Agency Business Podcast: 300 Episodes In

I'm Kurt Schmidt, founder of Schmidt Consulting Group and host of The Schmidt List, which just crossed 300 episodes. That number sounds big, and I suppose it is. But the more honest way to frame it is this: 300 recorded conversations is a very long way of saying I've been a curious person for seven-plus years, and this agency business podcast gave me a structure to act on that curiosity.

Here's what I want to do with this milestone post. Skip the victory lap. Tell you what actually happened, what I've learned from the guests and from running my own businesses, and where I think the most useful insights live for agency owners who are in the thick of it right now.

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Why Did I Start an Agency Business Podcast in the First Place?

Starting without waiting for permission is the single most important thing I've ever done in my professional life.

When I was first building Foundry, my former agency, I was doing a lot of networking meetings. I kept walking away from those conversations thinking someone should be recording this. The people I was sitting across from were brilliant, and the ideas were disappearing the moment the check arrived.

So I told people I was thinking about starting a podcast. And I noticed something uncomfortable: I was telling everyone, but starting nothing. My wife nailed it in about ten seconds. She asked if I was asking people for permission. And yes, that's exactly what I was doing. I was waiting for enough people to say "great idea" before I felt safe to move.

The moment I heard that, I stopped asking. I got some equipment, ran a few tests, and then cold-reached out to the CTO of CHS, a Fortune 50 company, to be my first guest. He drove to my house in Richfield, Minnesota. Came inside. My cats greeted him. We went into a spare bedroom and recorded. I still think about that. A Fortune 50 executive drove across town to sit in my spare bedroom because I asked.

That pattern repeated itself for 300 episodes. Founders. GMs. Nonprofit leaders. People you'd normally pay hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour to sit with. The founder of Hydro Flask. The general manager of the Twins. And every single one of them taught me something I couldn't have paid for in a conference room.

The lesson underneath all of this is that the ask itself creates the opportunity. Waiting for permission just delays the clock.

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What Does an Agency Business Podcast Actually Teach You About Running Agencies?

The honest answer: it teaches you that nobody has it figured out, at any size.

I work with agencies ranging from two or three people up to well over a hundred. And across that entire range, the same fundamental uncertainty exists. The bigger firms have more people to throw at problems and more process infrastructure in place. But they still aren't sure where to point their resources at the opportunities. They have more firepower and less clarity on the target.

Smaller agencies feel like they're behind because they don't have the systems. But the systems don't solve the core strategic questions. They just make the wrong decisions faster.

What 300 conversations have actually given me is a detailed map of where agencies get stuck. And it almost always comes back to a few recurring failure modes:

• Messaging that describes the service instead of the outcome
• Business development that only happens when revenue drops
• A pricing model built on time-and-materials when the value delivered is orders of magnitude higher
• A founder who's still the best salesperson, the best delivery person, and the de facto head of operations simultaneously

I've spent years listening to expert marketers on the show, and I've run the marketing for my own businesses, bringing in millions of dollars in revenue through work my team and I did together. The patterns I absorbed from those conversations, combined with actually doing the work, is what I now bring to clients.

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How Do You Build a Consulting Practice After Closing an Agency?

Slowly, then suddenly, and with more embarrassment at the success than you'd expect.

When Foundry ended last year, I had two clear areas I wanted to focus on. One is business coaching for agencies: helping them get more sales, grow intentionally, improve profitability, and tighten their operations. The second is doing the marketing work directly for those same firms, helping with branding, messaging, content, and thought leadership.

The third thing, which I didn't fully plan for, is a partnership in a UX/UI firm called Blueshift, built with a former Foundry partner and a few former employees. My role there is almost entirely marketing and business development. Which makes sense given the arc: I started my career as a designer and developer, moved into management and delivery and product, shifted into strategy, launched Foundry, and eventually arrived here.

I've been almost uncomfortably busy for the last several months. The client feedback has been genuinely cup-filling. I don't say that to brag. I say it because I think there's something useful in the fact that 20-plus years of hard and varied experience, when finally channeled into a specific niche with a specific offer, compounds fast.

The thing that's made it work is that I've been willing to actually listen to what people want from me rather than insisting on what I think I should be selling. What clients keep asking for is help with messaging. Help figuring out how to talk about themselves. Help finding where their ideal clients are and how to reach them. So that's what I do. The lesson is to follow the signal from the market, even when your ego has a different preference.

This connects directly to agency positioning strategy and how services firms learn to describe their value in terms clients recognize.

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What's the Role of New Tools Like AI and Automation in Agency Work?

Practically speaking: a lot, especially for agency owners who are willing to get their hands dirty with the tools themselves.

Over the last several months, I've been building software and automations using tools like N8N, Replit, and Lovable. This is the first time in my career I've been the actual product owner and product manager of my own software. I've built plenty of things managing teams over the years, but sitting on the product owner side with these AI-assisted coding tools is a different experience entirely.

It's been frustrating in the good way. The kind of frustrating that means you're actually learning. And what's happened organically is that as I've built more of these automations, more of my consulting clients have gotten interested in the same capabilities. The work bleeds into itself.

For agency owners, the implication is direct. The principals and founders who are personally experimenting with tools like N8N, Lovable, or even basic automation workflows in platforms like HubSpot or Zapier are developing an intuition that's genuinely hard to acquire by reading about it. You understand the limits of the tools, the realistic timelines, and the real costs in a way that a secondhand briefing doesn't give you.

I covered the practical side of AI for B2B services in depth on The Schmidt List, and it keeps coming up because it's genuinely changing what small firms can produce without adding headcount.

This connects to a broader point about and how founders can use automation to scale delivery without proportional cost.

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When Should You Pivot Away From What's Working Toward What Excites You?

The answer I've landed on after 300 episodes: when you notice you're doing the thing out of inertia rather than interest, make the move before your output quality drops.

I've been running this podcast primarily as an audio show for years. It's been genuinely valuable. But lately, I've felt more pull toward YouTube and video content. The audio-only format stopped exciting me the way it used to. So I started leaning into video, building out a channel, and testing what resonates there.

I'm also building an app version of my Little Book of Networking, which has been a completely new kind of challenge. The combination of vibe coding tools, product decisions, and user experience thinking has lit me up in a way that pure podcast production hasn't recently.

The principle I keep coming back to is simple: if you're lucky enough to have options, choose the one that makes you lean forward. That applies to service offerings, business models, content formats, and client types. Sustained quality over years only comes from genuine engagement with the work. You can't fake interest across 300 episodes or across a consulting practice.

For agency owners, this matters because many of them are offering services they've outgrown. They built the capability, they still deliver it competently, but they're no longer energized by it. And clients feel that. The best service offering is the one where your natural curiosity about the problem makes you better at solving it than anyone who just follows a checklist.

This is also relevant to agency service mix and how founders decide what to keep, cut, or add as their firms evolve.

If you're at a point where you're running an agency but not particularly excited about the work, a specialist who lives inside that single problem every day might serve your clients better than a generalist who's coasting. Worth being honest with yourself about that before your retention numbers tell you for you.

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What Does a 300-Episode Milestone Actually Mean for an Agency Business Podcast?

Not what you'd think. The number matters less than the habit.

Per Edison Research's 2024 Infinite Dial report, podcast listenership in the U.S. Continues to grow, with over 100 million Americans listening monthly. But the vast majority of podcasts never reach 10 episodes. The ones that compound, in audience and in the host's own expertise, are the ones where the host genuinely needs the conversation to happen. Not for content. For their own thinking.

That's been true of The Schmidt List from the beginning. I didn't start it to build an audience. I started it because I was having incredible conversations that were evaporating. The audience came because the curiosity was real.

The format will shift. Episodes will come out closer to once every two weeks, maybe monthly, as the YouTube side grows and consulting work expands. But the show continues because the conversations still teach me things I can't get anywhere else.

For agency owners thinking about content and thought leadership, the same principle applies. The content that compounds is the content you'd make even if no one were watching. The stuff you produce because you're genuinely trying to answer a question or document something you've learned. That's what reads as authority, because it is.

This connects to thought leadership building and how B2B services founders build credibility through consistent public thinking.

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Key Takeaways

• Permission is a trap. Start before you feel ready; the ask itself creates the opportunity.
• No agency, at any size, has its strategy fully figured out. Bigger firms have more resources pointed at the same uncertainty.
• The most requested thing clients want help with is messaging: how to describe what they do in terms their ideal clients recognize.
• Personal experimentation with tools (AI, automation, software) builds intuition that reading about those tools never will.
• Follow market signals over ego preferences when deciding what to offer.
• Sustained output quality requires genuine interest in the work. When the excitement leaves a format or service line, move before the quality drops.

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What would 600 episodes teach me that 300 hasn't? I genuinely don't know. But I'm curious enough to find out.