AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Jonathan Dane (Klientboost) on Why AI Isn’t Killing Agencies, Weak Positioning Is
Guest: Jonathan Dane
Guest: Jonathan Dane
Jonathan Dane, founder of Klientboost, doesn’t think AI is the threat most agency owners assume it is, he thinks weak positioning is.
On this episode of the Agency Growth Club, he breaks down why he built Klientboost’s own software (Kite) to defend client results mathematically, the “growth grid” tool that exposes bad budget allocation on sales calls, and why guarantees are the “ace up the sleeve” that wins competitive pitches once you’re genuinely obsessed with client outcomes.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Jonathan’s view, formed even before more recent AI agent releases: a meaningful share of what agencies do today, particularly paid media conditional logic (“if this is true, do this”), is exactly the kind of task AI and the ad platforms themselves will increasingly handle natively (he cites Meta’s Andromeda release as a direct example).
“The puck is already going there.”
His conclusion isn’t that agencies become obsolete, it’s that their value shifts upstream, away from execution and toward the strategic layer beyond it. “The value that agencies can bring in the future is going to be, well, what happens next? What’s the carrot you have on a stick as an agency?”
Klientboost built a proprietary software product, Kite, structured around three differentiators. Financial acumen: modeling what needs to be true (revenue, profit, or whatever the client’s actual goal is) and rebalancing budget across channels (SEO, paid, CRO, etc.) to get there. Goal-driven pacing: tracking how far off-pace a client is from their KPI target, since the size of that gap should directly dictate the size of the intervention, a 2% gap needs small dial-turns, a 20%+ gap needs bigger structural levers.
Jonathan is direct that the “AI” framing oversells what’s actually happening under the hood: “It’s like Scooby-Doo when they pull the mask off at the end. It’s not AI. It was just if-this-then-that.” Kite’s real value, in his framing, is that it turns Klientboost’s own internal decision logic (originally built manually in Google Sheets) into something systematized and teachable, which directly supports defensible client claims: “A lot of agencies call themselves performance marketing agencies, but what does that mean? We can answer that.”
The growth grid originated directly from a recurring pattern Jonathan noticed on sales calls: asking a prospect how they decide where to allocate marketing budget almost never produces a strong answer, most default to last-click attribution within a single ad platform, directionally useful but incomplete.
The tool itself does two things. First, it takes a snapshot of current spend across channels, computes cost-per-visitor and visitor-to-lead conversion for each, and asks a simple question: is this genuinely the best allocation of the money you’re already spending? Second, once performance is on track, it answers a forward-looking question: if you had additional budget to deploy, which channel should get it, and why, prioritized by the cheapest cost-per-KPI and how quickly Klientboost has seen that specific channel produce results historically.
“That’s what the growth grid does. It just takes a snapshot of your budget allocation across different sources and asks: is this still the best way to spend the money?”
Jonathan breaks an agency’s client-facing operation into five systematizable areas: sales and expectation-setting, client onboarding, hitting the client’s first goal, growing the account further (scope, spend, new services), and the social-proof layer (reviews into case studies into referrals into references). His framing: every agency should be asking, explicitly, how do we level up each of these five individually, rather than treating “growth” as one undifferentiated blob.
His clearest example is expectation-setting through guarantees. Once an agency has genuine internal data proving consistent outcomes (his example: hitting 80% of client goals internally), a written guarantee becomes a legitimate, calculated competitive tool, not a blind risk.
“If I’m neck-to-neck with another agency and I don’t know if the client is signaling we’re going to win this deal, I’m going to pull out the ace up my sleeve and say we’re going to give you a guarantee, written into the contract.”
He’s explicit this is a deliberate, math-backed decision, not bravado: it means having the conversation with your CFO about whether a higher close rate from offering guarantees outweighs the cost of occasionally refunding clients who don’t hit their goal.
His onboarding example follows the same “level up” logic directly: a dedicated “7-day team” that builds everything a new client needs immediately, rather than folding onboarding into an already-busy account manager’s existing workload, compresses time-to-value and shifts client perception from “on track” to “ahead of schedule.”
Actionable advice:
Jonathan is candid that retention is often treated as a purely defensive metric, and pushes his team (and the agency owners he coaches through his “Unicorns” program) to think about it offensively instead: proactively testing the real strength of a client relationship by asking for something that benefits Klientboost, not the client, like a review or case study participation, and paying close attention to any hesitation.
The system: every month, Klientboost takes an NPS snapshot across all roughly 150 clients, with an expected 100% response rate (not the passive, self-selecting surveys most agencies rely on, which Jonathan argues create false confidence since only the happiest clients tend to respond voluntarily). Clients scoring 9 or 10 who are also on track with their goals get asked for a review. If they decline or hesitate, that’s treated as a genuine red flag, investigated through what Klientboost calls an ATF, an action plan, timeline, and follow-up, built collaboratively with the client to resolve whatever’s actually wrong.
“What needs to be true for you to feel like you want to leave a review for us? In that answer comes a lot of value that a lot of account managers and agency owners are just afraid to go find out.”
Actionable advice:
This section of the conversation was Josh sharing his own experience, not Jonathan’s or Klientboost’s. Josh described a recent initiative at Search for Hire’s SalaryGuide.com, reaching out directly to users for feedback after building features the team assumed were valuable, only to hear from roughly 1,200 respondents that they’d been building in the wrong direction entirely. Josh connected this to the broader principle that in a client churn postmortem, the client’s own voice should take priority over internal assumptions about what went wrong, referencing entrepreneur Brad Jacobs’ preference for talking to an actual customer in a supermarket over sitting through an internal leadership debate about what customers supposedly want.
Asked what most commonly breaks as agencies try to scale their systems, Jonathan’s answer is direct: a lack of deliberate delegation, specifically the intentionality behind what gets handed off and why.
His own practice: aggressively removing internal meetings and processes that no longer serve a clear purpose, structuring his own week around “level one” work he’s already taught his team to own (freeing him for “level two” strategic work), and holding team members genuinely accountable to commitments they’ve made about taking on that delegated responsibility, up to and including formal write-ups if commitments aren’t honored.
The deeper principle: delegation only works when it’s paired with real understanding of what motivates the person you’re delegating to, their pay goals, promotion goals, and skill-development goals specifically, framed as an explicit trade: genuine challenge and growth in exchange for real commitment. Klientboost tracks this through what Jonathan calls “game film”, direct, specific feedback on how well someone is executing the systems they agreed to own, paired explicitly with permission to challenge and change those systems if they’re not actually working. “We’re not romantically tied to this.”
Jonathan’s hiring process inverts the usual dynamic: he treats his own job as selling the candidate on Klientboost first, opening with genuine vulnerability about the agency’s actual weaknesses and struggles, not just its strengths. Only after that does the process move into skills assessment (Jonathan references the book Who directly, “finding the 10% of the 10%”), and if a skill gap exists but the fit is otherwise strong, Klientboost trains for it rather than passing.
Throughout, Jonathan is explicit about setting realistic expectations directly: what a full client roster and calendar actually look like, what kind of pressure the role carries from both clients and the company itself, and drawing a clear line that he personally tries to absorb company-side pressure so the employee’s stress stays focused and manageable. His framing for when a client relationship doesn’t work out despite genuine effort: “You left it all on the court, nothing’s going to happen, high five, on to the next”, a deliberate attempt to build psychological safety into the role from the interview stage onward.
Jonathan traces Klientboost’s talent brand (including a #1 “Best Place to Work” Glassdoor ranking in 2022) back to a deliberate content strategy, starting with blog content in the agency’s early days and shifting more recently toward social content. He shares a specific, memorable proof point: candidates coming in for interviews pre-pandemic would recognize team members by name before ever meeting them, purely from consuming Klientboost’s content beforehand.
His broader framing directly connects content to both client and talent retention: any client or employee who leaves for a competitor is implicitly saying that what they know about you wasn’t compelling enough to keep them from taking a chance elsewhere, a “relational equity” problem content directly helps solve by building trust and familiarity well before someone ever becomes a client or employee.
Jonathan is candid that most employee personal-branding initiatives fail quietly within a few months without deliberate structural support, since intrinsic motivation alone (fighting imposter syndrome, uncertain time payoff) usually isn’t enough to sustain it. Klientboost’s system has four deliberate components:
Monthly team huddles showcase a leaderboard of results, which Jonathan credits with organically pulling in more voluntary participation over time, beyond the incentivized group.
Actionable advice:
No, but he believes it will absorb much of the conditional-logic execution work agencies currently do, especially in paid media. He argues an agency’s future value shifts to the strategic layer beyond what AI and ad platforms can already automate natively.
A sales and strategy tool that takes a snapshot of a prospect’s or client’s current budget allocation across marketing channels, calculates cost-per-visitor and conversion by channel, and mathematically tests whether the current spend allocation is actually optimal, then prioritizes where any new budget should go.
He reverses the typical interview dynamic, opening by “selling” the candidate on Klientboost with genuine vulnerability about the agency’s actual weaknesses, before assessing the candidate’s own skills, aiming to build psychological safety into the process from the start.
Through a structured program combining a real financial incentive (roughly $1,000/month for three weekly posts), leadership posting first and consistently, copywriting support, and batch content creation, specifically designed to remove the friction that usually kills these initiatives within months.
He argues that once an agency has real internal data proving consistent outcomes (his example: hitting 80% of client goals), a written guarantee becomes a legitimate, calculated competitive advantage in close deals, not a blind risk, provided the numbers are validated with finance first.
Through a monthly NPS snapshot across all clients with a 100% response-rate expectation, using high scores as the trigger to request reviews, and treating any hesitation to leave one as a red flag investigated through a structured action-plan-timeline-follow-up (ATF) process.
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