Podcast Marketing ยท Lower Street
He Grew His Podcast Agency From 5 People to 18 by Refusing to Productize
Harry Morton runs Lower Street, a fully distributed podcast production and promotion agency based just outside Stonehenge, UK. He built it around a bet that most agencies avoid: instead of cookie-cutting a service to scale it fast, he kept it custom, went upmarket, and let a global lockdown nearly wreck the business before it took off.
Harry Morton with Josh Nelson, live on the Seven Figure Agency podcast.
Where He Started
Harry Morton calls himself a lifelong audio nerd. He was making cassette radio shows with his sister on a tape recorder when he was 12, and he never really stopped playing with audio after that. About seven years before this interview, he was trying to build his own business and kept noticing founders getting huge traction from podcasting. He knew how to make great audio and tell a good story, but he wanted to understand how those founders were using podcasting specifically to grow so quickly. He obsessed over the answer, and that obsession became Lower Street, a fully distributed team that now stretches across the UK, the US and Canada, producing shows for agency owners and enterprise brands.
The Two Weeks That Almost Broke Him
The honest part of Harry’s story is not the growth curve, it’s what happened right before it. When COVID hit, Lower Street lost a huge chunk of its business almost overnight.
He describes the first three months of the pandemic as a scary, rough ride where nobody on the team knew what was going to happen next. Then, without much warning, the business flipped into what he calls a hockey stick. Client demand for podcasts exploded as more brands looked for ways to reach an audience that was stuck at home and, later, stuck commuting again with time to fill. Lower Street went from five people at the end of 2019 to eighteen people by the time of this conversation, now serving somewhere between 30 and 40 clients at any given moment as shows move in and out of season.
Why He Walked Away From Productizing
Harry started out wanting the same thing a lot of agency owners want: a clean, repeatable, productized service he could scale predictably and step away from operationally. He watched friends build exactly that kind of business and admired it. But as Lower Street moved from being a podcast editing shop into strategy and development work for higher end clients, he found it nearly impossible to force that work into a cookie-cutter package.
His reasoning is that a fully productized offer turns into a race to the bottom unless you are the category-defining brand in that model. Since Lower Street wasn’t going to out-productize the Design Pickles of the world, he leaned the other way, building a distinct creative style and a premium position instead. He’s candid that this is not the easier path. It requires the team to genuinely be experts, and it means growth comes from fewer, higher value accounts rather than volume. One new enterprise account matters a lot more to Lower Street’s growth than one more account would to a service billing in the low hundreds a month.
What Actually Makes a Client’s Podcast Work
A recurring theme in Harry’s answer is that most agency owners start a podcast backwards. They get excited about the gear, pick a topic, and start recording before they’ve thought hard about who is supposed to be listening and what those people already listen to. Lower Street’s approach starts with the audience and works backward from there, shaping format, cadence and guest strategy around what the target listener actually wants.
He is direct about the numbers that matter and the ones that don’t. Total downloads gets all the attention, but he says it’s often the wrong number to obsess over, especially for a niche B2B show. Some of Lower Street’s client shows only pull one or two hundred downloads per episode, and that’s fine if those listeners are exactly the right prospects. The metric he actually tracks is consumption rate, the completion percentage inside Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
He contrasts that against video on social, where a five to ten percent completion rate is considered normal. That gap is the argument he makes to clients who question whether a modest download count is worth the investment: a thousand people watching five percent of a video is a much smaller footprint than a few hundred people finishing 90 percent of a 30-minute conversation. He also points out that roughly 60 percent of listenership still happens inside Apple Podcasts, which is why Lower Street focuses heavily on that platform’s algorithm, which rewards shows that get a concentrated spike of new subscribers in a short window.
How Lower Street Builds a Show That Converts Clients Into Fans
- Interview format first. For agency owners specifically, interviewing best-fit prospects and industry influencers turns the first meeting into an hour-long, low-pressure conversation instead of a cold pitch.
- Research and a pre-interview. Before recording, the team researches the guest and often runs a short pre-call to surface the real stories worth drawing out on air.
- A growth plan before episode one. Distribution strategy, including banner placements inside apps like Castbox and Overcast and outreach through tools like Rephonic, gets built at the same time as the content plan, not after.
- Subscriber spikes over slow trickle. Contests tied to a subscribe-and-review action, run around big moments like industry conferences, are used to trigger Apple’s algorithm rather than relying on organic growth alone.
- Consistency over polish. Harry recommends a biweekly cadence at minimum, or releasing a condensed season of weekly episodes if a client truly can’t sustain a weekly show. Monthly, he says, is too infrequent for an audience to build a habit.
One story Harry uses to illustrate the subscriber-spike tactic involves a Boston Consulting Group show aimed at highly paid consultants. His team assumed a giveaway contest wouldn’t move people who already earn six figures. It worked anyway, pulling in hundreds of entries and giving the show a real bump. He also points to Chris Dreyer of rankings.io, an eight-figure agency serving personal injury attorneys, as a client who had already been running his own show for a year before hiring Lower Street. Harry’s description of that engagement is simple: the show was already working, so the team “threw gas on it.”
Where He Is Now
Lower Street today runs as a fully distributed, 18-person team serving roughly 30 to 40 clients at a time, a mix of agency owners and enterprise brands who want a soup-to-nuts partner handling strategy, production and audience growth. Harry’s own description of Lower Street’s best-fit client is a high seven-figure or eight-figure agency owner for whom a single account is worth real money and who doesn’t have the time to produce content personally. He still hosts and appears on shows himself, still calls himself, in his words, “a bumbling idiot” who spent years getting good at this, and still treats staying curious and sharpening the craft as the actual long-term strategy, more than any single tactic.
Want a Team That Grows Like Lower Street?
Harry built a distributed team, a premium position and a client roster that survived a pandemic gut-punch to come out the other side stronger. The system we teach is built for agency owners going after the same kind of growth.
