[Bonus] Ops-285: Track 4 | Digital Puppet

Ep 26: Gina Marie Mattei | The Human Cost of Reliability

Gina Marie Mattei, the Marketing Maven of Revelation Creative joins Mike for this week’s episode that starts as a conversation about B2B marketing and somehow turns into a full breakdown of agency life, client relationships, leadership burnout, and why experienced operators eventually develop sarcasm as a defense mechanism. They talk about trust, communication, creative strategy, and the difference between agencies that actually care about partnership versus agencies just trying to survive another quarter. Along the way, Gina absolutely unloads on Mike, exposing his stress habits, his inability to slow down, and the very real possibility that he’s spent most of his career functioning as an emotional support system disguised as a COO. There’s sharp marketing insight, operational therapy, and enough laughter at Mike’s expense to make this feel less like a podcast episode and more like two industry veterans sitting in a parking lot after a conference trying to recover from agency life.

[Bonus] Ops-285: Track 4 | Digital Puppet

This bonus episode gets uncomfortably honest pretty fast. Producer Emily Lundy joins Ops Mike to break down Digital Puppet, the OPS-285 track about burnout, staffing chaos, digital overload, and realizing your nervous system has been running on pure cortisol since Q2. They unpack the real stories behind the lyrics, the pressure of agency ops life, and what happens when “I’ll just push through it” quietly turns into survival mode. There’s therapy talk, resignation trauma, browser-tab rage, emotional support gym sessions, and Mike openly admitting he cried in a parking lot before a dentist appointment. Massive moment for the Angry Ops Guy brand. Full song track at the end. Congratulations, you broke this Ops guy.

Ep 25: Cheryl Baldwin | Keeping the Network Moving

The OG Ops Lady finally said yes to the podcast! Cheryl Baldwin from WSI Head Office joins me for a conversation about convention chaos, operational burnout, AI disruption, and what it actually takes to help keep a global network moving after 22 years inside WSI. We talk about the evolution of the network, the pressure of supporting consultants through nonstop industry change, and why “Embrace Digital. Stay Human.” matters more now than ever. Along the way, we get into convention war stories, balancing people and process at scale, and the very specific friendship that forms when two long-time ops people have spent years surviving the same chaos together. This episode also gets into why Global Convention still matters inside WSI beyond the presentations and sessions. It’s where consultants reconnect, share ideas, swap survival stories, and actually experience the network in a way that Zoom calls and Teams chats never fully replicate. For all the chaos that comes with digital marketing, there’s still something powerful about getting the community together in one place and remembering none of us are figuring this stuff out alone.

Ep 24: Nicole King | The Owner-Operator Learning Curve

Nicole King joins The Angry Ops Guy Podcast for a conversation about leaving corporate life, buying into a digital marketing franchise, and realizing very quickly that agency life is not exactly a gentle onboarding process. Mike and Nicole get into the reality of becoming an owner-operator, learning how to sell when you thought you were here to execute, and why the WSI network matters when the industry keeps changing underneath you. They also dig into AI, prompt engineering, ChatGPT projects, Gemini, NotebookLM, and how operators are starting to use these tools to protect process, continuity, and sanity. It is part tech geek-out, part agency therapy, and part reminder that digital marketing never stops moving. You either keep learning, keep adapting, and keep asking better questions, or the firehose wins.

Ep 23: Denise Bowen | When Ops Becomes the Business

Denise Bowen finally joins The Angry Ops Guy Podcast, and this one goes straight into the real stuff. Denise is one of my closest peers in the industry, so this conversation has been a long time coming. Mike and Denise talk about agency growth, leadership transitions, what it means to inherit responsibility from founders, and why the deeper you go into ops, the more you realize nothing ever stays solved for long. They also get into EOS, profitability, people management, and the constant challenge of building systems in an industry that changes every five minutes. The reality is, you can build the best process in the world, and it still falls apart if the people behind it are not aligned. Add in remote leadership, raising a family, and running one of the top agencies in the network, and this is a grounded look at what agency ops actually becomes when the title gets bigger and the pressure doesn’t let up.