A Founder Moves On

In 2007, I founded iStrategyLabs in my apartment in Washington DC after getting laid off from an ad agency. I had always been entrepreneurial, so with about 3 months of living expenses in the bank I figured I’d try my hand at not having a job as long as I could. I filed for unemployment benefits to get a little more runway and started out doing $500 logo projects and $2,500 web designs where I was the project manager, designer and developer all in one. It was hard — the Great-Recession-financial-crisis-getting-screwed-by-bankers was just beginning and I almost quit in the first year to go back and get a job.

I’m glad I didn’t.

Over time, things started to click, and I was able to hire people much more talented than me so I could focus on managing and growing the business (many of my tactics for success I teach about here in my Creative Live class) — and our work got better and better, eventually landing us a couple Small Agency of the Year awards and 20 Cannes Lions. We rode the wave of amazing work produced by an amazing team for great clients — for 8 years we just grew and grew and grew, and in one 3 year stretch saw revenue grow 500% and headcount go from 30 to 70. At the point where we were about 90 people and my executive team was running the show day to day, and I decided we were ready to explore a possible sale, because we were operationalized to the point of being able to handle greater scale — and a sale to the right acquirer would give us access to new markets/clients we couldn’t reach on our own.

We were ready for the majors — and with a client roster including 25 of the Fortune 500 we’d proven we were among the best in the world at what we do.

So, in 2016, we sold to WPP (the largest publicly traded agency holding company in the world) — turning down acquisition offers from 6 other suitors. In late 2017, I was able to promote my long time right hand, DJ Saul, to became our CEO.