The Agency Growth Podcast

The Agency Growth Podcast


Running $6m Agency While Maintaining Subject Matter Expertise (ft. Joy Hawkins w/ Sterling Sky) | Episode 153

May 02, 2025

The last few episodes we've talked quite a bit about how as agency owners, we start to lose our subject matter expertise in the thing we built our agency on.


We focus on growing the business and being good business owners rather than being the SEO or paid ads experts in the business. It's a weird feeling when your team starts to know more than you.


Of course, you could always be like Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky.


For those of you in the SEO space, you probably recognize her name. She's the founder, owner, and local SEO expert at her agency, Sterling Sky and frequently contributes to major SEO pulbications like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and is even frequently featured in Search Engine Roundtable.


We're in awe at how Joy can maintain such an expert-level status on local SEO while maintaining and running her $6m local SEO agency.


How do you maintain expertise while delegating and trusting people to be as good as you? Running the business is a fulltime job let alone being an expert in an area that's changing every day.


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Reach out to Joy on LinkedIn or check out her agency Sterling Sky. We also encourage you to check out their SEO digital conferences and webinars at LocalU. We've attended these ourselves and they are absolutely packed with local SEO information.


Also, check out Joy's local SEO subreddit at r/localsearch!


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