[Top Agency Series] Scaling Sustainably in Agencies With Steve Guberman of Agency Outsight

Steve Guberman is the Founder of Agency Outsight, a firm that guides creative, digital, and marketing agency owners toward achieving sustainable growth and overcoming operational challenges. ​He is a seasoned professional with over 25 years of experience in the creative, marketing, advertising, and public relations industries. In 2006, Steve founded his creative agency, which he successfully led for a decade before its acquisition by a PR firm in 2015. Following the acquisition, he played a pivotal role in transforming the firm into a full-service strategic communications agency.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [05:05] Steve Guberman discusses Agency Outsight and what it does
• [06:50] Common copycat goals agency owners set — and why they often fail
• [10:14] Life balance goals versus traditional agency growth targets
• [13:40] Steve explains how niching transformed his business and gave him more freedom
• [17:21] Saying “no” as a strategic advantage for agency owners
• [19:32] Steve’s process for helping agency owners choose the right niche
• [25:50] Structuring win-win agency partnerships without muddying the waters
• [34:52] Common profitability mistakes: undercharging, poor scoping, and inefficient teams
• [38:23] Pricing strategies based on true cost, value, and client perception
• [46:05] How Agency Outsight helped a burnt-out agency owner reclaim their time and boost profits

In this episode…

Many agency owners chase arbitrary goals like hitting a million in revenue or building a business to sell — only to find themselves overworked, underpaid, and disconnected from their original purpose. They end up stuck in day-to-day operations, unsure how to scale without sacrificing their sanity or team morale. So, how can agency leaders set meaningful goals, increase profitability, and build a business that supports their lifestyle?

Steve Guberman, a creative, marketing, and advertising world veteran, shares hard-earned lessons on escaping the burnout cycle and growing with purpose. He emphasizes identifying your “why” before setting business goals, urging agency owners to avoid copycat goals, and reverse-engineer outcomes based on lifestyle and financial needs. He outlines how niching became the key to higher pricing, authority, and operational clarity. From setting up SOPs to tracking profitability and leveraging strategic partnerships, Steve breaks down systems that create long-term agency sustainability.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Steve Guberman, Founder of Agency Outsight, about building an agency that aligns with your personal and professional goals. Steve discusses the dangers of vague growth metrics, the importance of niching for clarity and profitability, and how to systematize operations. He also shares insights on delegating, managing retainers without discounts, and forming smart agency partnerships.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Steve Guberman on LinkedIn
• Agency Outsight
• Agency Bytes Podcast

Special Mention(s):

• Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
• Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “I really believe in shedding the copycat goals that most of us adopt from other people we view as successful.”
• “We don’t really develop goals that are meaningful to us and our families and our teams.”
• “When I’m sought after and I’m seen as the expert, I can charge more.”
• “Your team will come and go, but the processes you build will stay in place.”
• “There’s a misnomer that if people are pre-booking my time, I should give them a discount.”

Action Steps:

1. Define your personal why before setting business goals: Clarifying your motivation leads to aligned, sustainable decisions instead of chasing arbitrary milestones.
2. Niche your agency by industry or service focus: Specializing increases authority, pricing power, and helps attract better-fit clients who value your expertise.
3. Systematize core service delivery processes: Clear SOPs improve team efficiency, reduce friction, and ensure consistent client experiences.
4. Track time and profitability by project and account: Monitoring time and cost data reveals your most profitable work and supports smarter business decisions.
5. Build partnerships that honor core competencies: Collaborating with specialized agencies keeps your team focused and strengthens client outcomes.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Steve Guberman of Agency Outsight. You can check him out at agencyoutsight.com.

Steve, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top agency series. Let’s go with some cool agency ones. I had Todd on Todd Taskey. I don’t know if you know Todd Steve. Do you?

Steve Guberman: 00:50

I know the name. I don’t know. Okay?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:52

He helps pair agencies with private equity, help sell agencies. And he’s got the Second Bite Podcast. Second bite because he finds when sometimes when those founders sell to private equity, when that private equity sells again, sometimes those founders make more in the second bite than they do on the first bite. Right. So check that out.

We talked about the agency space valuation space M&A space. That was an interesting one I like to see. And we’ll talk Steve about niches. Right. So there’s some interesting ones Adi Klevit, this is like niching with companies or industries.

There’s niching with services. You know Adi Klevit was a good one. We geeked out on our favorite productivity tool, software. And actually Steve is a great part of his website, which will pull up at some point. He’s got a great resources section.

It’s fantastic. And we’re going to talk about some of his favorite resources. But Adi specializes in creating SOPs for companies. So she goes in and helps document their procedures. Right to smooth out onboarding of staff, onboarding of clients and, you know, valuable service.

Right. It’s the non-sexy stuff that makes things run. You can check out that and many more on inspired Insider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25.

We help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. One, we help companies launch and run a podcast or in an easy button for a company to do that. We do the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution and production. And number two, we’re an easy button for companies gifting program.

We make gifting staying top of mind for clients, partners, prospects simple, seamless. And for me, Steve, most importantly, affordable so people can actually do it on a frequent basis, not just once a year or once ever. All someone has to do is give us a list of the people they want to follow up and keep in touch with, and we do everything else from there. So we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the company so they can really build relationships and run their business. That’s the number one thing in my life.

I’m always looking at ways on how to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way over the past decade to profile people on my podcast, share with the world what they’re working on, and obviously sending follow up gifts to the people in my universe. So check it out rise25.com or email [email protected]. I am super excited to introduce Steve Guberman. He has over 25 years in the creative, marketing, advertising and public relations industry, including a decade spent running and eventually selling his own successful agency.

Your Journey. Steve kind of reminds me of the book Built to Sell, which I know you’ve talked about John, because he does talk about like a creative person agency and then how they actually grew and then sold. And so Steve Gerber now channels his expertise into coaching agency owners, and he’s the founder, as I mentioned, of agency outside, and he helps owners unearth their challenges to find their goals and ultimately conquer them, which, you know, enables them to build and run their agency of their dreams. Steve, thanks for joining me.

Steve Guberman: 04:07

Thanks for having me. It’s great to see you. Yeah, I love what we’re doing here. And funny, you mentioned Built to Sell. A friend of mine ages ago when I had my agency recommended I read it and I’m not the best reader, you know, I’ll start a book, I’ll dig into it.

I’ll skip around. I took that book on a solo camping trip, and I read it cover to cover in a weekend, and I got back to the agency and started, and that drove me to niche. That drove me to double down on the things that I knew innately I needed to be doing, but just kept ignoring because I was in the day to day fires and the day to day everything. So huge book for me. Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:43

It’s also that the story in the book also just parallels your story, right? Just it’s actually about someone who’s creative, who’s all about kind of design and things like that, so I could totally see it resonating. So just start us off and I’ll pull up your website. Steve, talk about agency outsight and what you do.

Steve Guberman: 05:05

So, I mean, you nailed it in the short and brief of it is I work with owners and leadership teams to help them unearth their challenges and discover what their goals are and what they kind of should be. And I don’t really use the word should too often. But, you know, the reality is so many owners get mired down in the day to day and start drowning in working, you know, on the business or working in the business and not enough time to work on the business and help them develop a set of goals that are tangible and reachable and help them build a plan to accomplish them. And so I really believe in shedding the copycat goals that most of us adopt from other people that we view as successful. Typically it’s some of these social media content that makes us say, I want that or seven figures to get into a club sounds cool.

And we don’t really develop goals that are meaningful to us and our families and our teams. And then we wonder why seven, eight, ten, 15 years in, I’m still working 100 hours a week, and when I can remember to pay myself, I’m making minimum wage and working for clients that don’t really align with my values. And et cetera, et cetera. The list goes on. So.

So that’s what I do. I’m essentially a coach for business owners that happen to be in the agency marketing space.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:29

I want to really dig into that copycat goals, because I’ve heard you talk about this and someone will say, you know, Steve, I want to scale or whatever. Talk about just some of the copycat goals you hear, and then we’ll maybe demystify them. Or from your viewpoint, what are some copycat goals? You hear?

Steve Guberman: 06:50

The most common is I want a $1 million agency. And I’m like, cool. Why? You know, a million, you know, it reminds me of that movie The Social Network, you know? Yeah.

$1 million is cool, but, you know, $1 billion is really cool. But not to replace it with a billion, because whatever. That’s not really it’s not tangible, but it’s not realistic. The thing that resonates with me there with, like, Justin Timberlake’s character is why a million, like a million is so arbitrary. And it’s a nice, cool round number.

Interesting things start to happen at A to a business and within a business when it hits around that revenue stream. But often it’s I want to get into EO and EO has $1 million threshold or there’s a club of some sort. So again, it comes down to the why.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:37

There’s a why behind it.

Steve Guberman: 07:38

There’s got to be a why. You know, Simon Sinek nails it. And if you haven’t, you know, read or listened to his Ted talk or read his book or anything, the driving force behind our goals has to come from within. And so cool. If you want to hit $1 million, let’s reverse engineer the why of that.

Is it because you and your family need X amount of dollars to live? And in order to hit that X amount of dollars to live, the top line revenue is a million. Is a million. Great. Let’s go after it and let’s figure out what is the what is the team.

You need to hit that. What are the procedures you need to hit that? How much should you be charging? Are you niched properly? Like all of the pieces of the formula that will help you hit that goal. But it’s often just an arbitrary million dollars. Sounds cool. No, it’s not that cool.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:22

But some people have a reason why, and you’ll dig into that.

Steve Guberman: 08:26

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:28

Not just you don’t accept. Oh, it sounds cool, but it sounds like though you reverse engineer it. Right? If someone gives the why and in people that’s a strong if they have a strong enough why they’ll do it right.

Steve Guberman: 08:40

Yeah. And listen, it’s not for me to judge that like your, your why isn’t valid or the arbitrariness of $1 million isn’t valid if that’s what somebody like dead set on, and that is their vision and that’s their goal. Like, cool. Let’s tackle it. I have just found that goals that are, that are, that are arbitrary and aren’t true to somebody’s personal life plan or the life plan of their team, they are that much harder to achieve.

It’s harder to get people on board. It’s harder to believe in what you want and make it happen. If it’s not from the inside and it’s not tied to your true self, why? So it’s not to say that it can’t happen. But I think it’s a smoother path there when it is, you know, something intrinsic and meaningful.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:28

And I think sometimes, you know, people I speak for myself like sometimes I have this goal and I don’t know why. And I need someone to help unpack why that is right. And there is something beneath the surface, but I just haven’t pinpointed it. I just have kind of said the outcome. So that’s a what else do you see as like a copycat goal?

Steve Guberman: 09:52

And again, not that these are bad things. Like I get it. Copycat can also be kind of synonymized with, you know, inspiration. Right. So, you know I want to go fishing.

You know, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays. Right. So can I build a business around that? You know, that’s an exaggeration, but can I like a balance? My business.

What’s that?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:13

Like a balance goal?

Steve Guberman: 10:14

Like some a life balance goal? Exactly. I want to be able to walk my kids to the bus stop every day. I want to be there when they get home. Like, what are the things that are meaningful to a person that they want to build their business around?

I don’t think those are arbitrary. I think those are probably the highest of priorities of what a goal should be, you know. And so again, is there a synonym there between copycat slash inspirational goals and how do I adopt them and make sure that they mean something to me? I think team size and revenue size are often the most common copycat, arbitrary goals that need to be refined and massaged into what means something to me and why. You know, the life balance, the personal stuff.

There’s no reason to really question the why around that, that you know, that that’s really, I think, what life should be. If somebody says, I want to build a business that I can sell, I’m going to, you know, punch holes in that all day long. Like what? Well, because I think, again, it is something that somebody has seen somebody else do. They heard my story that I sold my business.

Maybe they think I’ve got Porsches lined up in my garage or something like that, and they want that. And I don’t have Porsches lined up in my garage. I drive a 4Runner.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:26

But Lamborghinis.

Steve Guberman: 11:28

Yeah, right. So. But the idea is I want to build something that I’ve seen somebody else do and exit and so what? Now? What?

And the reality is, while an exit is really nice. It’s not the answer to everything. And an agency that is running well enough to be acquired for, you know, a good amount of money is an agency that’s kind of operating on its own. And the owner is almost hands off, if not all the way hands off. And so it’s super attractive.

But why would you want to sell something like that. So again, I’m going to punch holes in that. Like I just want to exit. I want to be sold. I want to million dollar, you know, you know, payday or whatever.

And you know, there are better, better ways to manage an asset like that than to sell it and walk away. But that’s, you know, that is some people’s dreams and awesome, cool. Let’s make it happen. If the dream is I want to build it, sell it, build something else, sell it, build something like cool. There’s people that are serial entrepreneurs that want that exit and want the experience of an exit, but I’m going to punch holes in it initially.

And then if what you realize is that that is exactly what you want, and that’s tied to your. Why? Cool. I’m going to be the biggest cheerleader and help reverse engineer how we do that, and what the plan is to get there and help. Help somebody get there.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:50

There’s a couple key things there. You mentioned, you know, reverse engineer and kind of adapt it to someone else, and maybe they heard it somewhere or they’ve read a book or whatever it is, but they’re adopting it to their own situation. So I do want to break down some of your thoughts around these topics of how people do actually get to their end goal, right? And we talked before we hit record around some topics that come up pretty frequently that people ask you about, like niching operations, profitability, pricing, those things to get them to that place where they want. Talk about niche for a second.

I know you are, at this point in time, you know, doing a keynote on this very topic. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on niche and how that helps people, agency owners, kind of get to that next level.

Steve Guberman: 13:40

Yeah, if I can plug it. Agency Con in Denver, Colorado. End of April, it’s going to be an awesome, intimate little conference that is kind of being kicked back up after a bunch of years of kind of being sleepy for Jim Cranbrook and his group do it. So yeah, my topic is niching the freedom after fighting it. And that was my experience.

Like I fought it for a bunch of years and I was like, we’re going to get bored. If we just do fintech work, we’re going to get stagnant. If we only do higher ed work. I want to be all things to all people. And again, Built to Sell like really helped me hone in on that.

And coincidentally, we were also pitching an AOR account right around the time that I was reading that. And it talks about like avoid the AOR thing because you get so, you know, if 80% of your revenue comes from one place or, you know, that kind of thing, Niching is so, you know, again, creative professionals, we want diversity. We want to be all things to everybody. We also want the validation that we don’t need to say no to somebody. So there’s a lot of like psychological movement behind why niching is almost seen as a negative for us.

The reality is, man, and there’s so much good content out there about it. And the reality is that when I choose to own a or a few verticals, I’m now seen as an expert and I’m sought after. Over some time, I’m sought after as the expert in that space. And when I’m sought after and I’m seen as the expert, I can charge more. I’m more in an advisory role as opposed to a, you know, a pixel monkey like we used to talk about, you know, early day graphic designers.

And when I’m sought after and I’m seen in an advisory role, you know, there’s a lot that comes along with it on how clients interact with us. Where now I’m the prize as Emily Ruth Cohen talks about. I’m the prize. They’re not, you know, they’re not the prize for me. I’m the prize for them.

I don’t think, you know, there’s a misconception that I just need to own one vertical market. I think that that’s a great way to do it. So I do, you know, branding for nonprofits. Great. That is an awesome position to have.

I do marketing and web for higher ed financial services and construction company. You know what I mean? So again, I can own a few of these vertical markets where my team has deep expertise in I, I know players in that industry and they know they know our team in that industry. Knowing when and where and how to market is essential. Thought leadership in a few verticals, as opposed to general thought leadership, is more targeted.

And so it makes for inbound leads that much, you know, stronger. And so I can go on and on the benefits of it. But what I found was I fought it because I was afraid of losing the ability to be all things. And what happens when that dream client comes along and they’re not in my vertical? And I’ve got to say no.

Well, surprise, one of the greatest things to be able to do is say no. We’re not the right fit for you. Like, it’s such a great feeling. Kind of like when you fire a client or you break up with that toxic, you know, whatever that you were dating or something like that. Like it’s such a freeing and great feeling.

You’re not the right fit for us. Let me introduce you to Jeremy. They do that. You know what I mean? Like, so.

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