrepreneur that says, okay, I'm not prepared to accept this standard. Like, it has to be this good? And also, I'm not. I haven't got time to do that. I'm just going to find someone who's already done it. Like, what.
Where does that come from? Is that. Does that come from your upbringing or just your professional experience or.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: That's a good question for me. I. I grew up with entrepreneurs, so my family, they're all entrepreneurs, and I think they instilled in this the mindset of invest in your business. Like, invest to. To grow.
And so as I've been learning business over the years and. And look, you know, listening to the pros, it's Always like, if I put in a dollar, how do I make that into $10?
And so for me, as I was growing dot, I decided really early on I wanted it to be premium, I wanted it to be high end. I wanted that experience to be the best of the best.
And so yeah, I've just always tried to reinvest into the areas that actually make a difference. And I think I see that within the entrepreneurs that we work with, the ones who stick around for a long time, who see the best results not only with their account management, but with their agency as a whole, those are the ones who are just willing to reinvest into their business and they're not just trying to take out as much profit every month as they can. And they see the long, the long game.
So yeah, I think, I think it's just that mindset of how do I, how do I play the long game, how do I invest in my business in the right areas?
[00:37:48] Speaker B: You know what? Most people aren't playing the long game.
[00:37:50] Speaker A: No.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: Which I actually think is a huge competitive advantage if you can get your head around the long game. No one's playing the long game. So there's like, you talk about blue ocean, everyone talks about blue ocean. Right? Blue ocean, just play the frickin long game.
[00:38:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Because like you play the long game long enough and you're in a blue ocean because no one else is left.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true.
[00:38:07] Speaker B: Do you know what I mean?
Final thing I want to talk about is before I want to talk about what you're most excited about and what you're most frustrated by, but before we do that, I just want to talk about self care. You've got account managers who work fractional. They work in. So they're working in multiple agencies. Right. They might be working with, you know, a client load in multiple agencies, their context, switching, their task switching, how do they look after themselves, like mentally, how do they not burn out?
[00:38:32] Speaker A: Yeah. So right from the beginning I made sure that our culture was very relaxed and ensuring that everyone takes time for themselves. Because the reason that I started this business was I didn't want to work a 9 to 5 anymore. I wanted to do my laundry, I wanted to go to a workout class during the day. If I wanted to get coffee with my mom, I was able to do that. So it's been part of our culture from the beginning. So we very much so encourage all of our account managers to set those boundaries within their role. So we don't ask them to work 40, 50 hours a week. We ask them to work 30, 35 hours a week. But within that time we expect high performance and accessibility. You know, we want, we want it to feel like you're full time for your account manager or for your, for your agencies you're working in. But what you do within that is up to you. So we want to make sure you're getting your work done and we trust you.
So that is the culture that we've developed early on. And I think we hire the type of people who can handle this workload, who have been there, done that, worked in agencies, burnt out. They understand what the worst case scenario looks like. So now when they step into this role, they kind of set themselves up for success and that's something we encourage them to do.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: That must be a breath of fresh air for them. I've worked. When I first started out, I rented an office in an agency in a traditional advertising agency that had no digital right. Like they literally had job folders in a rack and they would hand the job folders. They were old school, they were doing like TV campaigns and radio ads and stuff. And I actually, I was doing voiceovers back in the day and that's how I met them. I did a bunch of voiceovers for campaigns that they were working on. And then I started my web agency and I ended up renting an office space with them. And I would see the account managers, it was like, oh my God, it's just like the worst job in the world, right? They were just like getting smacked around by clients. They were working till 8 o' clock at night, they were drinking by 5pm Fridays, they were drinking at lunchtime. You know, it was like, it was just a horrible culture. And I was, I was. And also there was literally a glass wall between the account managers in the studio that were doing all the work, right. I was like, why there's such this massive disconnect? The account managers would open the door and go into the talk to the studio manager who protected the creatives in the studio. And it was like this massive disconnect between what the clients are asking and everything is getting lost in translation. And so. And there was a real high churn as well in those agencies where, you know, staff come in for six months or 12 months, they get burnt out and they just move on.
And so that's why I was asking about self care, because the traditional account management role in agencies is really hard.
[00:41:04] Speaker A: It is.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: What are you most frustrated by right now? If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing, what would you fix?
[00:41:13] Speaker A: I would say the mindset for entrepreneurs. I feel like.
I feel like there's a lack of confidence in, in the world right now. And I think that people just have to believe in themselves and not look for external validation.
You know, like, I could have absolutely looked at all the things that were going wrong in my business, in our industry. So many people told me that this model wouldn't work and that this business wouldn't work, and I just didn't listen. And I think that comes back to just being super confident in yourself.
And so I wish that more people would just listen to themselves and kind of tune out the noise in the world right now.
I don't know, maybe that's too deep.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: Maybe that's not, you know, what you
[00:42:10] Speaker A: were looking for, but.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: No, I mean, I wasn't looking for anything specific. I was looking for the truth, really. And I mean, you know, I think Brent and I have, you know, spent the last 15 or 16 years each telling agency owners they need to put their prices up and actually charge what they're worth, otherwise they're going to go broke. Right?
[00:42:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: And I think there is a, a lack of belief. And I think a lot of that comes from the fact that marketers tend to hang out in marketing circles.
And so they think that everyone on the planet knows how to do what they do and they forget how valuable their skills are because they think that everyone knows how to do it. And particularly with AI, I actually think the opportunity now is better than ever. I think AI is creating more opportunities for agencies than anything. Because what's happening is, if you think about what AI is doing to the average, first of all, most people don't know what's going on with AI.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Most people are completely clueless. They've got no idea what's happening with AI. We know what's happening with AI because we live and breathe it every day and we're using it every day. Most people aren't, but those that are are now starting to understand what's possible. Oh, so now we can run a video campaign as a small business, whereas previously we couldn't because we couldn't afford the crew. But that doesn't mean I've got time as a small business owner to use AI to generate my video campaign.
Right. I still need someone to do that for me. I just don't have to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a video crew to shoot an ad. I can do it with AI so the opportunity, I think the opportunity is for small to medium business to do more than they've ever been able to do because of AI, but the opportunities for agencies to help them leverage AI and use that technology to achieve the outcome. So I think the opportunity, I'm just going to say this on record, March 2026 the opportunity for agencies now is better than ever because of AI. Do not be scared that AI is going to put you out of business.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: Right, I agree.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: I absolutely agree between the client and the technology.
What's the, what are you most excited about over the coming 90 days?
[00:44:03] Speaker A: Well, speaking of AI, we have an event coming up called Vistara, which I'm really excited. I'm. I've invited a number of people to be my guest who I've worked with for five years and chatted with and I get to hang out in person. So I'm really pumped about that.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:44:20] Speaker A: So that's great. Excited about that. I'm just really excited to continue, you know, on this integration. It's, it's once in a lifetime, probably opportunity for me to see my firstborn baby, which is my business, you know, flourish and be a part of something bigger. So I'm just excited to, to see how it goes and just to be a part of it.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. I think we've got a coupon code for Vistara. We will put that in the show notes. I will drop a link in the show notes to get tickets to Vistara, which is the AI event coming up in Austin in May run by E2M. Check it out in the show notes. Taylor, thank you so much for joining us on the Agency Hour again and look forward to having you back at some point again in the future.
[00:45:07] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks Troy. I'm so happy that we finally got to meet and this was such a great conversation.
[00:45:11] Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: Thanks.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: All right, thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast and a huge shout out to Taylor for joining us here and also a huge shout out to Pixel Studio in Canada, where Taylor was when we recorded the podcast. It's a podcast studio that Taylor popped into to help shoot this episode. Just such a professional outfit, looked great, sounded great, very smooth communication, everything ran beautifully and so just wanted to give them a shout out because I love it when guests on our podcast turn up with great video and great audio. It just makes our job a lot easier. So I'm going to pop a link to Pixel Studios in the show notes. It's PII x e L apparently, but I will put a link in the show notes so that you can go and check it out and give them a shout out. And also make sure you click on the link in the show notes to grab your tickets to the Vistara event coming up in Austin, Texas. You do get a discount as being part of the Agency Mavericks community. I'll pop a link in the show notes there. Get out there. I hopefully when this episode goes live, there are still tickets available because I know they're selling very quickly. So grab a ticket to the Vistara event and learn how you can transform your agency with AI. And learn how you can partner with E2M to provide AI solutions for your clients as well. All right, it's good to be back here on the podcast for 2026. We've got a whole bunch of exciting guests and content and episodes coming up for you throughout the year. Got a very big guest coming up in May who I can't announce yet, but someone who has been I've never met and I'm very excited to meet them. They've been a massive influence on my entrepreneurial journey. They have informed so much of my thinking and still to this day I use the things that I learned reading this person's first book when it came out many, many years ago. So I'm very excited to bring this guest to you in May. Stay tuned for that. All right, subscribe like share, do all the things that you do and and for now I look forward to, you know, wishing you all the best and seeing you on the next episode of the podcast. I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.
