Is Your Best Skill Actually Squashing Your Agency's Growth? with Brett Singer | Ep #923

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Are you willing to give up the work you built the agency around in order to build the agency itself?  Today's featured guest recounts how he and his partner built their agency after a decade working together at the Oprah Winfrey Show. Fifteen years in, they are still figuring out what the founder job actually is versus what they have always been good at.

He talks through how the transition from doing to leading actually happened, what it cost him creatively and personally to step out of directing, and what he means when he says that making the video was always the easy part.

Brett Singer is a co-founder and principal at Bottle Rocket Media, a digital agency based in Chicago specializing in video production, motion graphics, SEO, paid media, and AI search optimization.

He and his business partner Dan Fisher both worked at Harpo Studios on the Oprah Winfrey Show for over a decade before launching Bottle Rocket in 2011. The agency built its initial client base entirely from the network that came out of Harpo when the show ended, then invested heavily in their own SEO to shift from outbound to inbound. Brett is now focused on business development, vision, and team culture.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

Letting go of the work you love for the future of the agency

When the business no longer needs you

The hardest part of running an agency

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Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

The Work You Love Is Not the Work the Business Needs From You Brett spent years at Harpo perfecting motion design and later started Bottle Rocket partly because he wanted to keep doing it. It was work he greatly enjoyed. Unfortunately, he realized that was the wrong job for him, not from a strategic decision but from simple math: when he was in the edit suite, no one was finding the next client. The business did not care how good he was with a camera. It needed someone holding the relationship and the vision.