How to Scale an 8 Figure Agency 🚀

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Aug 2026

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Welcome to How to Scale an 8-Figure Agency, the show where I break down the exact operational, financial, and AI-driven systems that today’s top marketing agencies use to scale past seven figures — without burning out or getting trapped in fulfillment. Every week, we go deep into: • AI consulting for marketing agencies • Operational infrastructure that actually scales • Building automations, workflows, and agent-based systems • Hiring and training world-class teams • Improving margins, capacity, and client LTV • Turning your agency into an 8-figure operation that runs without you If you’re a founder stuck in the weeds, capped by systems, or wondering how to integrate AI into your agency the right way… this podcast is your blueprint. I’m Jordan Ross — founder of 8 Figure Agency and the person behind hundreds of successful agency scale-ups — and this is where we turn chaos into clarity, and CEOs into true operators. Let’s get into it.

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August 12, 202624 min

AI SEO for Agencies: How to Rank in AI Search Without Getting De-Indexed

Want an AI content engine that publishes at a pace your domain can actually carry? Go to https://www.8figureagency.co/get-aiagency-ops for a free AI consultation. Any agency can do SEO. Any agency can also torch its domain in six weeks doing it wrong. A few weeks back I had someone on this show who was publishing 20 AI-written blog posts a day. Cameron LiButti — founder of BidView Marketing, 13 people, ~70 clients, close to 200 locations across medical, legal, professional services, and large home services — told me exactly what would happen. Google de-indexed the site inside six weeks. So I brought Cam on to answer the question I actually have as a founder learning this myself: how do you use AI for SEO aggressively without setting off Google's alarm bells? We get concrete fast. Cam explains crawl budget — how much compute Google decides your site is worth, and why a site crawled every three to six weeks publishing 20 posts a day is a flare in the sky. He covers the audience question most agencies skip: his medical practices serving 65+ patients get under 5% of leads from AI search, while his tax attorney client gets 40–50%. Same firm, same tactics, completely different priority. Then the part you can build on this week. Google's non-commodity content standard, and the two-part article structure that satisfies it: the first half answers the questions traditional SEO and AI both want answered, the second half is a real client situation — the problem, what you did, the outcome. That's the point of view Google can't get from a commodity blog. Cam gives the exact ramp: start at three posts a week, submit each one in Search Console, and check whether it's still indexed two weeks later — not 48 hours later. Still indexed at week three? Go to four. Then five. You earn 14 a week; you don't switch it on. And if pages drop out of the index, that's your signal to stop and diagnose before you scale the problem. We close on off-site: niche directories like G2 and Clutch, local citations off a Google Business Profile, press releases as safe volume, newsjacking for the links that actually move, and the two sources AI models cite most — YouTube and Reddit. If you're an agency owner planning to point AI at your own SEO this quarter, listen before you publish anything. CHAPTERS 00:00 — He got de-indexed. Cam saw it coming. 00:57 — Engineer to SEO: BidView Marketing, 13 people, ~70 clients, ~200 locations 02:51 — The card catalog framework: Dewey decimal → PageRank → organizing data for AI 05:37 — Crawl budget explained, and why 20 posts a day on a low-authority site is a red flag 07:48 — Where are your clients? 5% of leads from AI vs. 40–50%, same tactics 08:24 — Site foundations that still matter, plus why brand became an SEO input 10:49 — Non-commodity content: Google's term, and what it demands from you 11:18 — The two-part article: the how-to, then the client case with a point of view 13:38 — How often can you publish? Jordan's real numbers pressure-tested 14:37 — The ramp: 3 a week, index checks in Search Console, the two-week rule, earning 14 17:15 — Off-site: directories, local citations, press releases, and newsjacking 19:40 — YouTube and Reddit: the citation sources AI models pull from 20:18 — Where to find Cameron LINKS Cameron LiButti — bidviewmarketing.com Cameron on LinkedIn — search "Cameron LiButti" Google Search Console — for the index checks discussed at 14:37 CTA Want an AI content engine that publishes at a pace your domain can actually carry? Go to 8figureagency.co for a free AI consultation.

August 3, 202634 min

AI Agents for Marketing Agencies

Venture capital is pouring into the agency world because of AI — and Jordan sits down with one of the founders at the front of that curve. Jason Hu (UChicago '22, ex-AI researcher, a16z-backed) built Nexad, an AI-native platform for marketing agencies that wraps every major model and 1,000+ integrations into one command center. They cover the three archetypes of AI adoption in agencies, a live demo of creative generation, account health audits, and bulk campaign operations, how Nexad auto-routes between models like Claude, GPT, and Kimi K3 based on daily benchmark evals — and why Jason believes agencies will thrive, not die, in the AI era. Key Takeaways The three AI-adoption archetypes: (1) the unfamiliar — heard the buzzwords, only ever used ChatGPT as a chat; (2) the majority — using point solutions (creative gen, one-off agents) but not chaining them into agentic workspaces; (3) the frontier — operators running 20+ agents simultaneously. Each has different pain points; the platform meets all three where they are. The "impossible to keep up" problem: New models ship weekly. Nexad positions as a wrapper and router — an internal eval system runs each new model against ~30 representative agency tasks (health checks, complex campaign ops, long-running tasks) and auto-selects the best cost/performance option daily. Real routing example: Within an hour of Kimi K3's launch, their evals found performance comparable to Claude Opus 4.8 at roughly half the cost — so mid-tier traffic was rerouted automatically. Users pick a tier (Light / Pro / Max), not a model. The agent = a marketing employee's loop: ingest inputs (client comms, ad platform data from Meta/Google/TikTok/GA4, competitor intel), process (analysis, creative generation), output (campaign changes, uploads, client-ready reports). The demo covered competitor creative teardowns, a shareable account health audit, and bulk-uploading 100 creatives to Meta. Guardrails for sensitive actions: budget or creative changes trigger explicit review-and-approve prompts and batch action review — a contrast Jason draws with running raw agents that can "go rogue" in the backend. Client context is the killer feature: the platform reads Slack, Gmail, meeting transcripts, and Drive to build persistent client context ("no logos in creatives") that agents apply automatically — over 50% of agency hours go to client communication, and this attacks that directly. Chat first, automate second: typical adoption path is playing in the chat interface, then converting proven outputs into scheduled automations (e.g., daily health check → Slack report) in about 10 seconds. The closing thesis: AI commoditizes the execution layer of agency work. What remains — and becomes the whole game — is creativity, client trust, and proprietary market insight. Agencies thrive in the AI era; they don't disappear. Resources & Links Nexad: nex.ad Jason Hu on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/qitian-hu Work with Jordan: 8figureagency.co

July 27, 202611 min

AI Agency Competition: Why Sub-$3M Agencies Are at Risk

Turn your operations AI Native: https://www.8figureagency.co/get-aiagency-ops Get the free playbook how to build a claude code SEO Machine: https://t.co/NgZUewr4ii Jordan Ross (8 Figure Agency) delivers a short, urgent solo episode for established agency owners. Two true stories from this week — a 16-year agency veteran stuck in "agency prison," and a retired SaaS founder who taught himself agentic SEO in 8 weeks — reveal how the barrier to entry for agency services is collapsing from skill to time. If you're doing $3M or less, have been in business 5+ years, and have 8+ employees, this one's for you. Key Takeaways The incumbent's trap ("agency prison"): A prospect 16 years into her agency, doing ~$1M with thin margins, loathes the business she built. She manages the biggest accounts herself, her team is slow to adopt AI, and she has neither the time nor the discretionary profit to fix it. The new entrant's playbook: A twice-exited SaaS founder picked up Claude with zero SEO experience and, in 8 weeks, learned SEO and GEO (ranking on Google, ChatGPT, Claude, and Reddit), then built a mostly-agentic SEM agency around it — blogs, backlinks, on-page/off-page, subreddits, all systematized. The math that should scare you: With that system, one person can run 20–30 client accounts with one or two calls a month. Hire one more person and they can dominate an entire funnel — and if they pick your niche, they're taking your TAM. The playing field has shifted: The barrier to entering the agency space used to be skill. Now it's time — a few hundred hours of learning plus an AI stack. Expect these entrants to look like 20-somethings with time to burn, not exited founders. What's left as the moat: When the service itself commoditizes, the differentiators are strategy, the person, and above all the brand.

July 20, 202618 min

AI for Ad & SEO Agencies: 3 Shifts Coming by 2027 (and What to Build Now)

Jordan breaks down three shifts reshaping AI operations for marketing and ad agencies — and the expensive mistake agency owners are making right now. Why paying a consultant to build your "company brain" is the wrong move (and what to do instead), the affiliate-model agency software wave that monetizes your token and ad spend, and the orchestration shift that turns agencies into McKinsey-style consulting firms where one strategist manages $2M+ in client revenue. Timestamps 00:05 — Who this is for + 8 Figure Agency's track record (1,000+ agencies served since 2019) 01:30 — The $2M EBITDA founder who spent two months on a "brain product" and has nothing to show 02:19 — Update 1: What a context window actually is, and why hallucinations happen 04:27 — The 2027 prediction: funded brain products from serious Silicon Valley founders (all still in beta) 07:00 — What to do instead: GitHub, organized folders, skills — stay portable, don't overcommit 08:26 — Update 2: The affiliate-model agency platforms coming for a cut of your token and ad spend (full interview drops next episode) 10:12 — Update 3: Loops, human-in-the-loop QA, and the December 2025 agency already running creative autonomously 11:54 — The new economics: pay a killer strategist $300K to manage triple the revenue 12:40 — Why 8FA is going boutique mode 13:52 — Work with Jordan + 8 Figure Exit Live Key takeaways Don't pay anyone to build your company brain in 2026. Host client context in organized GitHub folders and skills, stay portable, and migrate when a dominant brain product emerges. If you're still manually running reports, writing briefs, and checking PM tools — start there. Efficiency first, then capacity. The next software wave makes money on your token spend and ad spend, not the license. Understand the model before you commit your operations to it. Loops are already running agency delivery. When production automates, you get hired for taste and strategy — so start building skills and agents now, then learn to orchestrate them.

July 6, 202643 min

The AEO/GEO Gold Mine: How Marketing Agency Owners Can Dominate AI Search with Claude

Matt Putra runs Eightx, a fractional CFO firm for consumer goods companies. He is not a marketer. He is not technical. And in about 60 days, using Claude, he took his site from roughly 3,000 impressions a day to 76,000 — indexing 20 blog articles a day and beating "old school" SEO agencies who don't even know it's happening. In this episode, Matt screen-shares the exact marketing hub he built and walks Jordan through the whole stack: the DataForSEO audit loop, the 40+ MCP data connections, the parallel-agent writing pipeline, the Pinecone vector database of three years of client calls that clones his voice, and the PR/backlink play he's running next. If you own a marketing agency and you're not doing this yet, consider this your wake-up call. The uncomfortable takeaway for agency owners: a CFO with no marketing background is out-executing full SEO agencies — because he's willing to spend the tokens and do the volume no agency will. What You'll Learn Why AEO/GEO (answer/generative engine optimization) is a wide-open gold mine right now, and why most SEO agencies are still playing the old game The exact starting point: rebuild the site with Claude, hand Claude a DataForSEO key ($200/mo), and knock out the audit list How to run competitor audits and 45-day SEO sprints that finish in 9 days The technical-SEO checklist Claude gave him: llms.txt, llms-full.txt, robots.txt, and schema (FAQ, datasets, breadcrumbs) as "formatting for AIs" How to index 20 articles a day without getting flagged as thin/templated content The content pipeline: 40+ MCPs into free data sources (SEC EDGAR, census.gov, World Bank, OECD, national stats) for genuinely valuable posts Dynamic workflows / parallel agents — up to 50 agents writing and reviewing at once (~5–6M tokens per 10 articles) The voice engine: a Pinecone vector DB of 3 years of Fireflies call transcripts (~10–12M words), with oversized chunks for richer retrieval, so Claude "interviews" his own past words for every article Why PR/backlinks (Forbes, WSJ) are the next authority moat for GEO — and how he's using HARO/Connectively to start The real economics: ~$400/mo in tokens (Claude Max 20x) against $6–8K CFO retainers Chapters / Timestamps — Intro: who is Matt Putra and what is Eightx — The "marketing hub" and why visibility is the whole game now — Two months in: crushing competitors in the LLMs and GEO — Tour of the hub (PR, blog, news signals, trends, Reddit, newsletter, socials) — The #1 ROI channel: the native blog — How a non-technical founder learned SEO from scratch (a Hampton tip + Claude) — DataForSEO for $200/mo, and a 45-day sprint finished in 9 days — The results: April to July, ~3K to 76K impressions/day — Capturing the traffic: RB2B, Apollo, and the NoLeadLost widget — Technical SEO: llms.txt, robots.txt, and schema for AIs — Indexing 20 articles a day (and why it takes ~30 days to start) — Getting Claude to write content Google actually indexes — The writing pipeline and 40+ MCP data sources — Show-and-tell: Claude Code in VS Code — The cost: Claude Max 20x, ~$400/mo in tokens — Building skills and reviewing the early (bad) drafts — Dynamic workflows: up to 50 agents in parallel — CFO retainer economics that justify the spend — The voice engine: a vector DB of 3 years of client calls — Chunking theory and RAG, explained simply — Channel #3: PR and GEO via Connectively (HARO) — The next play: backlinks and a Forbes/WSJ authority moat — Where to find Matt + wrap Tools & Resources Mentioned Claude Code (in VS Code) — the primary build environment for the whole system Claude Max 20x — the subscription tier covering ~$400/mo of token usage DataForSEO — pay-per-call SEO data ($200/mo) handed to Claude via API Pinecone — vector database storing 3 years of call transcripts for voice/RAG Fireflies — call recording/transcription source for the voice database Netlify — site hosting (migrated off WordPress) Connectively (formerly Featured / HARO) — PR question sourcing for backlinks Apollo / RB2B — visitor identification and enrichment NoLeadLost.com — the ~$99 site widget Jordan recommends for booking calls MCP data sources — SEC EDGAR (10-Ks/8-Ks), census.gov, World Bank, OECD, national statistics offices Concepts worth Googling: AEO, GEO, schema markup, chunking, RAG, dynamic workflows Connect with Matt Putra Firm: Eightx — fractional CFO for consumer goods companies Blog (called a "gold mine" in the episode, with a chatbot trained on all his content): eightx.co/blog Want help building this or something like it for your agency? Go to 8figureagency.co to book a call

June 22, 202624 min

AI for Marketing Agencies: How to Profit $1.5M With 40 Clients

Get the Fable 5 Set up guide: https://value.8figureagency.co/fable Most of the agencies you're competing with are already AI-forward. In this solo episode I give you a straight update on where AI actually stands for marketing agencies in summer 2026: what's changed in the last quarter, what's now table stakes, and the new economics it opens up. The headline shift: you no longer need 125 clients and a bloated team to profit $1.5M a year. With skills, cron jobs, and a lean two-person setup, 40 clients can do it, and your life gets better, not worse. I think we're about to see a wave of lifestyle entrepreneurship unlike anything before it. In this episode: Why 50–60% of agencies are already AI-forward, and the real cost of falling behind Harnesses and loops: agents now running 12–30 hours straight with no human intervention AI strategist agents that set benchmarks and pace campaigns (the SEO-for-law-firms example) What a "skill" actually is, and why it went mainstream in Q1 2026 Cron jobs and content briefing: running repeatable client work on a schedule The new math: $1.5M profit on 40 clients vs. the old $7.5M / 125-client grind My own story: from a $13M holding company to three lean companies, plus making Lead Whisperer fully autonomous The domain-expertise goldmine: how a $2M ad agency built 99%-margin software for its own clients Fractional COO + fractional AIO: how I can help Takeaways: Skills and cron jobs are the floor now, not the ceiling. Turn keyword research, briefing, and on-page into files an agent runs on a schedule. The lifestyle agency is real. One $300K strategist plus one AI-pilled associate can run 40 accounts. Old way to $1.5M profit: ~$7.5M revenue, ~125 clients, a big team. New way: 40 clients and a lean stack. Your domain expertise is the edge. The problems only you can see in your niche become high-margin products. The window is now. AI improves on quarterly cycles, so early movers compound. Links: Work with me (fractional COO + fractional AIO): 8figureagency.co Book a call (I keep very little availability, usually booked ~2 weeks out) Off-market lead syndication: lead-whisperer.com Reach me directly: jordan@8figureagency.co (my Hermes agent reads it first, then I do)

June 15, 202633 min

How to Sell AI Receptionists to 200+ clients: The White Label Playbook (Retell + Versai)

TOOLS & RESOURCES From this Episode: 1. Retell AI — The voice agent platform Jeremy chose after testing every option YC-backed. Open API. Plug into any LLM (GPT 5.2, Claude Sonnet). Build a custom voice in 11 Labs and pipe it right in. White-label to your clients on day one. 👉 Start here: https://dashboard.retellai.com/?via=mmo 2. Versai — The HIPAA-compliant AI SMS tool Jeremy uses for his 200+ clinics Enterprise-grade. Sub-account architecture so every client lives under your master agency account. Text conversations pipe straight into GHL or HubSpot via n8n. This is what makes the AI feel like it's "magically" working inside the client's CRM. 3. Go AI-Native with 8 Figure Agency If you're a 7- or 8-figure agency owner and you watched this episode thinking "I need to do this for my book of business" — this is the program. I'll help you install AI-native systems that add $1M in annualized profit to your agency. 👉 Apply here: https://value.8figureagency.co/AINative 📝 Episode Summary If you have 50, 100, 200, or 300 clients in your book — the easiest way to add seven figures this year isn't selling new customers. It's selling white-label AI to the ones you already have. Jeremy DuPont did it. 200+ of his 350 physical therapy clinics adopted his AI voice receptionist, AI SMS tool, and chatbot in under 5 months. $2K setup fee per client. Recurring monthly on top. In this episode he breaks down the exact playbook. The platforms he picked. The 20-person beta. The scarcity script. The team structure. The hiccups. The upsell back into marketing services. If you run an agency, this is the cheat code. Chapters: The white-label AI opportunity hiding in your existing client base Jeremy's story: PT clinic in 2021 → sold in 2024 → 350-client agency in 3 years Why he pivoted from "marketing agency" to "AI-first agency" in early 2025 The platforms: Versai for SMS, Retell for voice — and why HIPAA compliance ruled the shortlist Why YC-backed tools win the AI race (and why he tested everything else first) The weekend build: from signup to demo-ready in under 24 hours The exact go-to-market that got 200 clients in 4 months The script: scarcity + co-creation + demo video to existing clients The $2K setup fee — waived for the first 20, charged for everyone after The hiccups: SOPs, CRM piping, the one-off customizations that killed scale The team: Head of CRM, Head of Ops, Ops Manager, 2 VAs. That's it. The ratio of customization work per client (and why he doesn't sweat it) The new go-to-market: lead with AI, upsell marketing The natural upsell trigger: "Your AI's working. Nobody's calling. Let's fix that." The SEMrush + AI health score funnel that still prints Where to find Jeremy 💡 Key Takeaways 1. The opportunity isn't new clients — it's new revenue from old clients. Jeremy didn't sell 200 new customers. He sold AI to 200 customers who already trusted him. Look at your book. That's your gold mine. 2. Pick platforms with open APIs and multi-LLM support. Retell won because it lets him swap LLMs and use custom 11 Labs voices. Versai won because of HIPAA + sub-accounts. The tools you pick today need to survive the model upgrades coming tomorrow. 3. Scarcity + co-creation beats every other pitch. "I'm taking on 10 people to help shape this." That's it. That's the script. The first 20 got the setup fee waived. Everyone after paid $2K and felt lucky to get in. 4. Sell to your highest spenders first. They have the lead volume to make AI actually work. AI on a clinic doing 16K/mo won't move the needle. AI on a clinic spending $5K/mo on ads will print. 5. Ship the V1, fix it in flight. Jeremy admits the first 60 days had hiccups — CRM piping, SOPs, custom requests. He didn't slow down. He signed clients and built the SOP in parallel. That's the founder's mindset. 6. Lead with the AI offer. Upsell the marketing. Hiring an admin is brutal. AI replaces the admin. That's an easier sale than "spend $5K on ads and wait 6 months." Once you've solved the admin problem, the ads/SEO upsell is automatic 60 days later. 7. Team of five can run 200+ AI deployments. Head of CRM. Head of Ops. Ops Manager. Two VAs. That's the whole machine. Don't over-hire. 🔗 Connect With Jeremy Agency: patchsystem.com Instagram: @_jeremydupont LinkedIn: Jeremy DuPont 🔗 Connect With 8F 8figureagency.co 🛠️ The Full Stack Mentioned Retell AI — Voice agent Versai — HIPAA-compliant AI SMS n8n — Middleware between AI tools and CRM GoHighLevel / HubSpot — Client CRMs SEMrush — Google Maps ranking audits 11 Labs — Custom voices for Retell Claude / GPT 5.2 — LLM brains behind the agents

June 3, 202644 min

How Marketing Agencies Can Build Context, Memory & MD-File Agent Systems | Dave Sifry

Start building your own agent with memory and MD files → https://value.8figureagency.co/hermesstart MetaSwarm (open source) — Dave's agentic harness → https://github.com/dsifry/metaswarm 18 default agents, each with definitions and rubrics, plus defined workflows for software development. Three ways to use it: build agentic systems with it, point it at your own SOPs to analyze them, or study how it does agentic decomposition. (Fun fact from the episode: search "metaswarm" and it ranks right behind Meta itself.) Dave Sifry has started nine companies. Now he's building a company that builds companies. In this one, he hands agency owners the framework for the thing almost everyone is getting wrong with AI: memory and context. If your agency runs 50, 100, even 600 clients and information keeps falling through the cracks — stakeholders forgotten, context lost, the same questions re-answered — this is the episode. No fluff. Dave breaks down what actually deserves to be remembered, the exact MD files that run an agent (soul.md, agents.md, heartbeat), and how to wire a team of agents that report to each other and improve themselves every single day. What You'll Learn Not all data is information. A JPEG is a mountain of data and almost no information. One sentence from the CEO saying "go do this" carries more than a thousand video keyframes. Store the signal, not the noise. Memory is a compression problem. Save the process — who you talked to, how the deal got done, where it went off the rails — not every artifact you produced. Timeliness is value. Information from 30 days ago usually beats information from 7 years ago. Decide what goes into deep storage and what stays live. Treat every AI agent like a new employee who always needs onboarding. What's the minimum they need to do the job well? That's your context window. Three layers of control: policy, guidelines, gates. Policy = "be nice to the client, don't cuss." Guidelines = your stop-word list. Gates = a deterministic wall, like a credit card with exactly $2,000 on it that rejects $2,001. Run an analysis phase first. Find the 5–6 things a role does 80–90% of the day before you build anything. (An account manager is a farmer, not a hunter.) The MD-file stack that runs an agent: soul.md — who am I, why am I different from every other agent, what I do and what I don't do. agents.md — the bootstrap: read your soul, read your heartbeat, and here are your SOPs as links (loaded only when the situation calls for it, so you never pollute the context window). heartbeat — the recurring loop. The five tasks every hour, the three tasks every four hours. Keep it light or it eats you alive. Great agent systems are an org-design problem, not a super-intelligence problem. You don't need one all-knowing brain. You need agents that each know their job and who to talk to. It works like an anthill. Build a COO agent whose only job is writing and revising SOPs. Feed it a daily retrospective and you've built a self-learning organization

May 26, 202644 min

How Advertising & Marketing Agencies Turn 100+ Leads a Week Into Booked Calls — The GoHighLevel SDR Pipeline (ft. Dylan Rich)

Learn how to use AI to Buy Agencies: https://value.8figureagency.co/MNA Systemized Sales (done-for-you sales teams): systemizedsales.com Revphlo.com (post-call sales attribution — works with GoHighLevel & HubSpot) Dylan on X: @sdrwhisperer Most agencies are sitting on a goldmine and treating it like a junk drawer. That was the exact problem on the table. A giveaway funnel pulling 100+ emails a week. 300 to 500 comments a post on X. Newsletter readers. Ad clickers who never book. Five different lists, none of them talking to each other. A great setter could go to work on that data and print money — if anyone had organized it. So Jordan brought in Dylan Rich, founder of Systemized Sales. Dylan runs 10 sales teams at once, end to end — name, email, phone number all the way to contract signed and cash collected. In 15 years of sales and seven years working with agencies, this is the most sophisticated GoHighLevel pipeline either of them has seen. They build it live: UTM attribution per post, the "tattoo" rule for tags vs. custom fields, an action-based lead score that pings a setter the second a lead crosses 6 points, a speed-to-lead workflow with 73 million enrollments, and 57 smart lists ranked P1 through P5 so setters never waste a minute guessing who to call. Then Dylan opens up Revphlow — the post-call attribution tool that kills the EOD form forever and tells you your cash per call by traffic source, by closer, by calendar. If you run organic and paid traffic into a sales team, this is the playbook. What You'll Learn The "tattoo" rule — when to use a tag (permanent) vs. a custom field (rewrites itself), and why getting this wrong wrecks your data One pipeline beats five — why segmented pipelines cap your granularity, and how custom fields + tags + stages stack to do the real work Lead scoring that runs itself — assign points to actions (email open = 1, application = 3, call booked = 5), and auto-trigger a setter call at a score of 6 Speed-to-lead you can actually measure — a workflow that timestamps every lead and counts only during setter working hours, so a Saturday opt-in doesn't blow up your numbers 57 smart lists, ranked P1–P5 — how setters work the right leads in the right order and never run dry between fresh leads Ask for the phone number — "if you won't give me your phone number, you won't give me your credit card," and why fewer, higher-quality leads win Post-call notes (PCN) — auto-dispositioned call notes pulled from the Zoom transcript that update pipeline stages for you, so closers stop skipping the EOD form Cash per call by source — the metric that tells you which ads, threads, and posts to make more of (and which to kill) Chapters — Why scaling SDRs is the hardest (and most profitable) thing an agency can do — Who is Dylan Rich: 15 years in sales, done-for-you teams at Systemized Sales — The real problem: a giveaway funnel pulling 100+ emails a week, five siloed lists — How to organize intent leads so setters book more calls per hour — UTMs per post, the Zap into GoHighLevel, and tagging the first click — Live build: one pipeline + custom fields for granularity — Lead categories that follow a contact all the way down the funnel — Tags vs. custom fields: the "tattoo" concept explained — Lead scoring: assigning points to actions and triggering at 6 — The speed-to-lead workflow with 73 million enrollments — Keeping setters organized so they stop thinking and start dialing — 57 smart lists ranked P1–P5, built on filters, not vibes — Why you should ask for a phone number on every opt-in — "Can we blow your socks off?" — the Revphlow post-call attribution demo — PCN, Zoom + Fathom + Slack: clean dispositions on every call — Cash per call by source, by closer, by calendar — Where to find Revphlow and Systemized Sales Go AI-Native in the Next 90 Days This episode is the manual setup. The next level is making it run itself. 8 Figure Agency installs AI-native systems into 7- and 8-figure marketing agencies — the kind that add $1M in annualized profit. Attribution that tags itself. Pipelines that update without a human touching them. Setters fed the highest-intent leads automatically. If you want your agency AI-native in the next 90 days, start here: → 8figureagency.co Work With Dylan Dylan and the Systemized Sales team run your sales process end to end — they listen to your calls, audit your CRM, review your last 90 days of sales and marketing numbers, find your biggest constraint, and fix it. Systemized Sales (done-for-you sales teams): systemizedsales.com Revphlo.com (post-call sales attribution — works with GoHighLevel & HubSpot) Dylan on X: @sdrwhisperer Tools & Resources Mentioned GoHighLevel — the CRM the whole pipeline is built in RevFlow / revphlo.com — post-call attribution and sales analytics Typeform — opt-in forms (add a hidden UTM source field) Beehiiv — newsletter platform, with email opens webhooked back to GHL for lead scoring HYROS — marketing attribution into the call Zoom + Fathom — call recording and transcripts feeding the PCN Slack — where post-call notes drop for closer confirmation Vidalytics — VSL view tracking UTM Builder (utmbuilder.net) — Jordan's no-affiliation pick for building UTMs

May 18, 202648 min

Claude Skills, AI Agents & The Build vs. Buy Decision for Marketing Agencies

FREE DOWNLOAD: How to Set Up the Hermes Agent → https://value.8figureagency.co/hermes Ready to become an AI-native agency? Book a call at 8figureagency.co Guest: Ben Fisher, founder of Skinny and Bald. Hampton member. Been coding since fifth grade. Has been CEO twice, CTO three times. Describes himself as 60% product, 40% engineer. The pull: Ben is one of the sharpest guys in the Hampton AI channel. This is his second time on the pod. Jordan came with real questions about funnels, databases, and skills — Ben answered live, then pulled up his actual meeting-processing skill on screen share. What we covered The build vs. buy question. Jordan’s giveaway funnel pulls comments → emails → form fills → booked calls across LinkedIn and X, six campaigns a week. His partner said use GoHighLevel. Ben’s framing: build custom with Claude when you control the maintenance, use a tool when it solves 80%+ without workarounds. Texting is the exception — Twilio’s regulatory rabbit hole can eat days even with Claude Code. Databases and custom funnels. Jordan wants the funnel experience to mirror what the user clicked — landing page copy, follow-up sequence, everything. Ben’s example: he still uses Kit.com for his newsletter, but layered custom API logic on top. He didn’t rebuild Kit. He enriched it. The thing that separates real builders from vibe coders. “What distinguishes really effective builders really comes down to workflow.” Same models. Same Claude. Different results because of how people work. Ben’s non-negotiable: test-driven development. Plan first. Write the tests. Then build. Otherwise Claude tells you it shipped something that doesn’t exist. The “your friend Ben is absolutely correct” story. Hampton buddy building a chief of staff agent in Slack and WhatsApp. Asked Claude if it was secure. Claude said yes. Ben listed four gaps. Buddy pasted Ben’s message into Claude. Claude wrote back: “Your friend Ben is absolutely correct. We don’t do this, this, this, and this.” Lesson: you cannot ask the AI to verify the AI. Claude Skills, real talk. Skills are mostly plain English text files the AI reads. They get highly personal fast — Ben said his public repo of skills is becoming less useful to others because the nuances are his. Best move for most people: use someone else’s skill as a reference, have Claude analyze how it works, then build your own flavor. Ben’s content-from-meetings workflow (live demo). Fireflies records every call → transcripts get stored as markdown files in a local folder → a Claude skill called process meeting notes runs on demand, pulls the last 3 days, formats each meeting in EOS Level 10 format (clear accountability, agreements, action items), and routes to-dos to the right project repo. Why local files instead of remote Fireflies calls? Speed. His second brain reads disk faster than it makes API calls across nine months of transcripts. Writing in your voice with AI. Ben studied journalism and advertising. He uses Claude as a sparring partner first, last-mile editor second. Reference for anyone serious about this: every.to publishes their full editorial AI process, including how to build an anti-AI style guide. Ben also actively removes em-dashes from his AI output now because they’ve become the tell. Markdown files as the convention. .md is what the AI world runs on. Pound signs for headers, asterisks for bold. Doesn’t really matter if you use .txt or .docx — but markdown gives the AI hierarchy it can parse. Tools and references mentioned Fireflies, Claude Code, N8N, Zapier, Kit.com , GoHighLevel, Twilio, Obsidian, every.to , Superpowers (Claude skill harness), Hampton, EOS Level 10 format, Ruben’s “How AI” Substack. Where to find Ben skinnyandbald.com — consulting offers dearben.ai — Ben’s AI podcast where execs submit questions and he answers live with screen share, plus his newsletter Ready to build an AI-native agency that runs on systems, not scrambling? 8 Figure Agency helps seven-figure agency owners install the agents, automations, and AI workflows that turn your team into a 10x operation. Done-for-you implementation starting at $2K/month. Book your call: 8figureagency.co value.8figureagency.co hermes This playbook shows you the exact stack. Install instructions, the 30-day roadmap, the five daily prompts that turn your agent into a second brain, and eight use cases pulled straight from agencies doing it right now. 8figureagency.co AI Solutions for Marketing Agencies | 8figure agency Optimize your marketing agency with our AI solutions. Join 1,000+ agencies and scale your revenue today! every.to Every Every — The only subscription you need to stay at the edge of AI. Ideas, apps, and training from practitioners who build with AI daily. http://every.to/ skinnyandbald.com Ben Fisher I help companies figure out where AI fits — and then build it.