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Cody C. Jensen talks with Jason Barnard about scaling with soul.
Scaling with Soul! Cody C. Jensen, Founder and CEO of Searchbloom, reveals how to build a $900 million client-generating agency without sacrificing your values. Drawing from his experience as a former Google employee and 10+ years scaling an award-winning search marketing agency, Cody shares his proven framework for growing teams from 3 to 25+ employees while maintaining ethics and transparency. Discover why he banned the word “client” from his company, how to replace yourself strategically at each growth stage, and the six core values that drive lasting relationships and industry-leading retention rates.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
– The leadership transition points that make or break scaling companies
– Why bespoke services and scale aren’t enemies when done right
– How to embed your team directly with partners for maximum results
– The “two pizza rule” for effective team management
– Why AI agents enhance human expertise rather than replace it
– How transparent communication drives $900M+ in client results
This conversation offers a blueprint for entrepreneurs who want to scale their business without losing their soul or compromising their values.
#ScalingWithSoul #SearchMarketing #SEOAgency #EthicalBusiness #TeamBuilding #BusinessGrowth #Leadership #DigitalMarketing #Entrepreneurship #AgencyLife #BusinessValues #ScaleUp #StartupGrowth #BusinessStrategy #Podcast #FastlaneFounders #CodyCJensen #Searchbloom
What you’ll learn from Cody C. Jensen
This episode was recorded live on video July 1st 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1265-searchbloom-digital-marketing-and-seo-strategies/id562518965?i=1000700534958
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scaling-a-digital-marketing-agency-with-white-hat/id1360621621?i=1000698844372
Cody C. Jensen
Transcript from Cody C. Jensen with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Scaling with Soul
[00:00:00] Jason Barnard: So I’m looking at the screen. I can see scaling with soul. AI doesn’t have a soul.
[00:00:07] Cody C. Jensen: Does not have a soul.
[00:00:08] Jason Barnard: Agential AI doesn’t have a soul. So there’s another contradiction going on there. So how do you scale with soul and use AI?
[00:00:17] Cody C. Jensen: I think number one, recognizing AI for what it is. As you said, It does not have a soul.
[00:00:25] Cody C. Jensen: It is literally a machine. You’re having conversations with a computer that has very little knowledge as it relates to being a human, right. It can only learn from humans itself and then over time, it can teach itself more and more. So scaling with soul starts, I believe with leadership, top down.
[00:00:48] Jason Barnard: So you have a soul.
[00:00:51] Cody C. Jensen: I have a soul. Yes.
[00:00:53] Jason Barnard: So describe your soul to me, because then that becomes the vision of the company that passes down to the leadership.
[00:00:58] Cody C. Jensen: Exactly. Yeah. So my soul, I suppose is based on ethics and white hat practices, doing things the right way from the beginning and not taking any shortcuts, knowing that failing is not failing unless you stop. These are parts of like my makeup, if you will. And that’s where we took those values or innate things about me and about some of our other leadership team and created our core values.
[00:01:35] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:39] Narrator: Each week Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes their legacy?
[00:01:58] Narrator: A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:02:04] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody, and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m Jason Barnard. And I’m here with a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show code Cody C. Jensen.
[00:02:17] Cody C. Jensen: Howdy! Welcome. Thank you.
[00:02:19] Jason Barnard: I struggled to get the C into the melody there. So we’re talking about scaling with soul, scaling your business, but I would hope also scaling in your case, your SEO services.
[00:02:30] Jason Barnard: So it’s scaling and business, both the company itself and the services you offer. That’s going to be super interesting. And before that, as always, we look at Brand SERP. So here’s your search result on Google, Cody C. Jensen. And you there with the C that disambiguate. You said there’s a famous YouTuber who challenges you for the place on the Brand SERP.
[00:02:51] Jason Barnard: Is that why you added the C?
[00:02:53] Cody C. Jensen: It’s exactly why I added the C. Yep.
[00:02:55] Jason Barnard: Okay, brilliant. Pity that you don’t have a Knowledge Panel but that’s my obsession and I know it’s not everybody’s obsession. I love them. They look really cool, but I also understand that not everybody sees them in important. But what I think you will love is this, which is Gemini.
[00:03:12] Jason Barnard: I went in and asked Gemini about Cody C. Jensen, founder and CEO of Searchbloom to find out more about you. It’s got a really nice description about you, your background and experience and Searchbloom’s approach. Which if I read it, I don’t need to interview you and we could close the show now. How about that?
[00:03:32] Cody C. Jensen: It would probably do a pretty good job?
[00:03:35] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Now would it do a good job because you’ve done a good job in your communication of Searchbloom online?
[00:03:43] Cody C. Jensen: That is the only reason it could do a good job is because I’ve positioned myself and Searchbloom in such a manner where the LLMs, whether it be Gemini or Grok, or GPT, it doesn’t matter. Like you could check, you could use ChatGPT right now and ask what is the best SEO company there is? Searchbloom will be on that list.
[00:04:05] Jason Barnard: Right? So you’ve intentionally gone out and optimized Searchbloom for LLMs.
[00:04:13] Cody C. Jensen: In a roundabout way, yeah. Most SEOs will tell you that AEO or Answer Engine Optimization or GEO, Generative Engine Optimization is simply Search Engine Optimization.
[00:04:27] Cody C. Jensen: It’s just an evolution of that using a different source medium which is like that answer engine. I found loopholes and hacks to be able to get into Gemini’s response or the specific, quick answer that Google’s providing the AI overview, AIOs.
[00:04:51] Jason Barnard: Okay.
[00:04:52] Jason Barnard: And how do you think that’s going to evolve? You’re saying there are easy hacks at the moment that if you look for them, you can find them. Do you think that Window’s going to stay open for long?
[00:05:01] Cody C. Jensen: I think that maybe quick hacks is the wrong word. I think, first you have to establish yourself and your brand, and that is not quick nor easy.
[00:05:15] Cody C. Jensen: And from there you can leverage it. And a lot of it comes down to money. For example, in order for you to become one of the best SEO agencies according to AIO or Gemini. You have to be cited as such in relevant articles, right? So what we do is we reach out to those relevant articles and ensure that we are placed appropriately. More often than not that is a transactional approach.
[00:05:47] Jason Barnard: Okay. So you were saying it isn’t SEO on steroids or SEO adapted it. It’s a whole different approach. What’s the attitude you set you need to change in order to be able to move into that?
[00:06:00] Cody C. Jensen: First you need to understand how much people are using specifically your ICP. How much is your ICP using ChatGPT. Let’s be honest, it controls the majority of the market, ChatGPT but how much your audience is using that particular AEO.
[00:06:20] Cody C. Jensen: And then from there, you can optimize for it. if your audience is not using LLMs, there’s no reason for you to go out and buy a listing on some platform.
[00:06:34] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Which makes total sense. And I love the point, if your audience isn’t using it, there’s no point. Which is delightful and simple and obvious and smart at the same time.
[00:06:44] Jason Barnard: So scaling with soul, your company has scaled from what I understand, pretty quickly.
[00:06:51] Cody C. Jensen: I wouldn’t say quickly. We’re 10 and a half years old. So I think the most of our growth happened over the last four years maybe.
[00:07:00] Jason Barnard: Alright. Us too. Very similar but you are a little bit ahead.
[00:07:03] Jason Barnard: You’ve got 25 people on your team. How did you find the difference between having three people, 15 people and 25 people in terms of being the CEO of the company?
[00:07:15] Cody C. Jensen: Each stage is completely different. Managing a business with three to five people is what I call very much a startup, like just getting things going. And maybe you have some SOPs, maybe you have some process, some you have a project management system, you have your streamlined approach, maybe you have even methodologies at that point. But it’s still so much in its infancy. When you get from five to when you break the 10 headcount mark, that’s when you have to really replace yourself probably two times at that point. You’ll need someone to help operate, in the form of a director of operations or operations manager or something like that. Because I believe in the two pizza rule where you can only manage as many slices as there are in a single or two pies, right?
[00:08:20] Cody C. Jensen: And I’ve managed 20 people at a time. That’s a full-time job and nothing else can occur. So what you have to do is build a leadership team, surrounding you that ideally are strong where you are weak. That way they have dissenting or differences of opinion with you, where you can then eventually meet in the middle of, Hey, I’m the CEO, this is the vision for the company.
[00:08:50] Cody C. Jensen: And then the ops person will come in and say, okay, but here’s the things that we need to do to achieve that vision. And there’s always going to be some back and forth, some healthy tension is going to be important. And that’s when you get into maybe 20, 25, 30 employees, that’s when you have a dedicated leadership team that’s doing quarterly business reviews, that’s meeting annually offsite, that’s really planning the vision for the company for the quarter, for the year and setting target goals, whether they be revenue or the target is. For me, for example, I don’t really care about revenue.
[00:09:38] Cody C. Jensen: I care about profit, right? How can we optimize our efficiency rates to make more profit? Because we are a bespoke SEO and Digital Marketing Agency, Search Marketing Agency, that’s what Searchbloom is. That is the inverse of scale. Bespoke or custom and scale are not friends. But there is a hybrid situation. There’s a lot of things that I can’t scale without human intervention. I can use AI agents to do certain things that makes the human SEO component of it. Their job much easier, or the Google ads manager, it makes their job much easier because I can surface insights, fetching APIs and things like that through different systems and Agential AI make changes.
[00:10:34] Jason Barnard: Right. So I’m looking at the screen. I can see scaling with soul. AI doesn’t have a soul.
[00:10:41] Cody C. Jensen: Does not have a soul, no.
[00:10:42] Jason Barnard: Agents, Agential AI doesn’t have a soul. So there’s another contradiction going on there. So how do you scale with soul and use AI?
[00:10:53] Cody C. Jensen: I think number one, recognizing AI for what it is. As you said, does not have a soul.
[00:11:02] Cody C. Jensen: It is literally a machine. You’re having conversations with a computer that has very little knowledge as it relates to being a human right. It can only learn from humans itself. And then over time it can teach itself more and more. So Scaling with soul starts I believe with leadership, top down.
[00:11:25] Jason Barnard: So you have a soul.
[00:11:29] Cody C. Jensen: I have a soul. Yes.
[00:11:30] Jason Barnard: So describe your soul to me because then that becomes the vision of the company. From what I understand, ethics and integrity is something that Gab broke down for me. So you have a soul that passes down to the leadership.
[00:11:43] Cody C. Jensen: Exactly. Yeah. So my soul, I suppose, is based on ethics and white hat practices, doing things the right way from the beginning and not taking any shortcuts, knowing that failing is not failing unless you stop. These are parts of like my makeup, if you will, and that’s where we took those values or innate things about me and about some of our other leadership team and created our core values.
[00:12:21] Cody C. Jensen: Search firm’s core values, there are six of them. There’s more than most, but we have six core values and that’s how we make decisions. Whether we’re hiring this individual or firing this individual. Whatever it is, it’s based on our core values of the company.
[00:12:38] Jason Barnard: And the six core values make up the soul of the company?
[00:12:41] Cody C. Jensen: Correct.
[00:12:41] Jason Barnard: What are the six core values?
[00:12:43] Cody C. Jensen: Okay. There’s a lot of them. I’m going to start with keep it crystal. Keep it crystal is to be crystal clear in your communication, transparent in your communication, showing not just the wins, but also the losses being forthright. As well as internal communication, keeping things very crystal clear with your expectations with a development request or a content request or whatever that might be within different cross-departmental teams.
[00:13:14] Cody C. Jensen: So keep it crystal is critically important and one of our core values. Another is never let it rest. And that’s what I just described to you, earlier. Never let it rest means that you’re always learning, you’re always optimizing, whether it’s your personal life, your professional life, your career, discipline, your expertise, whatever it is, you’re always learning.
[00:13:37] Cody C. Jensen: You’re pushing the envelope always. Otherwise it gets boring, at least for me. The next one is take pulse, which is actually the inverse of never let it rest. Take pulse means zoom out and look at the big picture every once in a while to make sure that you’re not missing anything.
[00:13:55] Cody C. Jensen: You got to be able to see the ground from 10,000 feet in order to really know what you’re missing over here and over there rather than being locked into a vacuum and never letting it rest on this certain thing. So they work with each other. In fact, all of our core values work with each other and against each other at the same time.
[00:14:15] Cody C. Jensen: It’s what I believe to be a really good balance of those. The next one is my own. I always use this, just analogy, if we’re running a marathon race and we’ve got Cody is running number one. Jason, you’re running number two, and we have Cara running number three. I’m running, I’m sprinting.
[00:14:36] Cody C. Jensen: I give you the baton. You grab it, you’re sprinting, you’re doing a great job. You give it to Cara, who I just made up, and she drops the baton. That’s the opposite of own it, right? So we have to have clear standard operating procedures so that there is no way for someone to have an excuse to say, Hey, I didn’t know.
[00:14:57] Cody C. Jensen: And then from there, they have to own their side of the street. They have to held accountable to that too. So own it. Own it as critical. Outside of that, we have lasting relationships which is also important. We build lasting relationships internally and externally with our partner clients, as well as with our colleagues here at Searchbloom.
[00:15:23] Cody C. Jensen: We do this by having coffee chats or we have a dedicated culture team for the company. That’s something that you don’t have with five employees, right? That’s something that you require at 20 plus employees. It’s something that’s really important. So yeah, I think I went through all six.
[00:15:41] Cody C. Jensen: I could have missed one or two but those are the core foundations of our core values.
[00:15:48] Jason Barnard: Okay. Which makes total sense and maybe we should be looking at that at Kalicube®. But the core values, I don’t think we’ve ever defined them. We all implicitly agree, but making it explicit and making it public within the company makes a lot of sense.
[00:16:06] Jason Barnard: I’m cool. I’m cool about that. So I’m interested in that idea as well, and I noticed you said partner clients.
[00:16:13] Cody C. Jensen: Yeah. Actually it’s a bad word to say client at Searchbloom. In fact, if you say client, I will correct you no matter who is on the call. It’s just a negative word at Searchbloom.
[00:16:24] Cody C. Jensen: And the reason is because of my experience with past agencies and working for them, every client was just another number. Every client was treated as a client and it was just a vendor client sort of relationship. Whereas with Searchbloom, the reason I started it is because there had to be a better way.
[00:16:43] Cody C. Jensen: It doesn’t have to be all about just making a massive net profit by offshoring or outsourcing all of your SEO work to some other country. Instead, you can still make a profit by doing it the right way from the beginning with ethical and transparent practices. White hat practices without having to take any shortcuts or anything like that.
[00:17:10] Cody C. Jensen: And what we found that works the best is when we embed a member of our team, or members of our team into our partner relationships. Embedding is like an example might be Slack and integrations where we’re embedding ourselves there with them in their Slack, right? It looks different for different people but for different partners, they have a dedicated resource at Searchbloom, a dedicated point of contact that is not an account manager. We don’t have account managers at Searchbloom. I don’t personally agree with the philosophy of account managers. They’re simply just a go-between. They’re not subject matter experts.
[00:17:53] Cody C. Jensen: Like in my previous experiences, a client would call to the account manager and it would be a telephone game. Account manager would get information from the client, they’re pissed off about this, that, and the other. The account manager would relay about 25% of that to the subject matter experts.
[00:18:10] Cody C. Jensen: Then the subject matter expert would take about 25% of that and solve maybe 15%, and then it goes back. And that’s just an ongoing, incomplete feedback loop. So as opposed to that, we created a model that you just work directly with the subject matter expert.
[00:18:25] Jason Barnard: So a client partner would be working with multiple people within your team, directly with the person on your team who will be implementing.
[00:18:36] Cody C. Jensen: Yes. Or with our cross-functional teams. So if it’s a development related request or task, then, we would embed a member of our dev team or our content team, things like that.
[00:18:53] Jason Barnard: Right? Yeah. I was working with a client a few years ago and they brought on a big agency and that experience you just explained.
[00:19:01] Jason Barnard: I had with them all the time is that you would explain the entire thing to one person. They say, I’m going to tell everybody else. And they didn’t understand three quarters of it and didn’t communicate three quarters of it. And the bit they did communicate wasn’t complete or was misrepresented and nothing ever happened.
[00:19:17] Jason Barnard: And my client paid a fortune for the pleasure and it was very frustrating. We do use the term account manager or something similar. And I can see that it doesn’t have such a great connotation now that you mention it in that context. But the people who do work with our partner clients, we call them digital brand engineers and they are subject matter experts, and we do.
[00:19:45] Jason Barnard: In fact, they’re incredibly curious people. If you want to work at Kalicube®, you have to be super curious about The Kalicube Process™ and about how you manage a brand on Google and in Search and indeed throughout the entire digital footprint. Do you have that same philosophy of absolute enthusiasm? And I would put that into the company attributes.
[00:20:06] Cody C. Jensen: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Transparency is a part of our mission statement. Our mission is to be the most trusted, transparent, and results driven, Search Engine Marketing Company in the world. That is no easy feat, but I believe that we are already accomplishing this. Simply because we have regular meetings with our partners. We are embedded with our partners. They know the good, the bad, the ugly. They know what we have done for them. What we’re doing now for them, and what we’re going to be doing next for them and why. So I think to your point, you could have an account management structure if that account manager is indeed a subject matter expert or can become relatively quickly a subject matter expert. Otherwise, it’s just a telephone game from there.
[00:20:57] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it’s just a telephone game. I like that. I’ll quote you on that. One of the problems with scaling then is actually finding enough people who are smart enough to become subject matter experts in something that is surprisingly simple in my point of view, from my point of view, but so vast that to become a subject matter expert, you have to have learned and understood an awful lot, and that takes time.
[00:21:21] Jason Barnard: Is there a solution to that?
[00:21:24] Cody C. Jensen: I think there is. I’m investigating a solution right now in AI agents supporting analysts doing a lot of the menial tasks, the things that just take a lot of time. So that the subject matter expert can look at the endpoint or the result and then analyze it and make decisions based on it and say where it was right, where it was wrong.
[00:21:51] Cody C. Jensen: I don’t have a solution for that right now, I’ll tell you that. We pay our people very well because they’re very good. More often than not, they were SEO directors at another SEO agency and took a down step just to join Searchbloom to be a senior SEO analyst here, or a senior PPC analyst.
[00:22:14] Cody C. Jensen: And they actually make more money here, but they just get a different title. So they have to be very experienced, subject matter experts. We put them through a four interview process. One the last of which is a presentation. I’m not involved in that anymore but our SEO director, our VP of delivery, these individuals handle all of that as far as the onboarding interview process, and so on and so forth.
[00:22:49] Cody C. Jensen: When it comes to anything, you can have it, the golden triangle. You can have it good, cheap, or fast. Pick two. I choose good and fast. So I don’t get cheap.
[00:23:05] Jason Barnard: Right. So at the end of the day, you’re using Agential AI. You’re pushing the boundaries with that but you are focusing on human quality in order to scale because the two need to go together. Is that fair?
[00:23:20] Cody C. Jensen: Yeah. And like I would say for right now, it’s darn near 95% human, right. But what I’m working on right now is AI Agents that do particular tasks based on my expertise. I think of myself more of a digital marketer first than a CEO.
[00:23:45] Cody C. Jensen: But I have a lot of expertise in whether it be SEO or Google ads or whatever, I can get in and actually program the agent to do it exactly how I would do it. And if it’s exactly how I would do it, then I know that it will meet our expectations and quality standards.
[00:24:02] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. How delightful.
[00:24:03] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much. That was a lovely conversation. I enjoyed it greatly. I got some great takeaways from it. Thank you everyone for watching. Thank you, Cody. You get the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Cody.
[00:24:18] Narrator: Your Corporate and Personal Brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube®.
Join Cody C. Jensen and Jason Barnard for this week’s episode of Fastlane Founders and Legacy!
Scheduled for 01 July 2025 at 18 H CET (Paris)
The event is 100% free:
Organized by Kalicube®.
