Jared Harman on Running a Full-Service Agency in the AI Era

This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Jared Harman — CEO and founder of One Group Agency, a Vancouver-based full-service marketing shop. With eight years building the agency and 25 years in marketing, Jared makes a contrarian case: AI’s real value sits in back-end logistics, not customer-facing creative, and human connection is still the thing clients actually pay for.

Where AI Actually Adds Value

Jared’s take on AI is neither hype nor fear. The first frustration novices hit, he says, is the prompting process itself — “throwing darts at the wall” to get a usable revision — because AI can’t yet account for how differently people communicate. That’s exactly why clients are leaning back into picking up the phone. The real, low-investment win is operational: logistics and workflow, not the customer-facing voice.

“The people who ignore it are gonna end up being left behind. Where there’s a ton of value right now that doesn’t require a ton of investment or time is in the logistical side or the operational side of AI.” — Jared Harman

The Myth of Cheap AI Content

Pushing back on the idea that AI just replaces people, Jared walks through the actual cost of producing a 60-second brand video with AI: subscription fees, tokens, and a development process he calls “a bit of a nightmare.” By the time you reach something usable, you’re often in the thousands of dollars — undercutting the assumption that AI is automatically cheaper than hiring humans.

Why Broad Beats Niche

One Group started broad out of necessity — early on you can’t turn down business. But even once they could narrow, Jared chose not to, reasoning that limiting the industries you serve limits opportunity for the agency and its clients alike. Working across industries lets the team carry a system or strategy from, say, hospitality into a brand that would never otherwise encounter it.

The Apple You Didn’t Ask For

Jared’s sharpest metaphor is about marketing’s intangibility: there’s no clean physical transaction like handing over an apple, where the buyer plainly knows they owe money. Because the work is intangible, clients treat its value as constantly negotiable — and assume they know how long it should take — even though they hired the agency precisely because they didn’t want to or didn’t know how. His response is a firm, consistent pricing stance.

“We’ve adopted the approach of, hey, our pricing’s our pricing, we’re gonna stick with it. Even if there’s a chance to price more just ’cause the client can pay more, we’re not gonna do that. But we’re also not gonna reduce the price just to get the business.” — Jared Harman

Same-Day ROI: Simplify Your Messaging

Asked for one thing a small business owner can do today, Jared’s answer is to simplify the message — the Office Space “what would you say you do here?” test. If people in your own network don’t know what you do, the fix isn’t more spend, it’s clarity. As he puts it, you’d be surprised how often the fastest ROI is just making your offer legible.

Connect with Jared Harman

Jared Harman is the CEO and founder of One Group Agency, a full-service marketing agency based in Vancouver. Learn more at onegroupagency.ca.