How to Build Your Agency's Brand Through Your Team's Personality and Expertise with Jakub Grajcar

Gray MacKenzie sits down with Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar, ZenPilot’s Content Marketing Manager, to discuss a topic close to home - how to build an agency’s brand not through traditional marketing tactics, but through the authentic personalities and expertise of the team. Kuba shares his vision for evolving ZenPilot’s marketing approach and the broader lessons that apply to any agency looking to differentiate in a crowded market.

Beyond the Service Description

Most agencies market themselves by describing what they do. Kuba argues that this approach creates a commodity trap - when every agency in a space leads with the same service descriptions, the only differentiator becomes price. The alternative is to build a brand around who your team is, what they believe, and how they think about the problems your clients face.

For ZenPilot, this means transitioning the brand perception from “ClickUp implementation partner” to “a team of agency operations experts who happen to use ClickUp as their primary tool.” The distinction matters because expertise in a domain creates trust and authority in a way that tool certification alone cannot. Clients want to work with people who understand their challenges deeply, not just people who are proficient with software.

This shift requires agencies to invest in making their team members visible. Instead of funneling all thought leadership through the founder, Kuba advocates for creating platforms where multiple team members can share their perspectives, demonstrate their expertise, and build their own professional brands.

Putting Team Personalities Front and Center

The core of Kuba’s strategy is straightforward: identify the people on your team who have genuine expertise and authentic personalities, then give them the tools and platforms to share both. This means creating content that features individual team members - not as scripted corporate spokespeople, but as real people with real perspectives.

YouTube and LinkedIn are the primary platforms Kuba focuses on for this approach. Video content on YouTube allows team members to demonstrate expertise while also showcasing their personality. Viewers get a sense of what it would actually be like to work with these people, which builds trust far more effectively than a polished brand video ever could.

LinkedIn serves a complementary role - it is where professionals discover and engage with individual thought leaders. When multiple team members from the same agency are actively sharing insights on LinkedIn, the cumulative effect creates a perception of depth and expertise that no single founder’s profile can match.

Quality Over Quantity in Content

Kuba is deliberate about content strategy. Rather than chasing publishing volume, he focuses on creating high-quality content around the keywords and topics that matter most to ZenPilot’s audience. This means fewer pieces of content, but each one is more thoroughly researched, more practically useful, and more likely to rank for meaningful search terms.

The approach extends to content repurposing. A single in-depth piece of content - a podcast episode, a detailed blog post, or a YouTube video - can be broken down into multiple formats: social media clips, newsletter content, short-form videos, and quote graphics. Kuba notes that AI tools like ChatGPT have made this repurposing process significantly more efficient, allowing a small content team to extend the reach of their best ideas without proportionally increasing workload.

Leadership Mindset and Team Culture

An interesting thread in the conversation is the connection between leadership mindset and content quality. Kuba observes that a leader’s mindset trickles down to every part of the organization - including the marketing team’s output. When leadership values authenticity, depth, and genuine helpfulness, the content reflects those values. When leadership is focused on vanity metrics or shortcuts, the content quality suffers.

For agencies considering this team-brand approach, Kuba’s advice is to start with culture. If your team does not genuinely believe in what you do and feel empowered to share their perspectives, no amount of content strategy will produce authentic results. The brand-building work starts with creating an internal environment where people are encouraged to develop their expertise, share their opinions, and take ownership of their professional identities.

Making the Shift Practical

Kuba acknowledges that not every team member will be comfortable on camera or eager to post on LinkedIn. The approach is not about forcing everyone into a content creation role - it is about identifying the natural communicators on the team and supporting them. Some people shine on video. Others write well. Some are great in podcast conversations. The key is matching each person’s strengths to the right format rather than applying a one-size-fits-all content mandate.

The practical starting point for most agencies is to look at the conversations already happening internally - the insights shared in team meetings, the advice given to clients, the problems solved every day - and find ways to capture and share those moments externally. The best content is often already being created. It just needs to be made visible.

Resources Mentioned

• Jakub Grajcar on LinkedIn - Content Marketing Manager at ZenPilot
• Gray MacKenzie on LinkedIn - Founder of ZenPilot
• ZenPilot - Agency operations consulting