Profitable marketing since 2008

I started in sales, not marketing. After an internship at Photonics Spectra and a few years at Metroland, I left in 2008 to build a project of my own, a website called Toronto4Couples.com. It didn’t work out. But while I was building it and trying to market it, I noticed something: SEO was treated as a technical job, and almost nobody ran it as a real marketing channel. That gap became the agency.

Our first client found me on Elance. Autumn Grove Cottage, a senior living operator with two locations, asked me to build a custom CRM. I talked them out of it. What they needed was more families calling, so that is where we started. When their communities changed hands over the years, many of them stayed with us under the new owners. That is how one senior living client became more than 100 communities.

Our second client was a plumber, Dr. Pipe, and he is still with us. Our third was a medical tourism company bringing patients to hospitals in Israel. When they took their marketing in-house, we opened a medical tourism business of our own instead and ran it for years, working directly with the hospitals. Doing it ourselves taught us what regulated marketing really takes: careful content, case management and patience with people making hard decisions.

Along the way I worked with Ogilvy on the Mondelez account. Caramilk’s campaign said that even in the age of Google, nobody could find out how the caramel gets inside. Our job was to keep it that way. We launched dozens of websites built to catch every search for the secret, and for two years nobody found it. That project taught me how big brands work, and how much fun it is when creativity and SEO meet.

I came from sales, so I have always believed marketing should end in a sale. David Ogilvy said it best: “We sell or else.” Before anyone called it performance marketing, we called it profitable marketing. Behind every budget we manage are people waiting on the results: payroll, profit, a business somebody spent years building. We don’t forget that.

An agency doesn’t last 18 years, through a financial crisis, a pandemic, tariffs and wars, without delivering.