How One Bad Hire Turns a Marketing Agency Owner Into the Bottleneck with Scott Leff Ep #903

Would you like access to our advanced agency training for FREE? What if hiring smart people and getting out of your way was not enough to build a self-managing agency? Today's featured guest will talk through the decisions most agency owners get wrong: when to stay involved, when to let go, and how the absence of rigor compounds into structural problems you won't even notice until you're stuck. He'll talk about how bad hiring decisions led him to become the bottleneck, how he's trying to fix that, as well as why your "number" for how much your agency is worth is probably based on nothing, and the one financial habit that gives you genuine optionality. Scott Leff is the founder of Leff , a B2B content marketing agency serving global professional services firms and nonprofits for over 16 years. His background spans business communications working as a managing director for a big brand, as well as a 22-month stint leading communications for Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. When the bid failed in the first round, he found himself in a period of reinvention. With the gig economy just taking off, he decided it was time to hang up his shingle. He started to take freelance work, which eventually led to hiring and forming his own business. This agency grew steadily, exploded during COVID, and is now navigating the reassessment most established agencies are facing in a shifting market. In this episode, we'll discuss: Why becoming the bottleneck isn't always about control The hiring rigor every owner should have Which metrics are you tracking? Why declining revenue doesn't equal failure

You can listen to How One Bad Hire Turns a Marketing Agency Owner Into the Bottleneck with Scott Leff Ep #903 online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

How One Bad Hire Turns a Marketing Agency Owner Into the Bottleneck with Scott Leff Ep #903 is an episode from Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies by Jason Swenk.

This episode is 40:03 long.

This episode was published on May 6, 2026.

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