How to Build a Marketing Agency Holding Company in the Age of AI: Automation, Diversification & The Future of Agencies

Welcome to how to build an 8-figure ABC. My name is Jordan Ross and I'm your host. And over the course of this journey, we're going to be interviewing 8-figure ABC owners and going through the systems that I've seen work and we've implemented into our clients' businesses that have helped our clients add a half a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue over the last handful of years. I myself have already hit the 8-figures in annual recurring revenue. And when I got there, I wasn't happy. I was stressed, I was dissatisfied and I didn't like the people I was working with. So I clicked the restart button and went from 12 million in annual portfolio revenue back down to the mid-sem figure level to a climb back again. And on this journey, I'm going to be documenting my process on how I'm getting back to the figures and bringing you expert industry leaders who will tell you everything they did to get there as well. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode. Building a holding company could be the exact leverage point that takes you from rich to wealthy. And I have someone that's a budding friend coming to this conversation. Probably one of the coolest people in Hampton arguably, Jason Shafton, founder of Winston-Franced Swah, which I learned from Swah means French and French. Jason, happy to have you in. - Hey man, good to see you. Thanks Jordan for having me. I don't know about anything you just said other than yeah, you pronounced it correctly. Francois Winston-Franced Swah was my little growth from I have a thing about calling it an agency. And I know you're helping people build eight figure agencies. But I set out to start an agency that wasn't an agency and have learned, have a lot of scar tissue from that experience. But I call it a growth consultancy or consulting firm. And it's probably just me being too precious about it honestly. - It's really funny because one of the most common spreads of agencies is yeah, I don't want to be an agency. It's one of the, it's a big common theme. But I think you're super cool. We've have some metro friends. You've hooked me up with like multiple resources for my home and my life and my business. And for everyone that doesn't know how cool you are, what's the quick TLDR about Jason Shafton, the business and the agencies and what you're not cooking? - I'll try to do the like elevator version. It'll be like, you're from Long Island. It'll be a bit of a New York skyscraper. But let me see if I can do it fast. So, Groove Midwest, suburbs of Chicago, Southside Bowling Brook, and then moved to Glen Allen. So, it was a White Sox fan converted to a Cubs fan, which never happens. That's like a crazy thing. And then what do you university Wisconsin? A studied marketing. I'm a public school, like state school legacy, 'cause for my grandparents, both my parents, my brother and I all went to Wisconsin. After Wisconsin, I luckily got a job at Google. I applied for assistant to the founders. She's a hilarious idea, like working with Larry and Sergey. And they emailed me and they're like, you've no experience as an executive assistant. What are you doing applying for this job? I was like, I just, Google seems cool. They're like, it's fine, come be an AdWords coordinator. And that's what I did. So, I came in at the very ground floor at Google, approving ads, answering phone calls, chats, and worked my way up. I spent seven years at Google. I built a bunch of cool things inside of Google, first on the kind of ads business. AdWords, before it was called Google ads, at least we call Google AdWords. And a bunch of agency products inside of Google that actually built and then worked with lots of agencies. And then I transitioned to the consumer side. I built and scaled Google music and Google Play before leaving. So, like, kind of checked every box. I've got a guitar behind me, big music guy. So, like, I have had a record label forever and got to do music at Google. It was like insane. Part of my job was traveling around the country, like going to music festivals for my job. I had an intern whose job was to come with me doing that. He still works at Google. So, it's crazy. Like, Google is incredible. It was like an extension of college. It was the most amazing thing. It's like getting my MBA there without getting it. After Google ran marketing at Comedy Central. So, it was like, then another really cool job. Launched season 17, 18 of South Park, Broad City, Insight Amy Schumer, Drunk History, Daily Show at Colbert Report, back in the day, like OG, Daily Show at Colbert Report. Just super fun. And then left Comedy Central to start my first startup. Confounded a Dr. House call app called Heel. It would later be acquired by Humana. We raised a quarter of a billion dollars in venture capital for that business. Scaled that all over the country. Host Heel, I ran a marketing at a company called Sue, which is the same idea as Heel, but forgetting a massage therapist to come to your house and get an on-demand massage. And then after Sue, I was in charge of growth in marketing at Headspace, the meditation app. In leaving Headspace, I took a job inside of a big Fortune 200 company. You know this. My wife was pregnant with her first. And she was like, hey, probably should get a real job, be a grown up. It's not working at these crazy startups. So I did for a little bit. And then I kind of was advising, consulting on the side and fell into this whole, you know, what most people call agency life. And I call being a consultant or whatever. But ultimately, Winston Francois was born out of a bunch of connections I made doing all that stuff and turned into this really cool business where I got to help lots of tech companies do the things I'd already learn how to do at Google and Headspace and beyond. - You're very concise with your words for it to give a try to be. - Yeah. - It still was a very long elevator ride. - It's polished though. - Thanks, man. - I feel the same way about Amazon as you do about Google. So that was really cool to hear. It's my entire underpin of how I view professional life and business. You do a lot of stuff now though. I brought you while we were talking before about building a holding company. So how many current things do you have cooking right now? - Cooking versus like out the door shipped, making money very different. But I will. - Okay. - Out the door and cooking. Give me the two. - Yeah, I mean, out the door, I have Winston Francois as a growth consulting firm. You do lots of growth marketing, full stack growth, right? So if you're a tech company and you need help scaling, that's what we do. We build what I call a growth operating system or growth OS. I'm trying to make that a thing. Everybody knows EOS, I'm GOS. Winston Francois is the thing. Is the kind of, you know, you have your main quest and the side quest. So main quest is Winston Francois. I do have a AI business that I'm building named after my daughter called edda.ai. People can go there and go to that URL and get on the wait list. The idea is an AI chief of staff. So imagine if you had a AI agent inside of every piece of sass you use with Slack, your Google workspace, your Gura or Osano, whatever you use for project management and it's in every meeting. It kind of is all-knowing, omniscient omnipresent. It can kind of proactively get to work and solve hard business problems for you. I imagine even for the stuff that you guys do, that would be pretty useful for the company to work with. So that's the thing, that's the vision for it. That's what I'm building. So that's edda.ai. That's one thing that is actually an entity and I do do have it. There's nothing someone can buy from me right now. I would love to be able to sell it to people, but that's one. Like those are the things that are kind of out, kind of not. And then cooking, like much more so cooking are two other businesses and then some like baby businesses tied to Winston-France was. So the first is a true agency that is like four smaller clients. So Winston-France will have to work with companies typically doing 10 million plus in revenue, or revenue, oftentimes 50, 100 million big companies. We worked with the Fortune like global 1000 Fortune 50, like really big companies all the way down to earlier stage. And what I've learned is like there's a sweet spot where people just can't afford us and we're just not the right fit for them. And so it's kind of, they got to be eight figures or bigger that tends to be a better fit. So what I've figured out is there's a bunch of companies that I would love to work with that are too small for us. So I'm standing up an agency that's designed to help them. And that agency is going to be called Frank. So Winston-France, while Francois is, those are our dogs. And so Winston and Frank, Winnie and Frank, are two French bulldogs. Frank, my wife had when we met, Winston we got. And Frank, like he's just, he's a tank and he's great. And just the idea, the double and hundreds of being Frank, that's a big part of my brand and how I work with companies. And so the baby agency is going to be called Frank. I don't, I shouldn't call it a baby agency, but the smaller one and for smaller clients is called Frank. It will be online. There's not even a website can go to right now, but maybe by the time this episode comes out, it's going to be at frankgrowth.com. I have a podcast called Frank Growth that I'm rebooting as well. I got a lot of things going on. - You're cooking. So you got a lot going on and what's interesting, you have like a surrounding aura around you, too, of like just the vibes are very high, round shape. And like, you connected me to a chef. He was saying the nicest things ever about you, like Jason's the man, like God, me and I was like, damn, like this guy, let's crush it. Like, I was so excited to meet, but I asked you before to go like, what are you jazzed up about? You said building a holding company. - Agency gain could be frickin' tough. I think now it's 5% hit seven of eight years, which is like crazy to me, that's only five. - And less than a half a percent hit eight. - There you go. It used to be 4% in point four, but I think it's five in point five. No, I think just as we get more technological events, I think more getting there. So it's very tough, but you're jazzed up about building a holding company. So what is it about branching out? And you know, your thesis and why you're doing that, rather than just locking in, like I listened to MFM a lot, or sorry, I listen to MFM and founders, there's a bunch of hot bottom founders, it's talking about doing one thing forever. And you and I, we're talking about something totally different, so like why branch out rather than walk in? - I think it's interesting, you know, when I started working young guy, 22, right out of college, working at Google, I was like, I could work at Google forever. And I think for a long time, I thought that. And even then, I still was kind of changing jobs every 18 months or whatever inside of Google. So I get bored, dude. One thing forever sounds really boring. And then, you know this 'cause you help companies too. It's like, I get to jump between interesting problems all day long, and I like solving hard problems and different ones working with different founders and CEOs. That was kind of what became my full-time job with Winston Francois, like I said, I fell into it. And then what I've figured out is that in order to keep challenging myself and having fun and to do what you just said would just be, you know, not only rich, but built wealth, I need to diversify my income streams. You know what? As I understand what you do, like, hoping agencies build systems and process, and then leverage the latest and greatest tools in AI to be more effective and scale and grow into age figure agencies, I think is awesome. But there's also a little bit of writing on the wall with agencies in general, right? And maybe this is quite a part, I'm not supposed to say a lot, but like, I'm the only one talking about it publicly, like no one's saying shit. This is a dying breed. This is a thing that's going to go away. AI is going to subsume so much of what everyone does. There's not gonna be that many people working in the way we think about work today in just 10 years, maybe even five. And so from my perspective, that means we have to adapt or die. And so Winston Francois is a growth consulting firm and we do really strategic, like McKinsey Brain level stuff, paired with like WPP Publis's agency style execution. Frank is gonna be this thing that does smaller agency level work similar like running ads, doing lifecycle campaigns, kind of the stuff that marketing agencies do. But also the EDI thing and the thing I'm gonna chance to talk about is I'm building a video AI production agency as well. And that business came out of a conversation with a very good friend of mine. It used to be a creative director at Google and now is a very successful commercial director and he is having the same realization that I just shared about agencies. He as a commercial director who makes films that go on TV, he's done ads for Google and Apple and Samsung and all these huge brands. He knows that AI is going to come for him too. - Check Bezos didn't build Amazon by being the smartest guy in the room. He built it by building systems. In his own words, good intentions don't work. Mechanisms do. And that's the whole game. Most ancients are stuck at some figures because they're running their business on poor and effective or non-existent systems. There's no repeatable way to analyze data, to root cause constraints, to build the correct strategic plans, to source higher onboard train, retain, develop, manage, talent and clients. Everything is dependent on the founder showing up every single day and willing their business to success. If you want to hit eight figures in annual revenue, you need my 13 systems. Not 12, not a couple processes, but all 13. When you plug all of these into your business, when you identify what you don't currently have, and build all 13 of these systems so you can truly scale, you will stop firefighting and start compounding. That's the difference between running an agency job and running an agency machine. If you want to learn all about these 13 systems to get your business to the next level, go to link below and get my ebook on the 13 systems so you could finally build a business that works without you and hit eight figures. My tagline online has been AI Rectiah and no one's doing anything, especially in Hampton, which is like Hampton's supposed to be in my perspective, supposed to be the 1% of the 1% of founders that are like, but I'm talking to most people in Hampton, it's like very few people, granted there's a lot of people do building AI companies, but there's a lot of the agencies that sell very few people are waiting to see. I'm like, you can't wait. By the time you see, it's too late, and I'm trying to publicly implore people that think differently. So you're seeing this not only as it build well, but I'm hearing diversification and avoiding that tactically, what does that meant? 'Cause I think everyone listening knows, but there's paralysis by analysis. I don't know what that means. There's a lot of tools in here looking at the tools and I'm like, no, it's not just tools, there's so much more. Or are you tactically changing course? I don't think everybody needs to go start a holding company and spin up other ideas, right? Like doing one thing is not wrong. Focus is awesome. So I think if you're needy building your agency business, there's so much that I can do. I'll give you an example of something that I recently automated. So we have at any given time between 50 and 11099 contractors working with us across 10, 20 active engagements. We use a kind of a patchwork set of SaaS to manage all those engagements from like a comms perspective Slack and Google predominantly. And then in terms of time tracking, we use harvest, for payments, we use airbase. Like we have all these pieces of software and all of our consultants are expected to go in and use them in different ways and do stuff. Like loan like Loom and Figma and like things to produce actual work product. And my COO, her job along with some of our kind of back office folks is to every month reconcile all the work that everybody did, all the hours tracked and then pay everybody correctly. It's very hard to do and it's easy to get it wrong. And there's lots of just like human error. So I spun up unlovable. If you haven't used lovable yet, any agency owner that is listening to this show can do it. You can do it, lovable.dev, it's that easy. LOV-A-B-L-E. - I've done it. - I was using it for a landing pitch, but like it was very easy. - You can do anything with it. I've built a bunch of stuff with it, but this is the coolest thing I've built so far. We switched over on December 1st, no joke. All of our time tracking is now going to happen inside of a tool that I built, purpose built inside of level. And like it probably is a combined maybe three, four, or five hours if I stitched all the time together, I've spent building it, but I'm just prompting and slowly chipping away at the use cases and figuring it out. And now I have a tool that has an admin panel for me and my team to review the hours worked and generate reports. And I haven't finished piping and payments at the back end, but basically it generates the PDF invoice, which was the kind of last mile like it's put into our payment tool airbase, but effectively it took what took, it has taken what took us 10 to 20 hours of people hours at the end of every month, down to a couple hours of work. Because what it will do is it will do all the time tracking and all the reporting and all the invoice generating. So we just feed those invoices into the payment platform and then I approve them and payment is initiated. And that's a huge step forward. And then eventually I'll hook in stripe or wise or one of these other tools and people put their payment info right in the same platform. And they'll get paid to the platform. And they'll be able to access all the payments too. And then we'll get rid of another SaaS that we're paying for. This is what I said is 2026, 2026 for AI's, I see it is, we're doing a lot of stuff in our agencies and we just don't need to be doing any of it. And in the interim, if you sprint to scale capacity, use that new capacity to sell it. And if that adds a half a million, two million in annual profit, you take that profit and reinvest it to build a bigger amount. You know, it's a few more AI. Like there's so many things, but it creates a flywheel. So that's why I've been saying the flywheel fact is 2026, where if you do that and then you compound that 10, 20, 30 times over the most high leverage things. And now it's like you're just free up a thousand hours a month of the org. Now you sell that time, it's just like there's such an opportunity because you'll never have the flywheel effect. And then mostly what I'm saying is go just use that to get more clients, build more IP, like whatever hell you want to do strategically. So you're doing a combo of diversification, but then also you're also like just doing what you should be doing. Like you're scaling and you're also, it sounds like you're tech savvy, like tech forward, right? You're playing lovable. - I'm a marketer, right? So I know how to use words. You commented that I said and I did a nice job on my intro. So I think anybody who can write, yeah, if you can be good at words, you can prompt an AI tool. And that is beautiful for anyone that's doing anything similar to what I'm doing or what you're doing. Like you can build things that you couldn't have built six or 12 months ago now. I've built a bunch of stuff on Lovable, I don't need to go into that right now. But just to kind of bring it back to the question, you asked about the holding company. If I summarize for you, I've got the cash cow today, which is Winston-Franclaw, the thing that generates the majority of our, basically all of our revenue today. I've got an AI SaaS that I'm trying to build that could scale way bigger than anything else I've ever done. That's a moonshot, right? Could be nothing. But I'd like to think that that's a good bet to make. A small agency, an AI video production agency that if you saw the Coca-Cola ad that just came out it was fully AI, it was squirrels, and it was better than the AI one they did last year. That's where all this is going. People spending seven, eight figures on Super Bowl ads, we'll be able to do them for a 10th or less of that and do infinite permutations with a black lead, a Hispanic lead, a man versus a woman, nighttime daytime, infinite permutations. So that's super cool. And then finally, I've got these two podcasts, Founder Mode, which is with another Hampton guy, Kevin Hendrix, and we interview interesting founders and tech. And so like that's how I go, starting to build kind of a lead gen engine with Founder Mode and my other podcast, Frank Roth, to bring in guests that would be great customers. And you know that world well from doing stuff like this and also just like anybody who's running the agency GTM Playbook now knows that you should have some way of getting your story and your personal brand out there to generate interest and buzz and get the flywheel going. - I appreciate the sentiment. It's also with the knowledge of the core thing, still the core thing. - Don't take your eye out of the ball, but build some amount of system and hedging to give yourself flexibility as the world changes. - Within your hedge, how do you see your agency abouting this in the next 12, 24, 36 months? - It's interesting. The thing, you know, it's like everything old is new again. Kind of like as we've experienced with Hampton, they love IRL now and like it was all virtual and COVID and now it's like no, no, no, everything's in person. - I've been asking Hampton to do an OC, Hampton by the way for just like. - They will. The backlash against AI is strong. People want people already. And so if you think about what I do, which is, you know, this business started as me selling myself as a fractional CMO basically. And then I grew it to have a bunch of fractional CMOs and operators inside of it that helped the companies we work with. Those human brains are more valuable than ever 'cause AI Slop is everywhere. And so if we can drop in really smart people that are strategic that have seen the same problem space before and solved within it, I think we have a lot of opportunities. So interestingly, I think that the answer is to be about anti-AI but acknowledging the role that it plays and talking about AI as a growth transformation lover and people as the ones pulling on the levers. - I totally agree. I think it's like we're augmenting our humans to like supercharge them. I almost think about like the super soldiers in Halo. I recently watched on Netflix. I'm like, "That is us with AI right now." - Yeah, man. This is, it's refreshing to hear you see the playbook and like the landscape as I see it because I'm constantly trying to help people like wake up. So to speak, because I think I really do believe it's potentially dead if you don't. - I should join your sales call and I can help you. I'll talk to them. I'll tell them like, "Hey, you gotta do it." Or you're in trouble. - I will route people, "Hey, Jason Shabden, "come down to the Pacific Coast. "We'll meet you and handle Jamount. "We'll talk shot." It's interesting because I didn't actually didn't think the whole conversation would route us back to it's a way to diversify, to be like stable in an unstable world but also using, moving with the tech for your core thing and also loving it to augment what you're ready doing and supercharge what you're ready doing. And then using not cash bullets, further scale and compound, I think it's a cool way of looking at it. - You have two little kids. So it's a little bit of legacy building too and setting up the system and the income to support the family long term and not thinking about the dollars tomorrow but the dollars 10 and 20 years from now. - That's why I own a financial service. It's for a man that's like the SMP 500, just scale forever. Hopefully we'll see. Awesome. Jason, thank you so much for coming on. If anyone finds you super cool and interesting, they want to learn more about you, where can they find Jason Shafton or Winston-Francée? - I am at Jason Shafton on basically every social platform. I think somebody took my name on TikTok so I'm Jay Shafton there. But I'm Jason Shafton everywhere. You can find me there by searching. Winston-Francée is at WF Does Growth. François is a hard one to spell. So WF Does Growth and if you go to wf.team so that's like Winston-Franc-.team/pod-OD. You'll be able to find us online and you can reach out. I think I still have on the site. You can book 15 minutes of me just because we can hang out and chop it up. So anybody out there needs to hear this. That doesn't believe it from Jordan. I'll tell you the same thing that he's telling you. - Awesome. And we'll do. Thank you for coming on. It was great to have you. And I will be seeing you very soon. I believe. - My pleasure. Thanks Jordan. Thank you for listening to this episode of How to Scale an Agency. It would mean the world if you could like, subscribe, and comment on this podcast. So more people can find it organically or share it with a friend. If you're looking to scale your agency and you need help, you're looking for a true partner. Go to 8figureagency.co/call. My business has been built on becoming fiduciaries for other companies. We are going to be your partner where I will bring in my eight figure talent to help you grow working side by side. If you need help with that, go to 8figureagency.co/call, or like, share, subscribe to the bot. Thank you so much. I'll catch you in the next episode.