Always Be Inviting: Joe Rinaldi on Community as Your BizDev Engine

Always Be Inviting: Joe Rinaldi on Community as Your BizDev Engine

Joe Rinaldi has spent his career around studio-sized agencies, as the biz dev guy at Happy Cog in its celebrity-agency years and now as a consultant who has worked with more than 90 of them. So while the industry tries to escape referrals, Joe runs the other way. Referrals were never the problem, he tells Adam Weil. Almost no agency has a plan to make more of them, so most owners just wait super hard, and great work stops being enough once your need outgrows your inbound. His answer catches people off guard, because it is to never sell. You show up in community, you give things away, and you treat business development like a verb instead of a noun you sit on. Joe walks through the math he believes in, where you can't make one person 100% more likely to hire you, but you can make a hundred people 5% more likely to think of you when they need what you do, and over a year or two that becomes actual client work. Joe and Adam swap real examples too, the content spreadsheet Happy Cog dressed up and gave clients for free, the biotech resource guide that grew into an AI-powered quiz, the iPhone templates Teehan+Lax dropped after every Apple launch. The thread through all of it is generosity over urgency and abundance over fear, the kind of partner energy from day minus one instead of begging for work. Stick around for where Joe thinks the strongest small agencies are heading, a tight ride-or-die core wrapped in a membrane of brilliant partners.

The Churn Consultant: Max Traylor on Growing the Accounts You Already Have

Max Traylor has a job title that makes people read it twice. He's an agency churn consultant, which means agencies bring him in to figure out why their clients leave. His take reframes the whole growth question: the fastest growth an agency can find is usually sitting in the clients it already has, and most of it goes untouched because account managers only ever talk about marketing, which sits near the bottom of what a client cares about most. In this conversation with Adam Weil, Max explains why three of marketing's old four P's drifted off to finance, product, and IT years ago, leaving promotion as most of what's left. So the budget an agency wants to grow into now sits with operations, sales, and the people who decide whether you stay. The account managers who reach those rooms are the ones who stay curious about the client's whole business and can hold a conversation that has nothing to do with marketing. From there it gets practical: how to climb back from being treated as a vendor, why most quarterly business reviews are a recap the client never asked for, and how to read an account by mapping who would actually pick up the phone. Max is just as direct about AI, where some executives are canceling accounts because they believe a tool can replace marketing. His view is that the agencies who come through are the ones whose people are paid to grow relationships, not manage work a machine can already handle.

The Honest Matchmaker: Daniel Weiner on Pairing Brands With Agencies

Daniel Weiner runs You Should Talk To, a consultancy that pairs brand marketers with the agencies that fit them. In this conversation with Adam Weil, Daniel lays out a take that earns him heat on LinkedIn pretty regularly: the work doesn't matter until it does. Sure, you have to be reasonably good at what you do, that's table stakes. But with over 100,000 agencies in the US alone, doing great work is the price of admission. What gets you hired is the relationship, the chemistry, and showing up consistently. Daniel has spent the last six years sitting in the middle of brand and agency conversations, and he's earned a reputation for being "disgustingly honest" with both sides. He gets into where matches actually fall apart, and almost none of it has to do with the creative output. Misaligned expectations on budget. Account people who turn over every six months. Agencies who drink their own Kool-Aid and tell brands they're "the best at X" without ever explaining what that means in practice. When a brand fires an agency, the work is rarely the first thing they bring up. It's everything around the work that broke them. The conversation also gets into what wins pitches: making it 99% about the brand and 1% about yourself, telling a cohesive story start to finish, and showing up so excited that the brand feels it in the room. Daniel and Adam talk about niching without going so far that every agency starts to look the same, why a CEO needs to be in the pitch without making it about themselves, and how AI has made everyone want everything yesterday without really moving prices much. If you're an agency leader wondering why some pitches close and others die, Daniel's answer is direct: pick up the phone, give without asking, throw the dinner you wish someone would invite you to, and remember that nobody hires you because you're brilliant. They hire you because they like you, trust you, and want to genuinely work with you.

The Compliance Tax: Lior and Sophia on What It's Actually Costing Your Campaigns

Most agencies find out they have a compliance problem the same way. An ad gets rejected. An account gets shut down. A campaign that took weeks to build goes dark overnight. By then, the damage is already done. Lior Root and Sophia Trunzo built Loopholes because they lived that exact cycle. They were running campaigns in regulated categories, finance, supplements, cannabis, and kept hitting the same wall. Not from bad creative. Not from weak strategy. From a single missed policy, a word on a landing page, a claim in a video that nobody caught before it went live. The conversation with Adam gets into how that happens at the operational level. Why marketing and legal teams keep working in silos. Why 90% of the time you don't even know why your ad got rejected. Why it's almost never the ad itself that's the problem. And why agencies that think they're insulated from this because they work with "normal" brands are more exposed than they realize. Lior breaks down what six months looks like when an ad account disappears. Sophia talks through what it means to take on a client who's already been shadow banned and not even know it. Together they make a pretty clear case that compliance isn't a legal problem. It's a revenue problem. And right now, most agencies are treating it reactively, catching it after the fact, when everything's already on fire. If you run campaigns in a regulated space, or you work with clients who do, this is the conversation to listen to before your next launch.

Soul Before Scale: Dana Arnold on Building Growth as a System

Most agencies hear "growth" and immediately think pipeline. Dana Arnold, Chief Growth Officer at Hiebing, has a different take. And it shows in how Hiebing has operated for over 40 years. In this conversation, Dana lays out what a modern growth function actually looks like when it's built to last. It's a system. A discipline. And yes, part of that system is supposed to be a little boring, because boring means it works even on your craziest days. Dana and Adam dig into why chasing revenue without checking fit is one of the fastest ways to erode culture, why your positioning is just a hook in the water unless your clients are actually experiencing it every day, and how Hiebing built their identity around two deceptively simple words: speak in data, dream in color. That phrase isn't just a tagline. It's the filter for which clients they pursue, which work they take on, and how transparent they expect a client to be from day one. They also get into the part most growth conversations skip. The internal health of the agency. Retention. Honest self-assessment. What it actually looks like to sit with your leadership team and ask whether you're delivering on the promise you made when you brought a client on. No ego. Just the truth. If you're building or rethinking your growth function, this one's definitely worth checking out.