Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies · Jason Swenk

Want to Sell Your Agency? Start by Firing Yourself with Taylor McMaster | Ep #879

·26 min·1 clip

Manish sent Taylor a cold LinkedIn message, then the two met at Elevate 2024 and later discussed an acquisition.

1. Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk covers Taylor McMaster's exit from Dot & Company and the sale of the agency to E2M. 2. Jason Swenk hosts the conversation, and Taylor McMaster is the previous owner of Dot & Company, an agency account-management company. 3. The episode asks how Taylor built an agency so she could sell it without staying on after the deal. 4. Taylor says she wanted a full exit from the beginning, even though she also considered exiting the day-to-day like Jason coaches founders to do. 5. After the first year, she decided the company had to be built differently if she wanted a sale rather than a lifestyle business. 6. She lists the critical lanes she initially handled herself: sales, operations, fulfillment, admin, and finance. 7. Taylor says her goal was to become "basically irrelevant" so the business could be sold without her. 8. She says that by the time she exited, she had just come off a six-month maternity leave. 9. That timeline showed her the company could still operate and grow without her involvement. 10. Taylor says her weak spot was managing people, which she knew would block growth in a resource-heavy company. 11. She says she was removed from doing any work herself within the first two years. 12. She later moved sales off her plate because repeated sales calls felt repetitive and she wanted someone else to take them. 13. In hindsight, she says she should have stayed in sales longer and gotten a coach before handing it off. 14. Jason says founders should add sales only after building a sales system or process, not before. 15. Taylor agrees that salespeople need a different skill set, especially when closing high-ticket offers. 16. She also says she should have hired a closer with more experience instead of training one from within too early. 17. Taylor says she brought in her husband to lead operations, finance operations, and team oversight. 18. She says that choice worked, but she would not do it again and prefers separation at work. 19. The conversation is conversational and detailed, with Jason pushing on timing, replacement decisions, and the emotional side of selling a company. 20. Agency owners thinking about exits and delegation would get the most from this episode, while listeners wanting a pure growth tactics episode may skip it.

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