Serial Technology and Marketing Entrepreneur. Scaled and exited two agencies.

The last 13 years I spent owning and scaling a digital marketing agency and I’ll be honest, the first 10 years was a lot of struggle.

Just as clients and revenue started really growing, some clients got frustrated, so we ramped up client satisfaction, then the team needed more so we invested over there, and so on, as you probably understand, every step of the way I was fighting to keep a reasonable profit from all the work.

I have been in the shoes of the agency owner who feels that they have to do and lead everything in the business or it will fail – not to mention the imposter syndrome feeling that your team and your clients might figure out you don’t have all the answers.

However, a few years ago, with some referrals from some people I trusted I sought out some great advisors. Finally, they helped me figure out the right way to scale and build a leadership team. Once we were on our way, I was able to use the next 3 years to set the agency up for success while working less ‘in the business’ which allowed me to build significant enterprise value for a strategic buyer that led to a much better than industry average exit multiple.

I talk to a lot of agency owners who are still in the day-to-day struggle of growing and trying to profit from their agency. I started Grandin Holdings because I want to help. I asked the advisors who helped me at my last agency to come on board and help more agencies. 

We can all win by growing together and I want to share my experience and lessons along with leveraging my capital to help you scale to achieve a meaningful exit from all your years of hard work.

On top of my agency experience, I have been at the intersection of marketing and technology for almost 30 years. I was fortunate enough to be a consultant at IBM in 1995 when this little thing called the “World Wide Web” was starting out. This put me on projects building not just basic websites, but full online applications connecting to back-end systems for some of the largest brands. From there my career included running R&D for a VC backed company in San Francisco, Product Marketing Manager for a software company, to helping start a company that upended the event based marketing industry by introducing technology that helped drive people from live events to online properties that has now become an industry standard. I also wrote a couple of books along the way. The last agency I sold was in the Legal Marketing industry.