I’ve spent 35 years watching the same pattern repeat itself. A founder hires a marketing person or brings in an agency. They deliver a campaign, maybe even a good one. Then the founder hits a ceiling – they can’t maintain the momentum internally, can’t replicate what worked, can’t scale without bringing the agency back in for every single thing. The dependency becomes the bottleneck.
That’s the structural problem with how most marketing partnerships work. Even when project delivery succeeds, it creates ongoing coordination costs that prevent true organizational independence. You’ve got ten different handoffs, three people doing half the things they need to be doing, and nobody connecting strategy to execution without friction. Around 95% of projects fail to deliver the business outcomes and benefits in full – not because the work is bad, but because the model itself creates value leakage at every handoff point.
So I’m building something different. Not a pivot. An evolution based on what I’ve observed across almost 7,000 products and a billion dollars in billing revenue.
The Boutique Model That Eliminates Handoffs
I call it a full-service boutique. That means the typical agency model – video production, strategy, branding, implementation, photography, media buying – gets paired down into my studio. Twenty channels of audio. Five video capture points. Five complete sets in 1,000 square feet. I can produce an hour of broadcast-quality video in an hour, in 4K, with live switching. When that production capability gets married to social media management and AI content creation, I can generate massive amounts of content from any location.
The takeaway is simple. Book the appointment. Show up. Grab a mic. Watch the cue cards on the teleprompter. Deliver a broadcast-quality presentation. That’s it. The most expensive person in any business is the leader, and he’s not going to take a week to learn how to read a script or operate camera equipment. He wants to get it done and move on to his next thing.
From Execution to Infrastructure
Here’s where it gets interesting. I’m not just executing campaigns anymore. I’m building production infrastructure that clients can operate themselves while preserving the continuity principles that make integration work. I have a studio and cameras that can create three-dimensional avatars – absolutely real, with lip sync, eye movements, hand gestures. The client does a mind dump into AI, we turn it into a teleplay, and now we’re producing really high-quality video at an insanely swift rate and at a much more manageable price.
I’m already doing this with the Sheriff of Philadelphia, Rochelle Bilal. She’s been in her role for almost ten years now and has hired me for the past two years to use my software and studio as a platform-as-a-service. I send out an Amazon shopping cart – backdrop, microphone, ring light, everything she needs. She sits in front of her iPhone, streams it to me, I cut her out and put her into the video. Broadcast quality. No technical learning curve. No coordination loss.
The Retail Model That Doesn’t Exist Yet
Think back to the early eighties when desktop publishing first hit the marketplace. Retail stores had Macintoshes because those were the only computers with real desktop publishing capability. They grew like a weed – turned into AlphaGraphics, CompUSA, FedEx. Then came the web, and that model created the opportunity for people to walk in and get anything created in HTML. It spawned the GoDaddys and Squarespaces of the world.
The same thing is happening in AI and video right now, but there’s not a retail model yet.
So I’m adding that as an extra layer – service, technology, and talent on top of the base model of a fully integrated boutique agency. Drive cost down. Drive speed to market up. Ensure that people in front of the camera know they can always get something great.
I see 1,000 retail locations inside of five years. Not because I’m chasing growth for growth’s sake, but because I built a software-as-a-service product for public safety from 2008 through 2016 that grew from just a dream to being a $13 million company with the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, 69 cities across the United States, and colleges. I know how to grow platform-as-a-service businesses because I did it before, and I plan on doing it again.
The Results That Validate the Model
Video increases brand awareness and trust. We know this empirically. Landing pages with video can increase conversion rates by up to 80%. When clients see a series of videos, engagement compounds. We produce at least three pieces of content a week in the three-to-five-minute range, then repurpose them for social media by sending out 15-second clips – I call them hand grenades because they explode in the mind of the user.
We’re using these not only for promotion but for recruitment of salespeople, for partnership programs with merchant and technology partners. One client saw 350% growth in clicks in less than 45 days. I did the same thing for myself, marketing my company to property management groups in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex – 1,548 names who’d never received an email from me. I had 961 opens and 791 clicks in an hour.
That’s not luck. That’s what happens when you eliminate the artificial separation between strategic conception and revenue actualization. When you collapse the handoffs. When you build systems instead of just delivering projects.
