Karl O'Brien spent eight years running a Dublin digital marketing agency before founding Storehero (https://storehero.ai/), the AI growth coach for ecommerce brands and agencies. After watching client after client fly blind on profit (revenue grew, margin disappeared into the Meta and Google tax, attribution wars never ended), he built the dashboard he wished his agency had. That dashboard is now an MCP-powered profit brain plugged into Claude, with billions of dollars of ecommerce revenue passing through it annually and customers across 15 countries.

For agency owners, this is the agency-to-SaaS conversation that does not skip the hard parts. Why most SaaS businesses are "venture-backed agencies in the background". Why Meta and Google are coming for the management fee. What productisation actually looks like when AI is compressing your costs faster than your prices.

In this episode we talked about:

- The eight-year Dublin agency that taught Karl what ecom brands actually needed (and couldn't see)

- Why a SaaS should be the end-degree of automation for work an agency was already doing

- The future of ecom agencies: either lower-cost specialised at scale, or higher-margin profit-focused

- Why agencies are 60% of Storehero's customers (and another 10-15% are agency referrals)

- The Storehero Claude Connector in production: automated Monday morning anomaly detection across a client book

- The Profit Scaler skill that turns a junior's two-day analysis into a two-minute insight that blows away the client

- Bezos in the AI era: "your margin is my opportunity" and what it means for agencies in 2026

- Events as the in-person counterweight to digital fatigue (Shopify partnership, 1,000-member NYC community)

- Karl's closing advice: solve an expensive problem, the kind people will pay to make go away

Karl did not set out to build a sellable business. He set out to build a better one. The result is the same. This episode covers two levers: financial reporting (the profit visibility every ecom client wants and most agencies cannot offer) and repeatable delivery (the productisation curve that ends in software, or somewhere close to it).

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---

Connect with me:

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Website: https://moveatpace.com

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Email: connor@moveatpace.com

#ExitReady #MoveAtPace #AgencyOwner #Ecommerce #SaaS

Jake Thompson runs Outwork from Holywood, County Down. Nine years a freelance videographer, then a return from London with no clients in the door forced him to learn the bits videographers do not usually touch: offer design, sales psychology, paid media. The result is a productised core offer (30 pieces of video creative in a single shoot day) that put Outwork on the map, plus Meta ads delivery and now full back-end management for clients like Henderson's and SPAR.

The story of Outwork is the story of an offer evolving in front of the market: video-for-hire to a defined product, projects to ads, ads to wrapping the conversion stack the clients were missing.

In this episode we talked about:

- Coming back from London with no clients and rebuilding by treating the offer as the product, not the camera

- Why a clear, linear offer (30 videos in a day) was easier to sell than "I do video"

- Wrapping Meta ads around the creative, then wrapping back-end management around the ads

- The Christmas the cashflow scare on a one-off-project model made retainers non-negotiable

- The unicorn hire (Polly the editor, working in Nando's when Jake found him) and what good creative hiring actually looks like

- The studio move and what unlocks when the agency owns the space

- The AI stack already inside the agency: Fireflies into Claude for ICP discovery, ChatGPT for market research, Plaud for in-person meeting capture

- The Hormozi playbook ($100M Offers) that re-shaped the whole business

Jake did not set out to build a sellable business. He set out to build a better one. The result is the same. This episode covers two levers: sales engine maturity (productised offer plus paid acquisition wrapped around it) and recurring revenue (the retainer model that lets the founder step out of constant sales mode).

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Want to work with me?

Take the free Agency Valuation and find out what your agency could be worth:

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---

Connect with me:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-mca-0a9b6b160/

Website: https://moveatpace.com

Podcast hub: https://moveatpace.com/podcast/

Email: connor@moveatpace.com

#ExitReady #MoveAtPace #AgencyOwner #VideoAgency #PerformanceMarketing

Kathryn Byberg founded Little Leaf Agency (https://littleleafagency.com/) in 2021 after 10+ years inside the sexual wellness industry, including a Shanghai posting as Global PR Manager at LELO. Five years later, Little Leaf is a 14-person fully remote team across the UK, Europe, the US and Canada, the only specialist PR agency in the world for its category. Kathryn won XBIZ Marketing Executive of the Year in January 2026.

Every marketing channel most agencies rely on is either restricted, censored, or closed off entirely. Google Ads shut off overnight. Instagram accounts with 700,000 followers disappear without warning. Times Square billboards refuse the campaign. The standard playbook does not apply, so Kathryn built a different one.

In this episode we talked about:

• The career path from science to journalism to sports PR to Shanghai to founding the agency
• Why the marketing funnel isn't a funnel anymore, it's a web, and how AI summaries forced the shift
• Winning the two or three product slots inside an LLM answer (and why Reddit, Substack and YouTube are suddenly load-bearing)
• The Bolesa Instagram account that vanished overnight with 700,000 followers, and what platform risk really looks like
• Building a 14-person remote team by cherry-picking former colleagues and category peers, not posting jobs
• Serving competing clients inside a small niche using siloed pods and clean Chinese walls
• Guerrilla PR wins the paid channels could never deliver (a sex toy on ITV's This Morning on Valentine's Day)
• Why the recognition (Cannes Lion, Executive of the Year) opens doors the category usually keeps shut
• The Spain expansion this year and Germany next

Kathryn did not set out to build a sellable business. She set out to build a better one. The result is the same. This episode covers what that looks like for two levers: client concentration (how a niche specialist serves competing clients without losing either) and repeatable delivery (productising a playbook for an industry where the old playbook is banned).

Want to work with me?

Take the free Agency Valuation and find out what your agency could be worth: https://moveatpace.com/agency-valuation/

Join 200+ agency owners getting weekly frameworks: https://moveatpace.com/newsletter/

Connect with me:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-mca-0a9b6b160/

Website: https://moveatpace.com

Podcast hub: https://moveatpace.com/podcast/

Email: connor@moveatpace.com

In this episode of Exit Ready, Fergal talks me through:

What Lean Brand Design actually means in practice, and why most 100-page brand guidelines are pure waste sitting in a folder no one opens

• Why he embeds on site every week or two with clients like Sperrin (Ryan Tierney's latest acquisition) rather than designing from a distance, and how being "in the gemba" surfaces improvements you cannot spot over email
• The morning meetings he ran with himself (slide deck, stretch routine, the lot) to embed Lean culture into a one-person studio, and why he now does them on Zoom with another freelancer
• Why mid-Ulster's manufacturing belt is "gold in the fields", and why so many of those companies are sitting on world-class products with neglected brands
• Ryan Tierney's mission to make Ireland the next Japan, and how Fergal sees his role in that
• The two-second Lean rule he stole for social media: document every tiny improvement on video, don't wait for perfect, post anyway
• Where AI fits into a Lean studio (admin and process, yes; creative judgement, no) and why "faster" is not the same conversation as Lean
• The mentorship lesson he wishes he'd taken earlier: you should never be the smartest person in the room, and the value comes from people outside your own industry

If you're an agency owner looking for a positioning that isn't another full-service generalist pitch, this one is a clinic in niching down.

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Take the free Agency Valuation Assessment: https://moveatpace.com/agency-valuation/

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FH Design: https://fhdesign.co.uk/

Connect with Connor:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-mca-0a9b6b160/

Website: https://moveatpace.com

#ExitReady #AgencyOwner #AgencyGrowth #MoveAtPace #LeanBrandDesign

In this episode of Exit Ready, David talks me through:

• Why he rebranded from Marketing For Me to Zoma in a Dundalk pub during COVID, and why they defined the brand values before picking a name
• The 10-person danger zone: scaling from 3 to 18-20 people, finding they were less profitable than at 10, and deliberately scaling back to 15
• The €500 photoshoot that turned into a €100,000-a-year client
• Becoming the first Shopify partner in Ireland in 2016 (two years before most of the Irish market caught up)
• How wellbeing culture (rooftop fitness fundraisers, social clubs, fit-meal canteen) became a hiring moat in a rural location an hour from both Dublin and Belfast
• Producing the most viral jersey launch video in League of Ireland history for Dundalk FC
• Why he's looking at the US during economic turmoil ("when there's economic turmoil, that's when you have a real chance to enter a market")
• How Zoma uses Notion + AI automation to free creative time, and why he won't let AI run client relationships

If you're an agency owner trying to grow without losing the things that made the business work in the first place, this one is full of decisions worth stealing.

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Take the free Agency Valuation Assessment: https://moveatpace.com/agency-valuation/

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Zoma: https://zoma.ie

Connect with Connor:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-mca-0a9b6b160/

Website: https://moveatpace.com

#ExitReady #AgencyOwner #AgencyGrowth #MoveAtPace

Pete Lynagh runs Haul (https://haul.agency/) from Mornington, Victoria. Haul is a full-service digital marketing agency that works exclusively with transport and logistics companies. Before Haul, Pete spent over a decade running a generalist agency called Stage Fright Management. A four-year engagement with Border Express, one of Australia's largest logistics companies, showed him how underserved the industry was. He shut the generalist model down and rebuilt around a single vertical.

Most agency owners wrestle with whether to niche. Pete went further than that. He killed the generalist business and bet everything on one industry.

In this episode we talked about:

- The unconventional career arc from electrician to NLP practitioner to agency owner

- The four-year Border Express engagement and the moment it changed Pete's direction

- What it actually cost to shut down a generalist agency and rebuild around one vertical

- How deep industry knowledge changes the sales conversation (you stop selling marketing, you start solving problems operators thought only other operators understood)

- The Content Marketing Quadrant: Pete's framework for positioning inside a niche

- The Arrow Transport engagement: 53% revenue growth and 472% traffic increase in 12 months

- How Haul is using AI without losing what makes the agency specialised

- What Pete would tell any agency owner thinking about niching into a single industry

Pete did not set out to build a sellable business. He set out to build a better one. The result is the same. This episode is about how a genuine niche tightens two value levers at once: sales engine maturity and predictable profitability.

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Want to work with me?

Take the free Agency Health Scorecard and find out where your agency stands:

https://moveatpace.com/agency-scorecard/

Join 200+ agency owners getting weekly frameworks:

https://moveatpace.com/newsletter/

---

Connect with me:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-mca-0a9b6b160/

Website: https://moveatpace.com

Podcast hub: https://moveatpace.com/podcast/

Email: connor@moveatpace.com

#ExitReady #MoveAtPace #AgencyOwner #AgencyGrowth #AgencyScaling

Elizabeth and Anthony Heaney started Squint Creative (https://squintcreative.com/) from their apartment during COVID lockdown in 2020. Both were working 12-hour shifts at a diagnostics company. They built the business in their three days off, took client calls from an airport cafe, and signed their biggest retainer from that same airport.

Five years later, Squint is one of the most distinctive CGI and fake out-of-home studios in the country, working with brands like Primark, Boost, and Killwater, and producing campaigns that hit millions of views.

In this episode we talked about:

Working 12-hour shifts while building an agency on the side, and why they would do it the exact same way again

How they scaled Hollywood-level CGI back to an affordable price for social media campaigns

Running a business as a married couple, and why critique from your spouse hits differently than critique from a client

A construction sector campaign that hit five million views and why the client had to be brave to back it

How Squint uses AI for 3D tracking and gap-filling without replacing the creative process

Their advice: build a safety net, get a retainer or two, then make the jump

The things that make an agency easier to run are the same things that make it valuable to a buyer. This episode covers what that looks like for repeatable delivery: when you systematise how the work gets done, you can scale it without scaling the chaos.

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Want to work with me?

Take the free Agency Health Scorecard and find out where your agency stands:

https://moveatpace.com/agency-scorecard/

Join 200+ agency owners getting weekly frameworks:

https://moveatpace.com/newsletter/

---

Connect with me:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connormcauley/

Website: https://moveatpace.com

Podcast hub: https://moveatpace.com/podcast/

Email: connor@moveatpace.com

#ExitReady #MoveAtPace #AgencyOwner #CreativeBusiness #AgencyGrowth

Aedin O'Neill spent over 20 years in marketing before founding Grow Web (https://growweb.co.uk/), a boutique PPC and paid media agency in Belfast. She made a deliberate choice to stay specialist: 80% performance, 20% brand. No full-service, no generalist drift.

That focus is what keeps Grow Web trusted by national and international clients. But staying specialist in a landscape where Meta and Google are changing the rules daily is a fight, not a default.

In this episode we talked about:

Why she chose to stay boutique and specialist instead of chasing full-service revenue

How Meta's aggressive automation is pushing agencies to fight for control of their clients' brands

Running a business with her sister Sinead, and why complementary skills make the difference

The competitive mindset from an All-Ireland GAA background and how it shapes a results-first culture

Her advice to anyone starting a PPC agency: go niche, get your hands dirty, build credibility before you build a brand

Using AI for operational efficiency while managing different attitudes across a multi-generational team

A well-run agency is also a sellable agency. When you do one thing and build processes around it, you get repeatable delivery. That is what makes the business both easier to run and more valuable.

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Want to work with me?

Take the free Agency Valuation and find out where your agency stands:

https://moveatpace.com/agency-valuation/

Join 200+ agency owners getting weekly frameworks:

https://moveatpace.com/newsletter/

---

Connect with me:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connormcauley/

Website: https://moveatpace.com

Podcast hub: https://moveatpace.com/podcast/

Email: connor@moveatpace.com

#ExitReady #MoveAtPace #AgencyOwner #DigitalAgency #AgencyGrowth

Mark Kelso co-founded Glaze Digital with Richard over 12 years ago. What started as a do-everything agency (websites, video, photography, app development) is now a Shopify Plus partner in the top 1.5% globally, with 250+ stores built for brands doing over £20M a month.

The technical side was never the problem. Glaze had the reputation, the clients, and the platform expertise. The commercial engine just had not kept pace.

Over 13 months working together, Glaze saw a 47% increase in revenue and a 110% increase in profit.

In this episode we talked about:

The month Mark had zero revenue coming in, and the wake-up call it created

Why being brilliant at Shopify does not automatically grow your agency

Moving from white-label work to direct strategic partnerships

The resistance to hiring middle managers (and what changed their minds)

Restructuring billing so you are not sending every invoice at month-end

How Glaze uses AI (Flora for product imagery, clients bringing Lovable designs) without losing what makes them them

If you run an agency where the work is already excellent but the business side has not caught up, this conversation is for you.

FREE AGENCY VALUATION (PDF report): http://moveatpace.com/agency-valuation

WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: http://moveatpace.com/newsletter

#agencyowner #agencygrowth #shopify #agencycoach #exitready

Growth was not a straight line. For the first few years the agency was doing good work, bringing in solid revenue, and barely making profit. Cathal was the salesperson, the account manager, the point of contact for everything. The business worked because he never stopped.

In this episode we talked about:

• The difference between a lifestyle business and an actual business
• Why referrals alone will not get you where you want to go
• The production manager hire he wishes he'd made 18 months earlier
• What changed when he started speaking to clients like an entrepreneur, not a creative
• Why you need to treat yourself as your own best client (and why agencies are terrible at this)

If you run an agency and the business side hasn't caught up with the quality of the work, this conversation is for you.

FREE AGENCY VALUATION (PDF report): moveatpace.com/agency-valuation

WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: moveatpace.com/newsletter

BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL: cal.com/moveatpace/discovery-call