You Don’t Have to Chase Revenue
What fifteen years and one unexpected Friday night taught us about growth.
On Friday night, the Manatee Chamber of Commerce named Aginto its Small Business of the Year. Friday afternoon, they read our name, and our COO Tre Alexandrea and I walked up in front of a room full of people who build things in this county for a living.
It’s a strange feeling for an agency. We’re usually the brand behind your favorite brands. When our work goes well, nobody knows we were involved. That’s the job. You don’t hire a marketing agency so that people will talk about the marketing agency.
So being handed a microphone was unfamiliar. But it gave me a chance to say something out loud that we’ve been operating on for fifteen years, and I want to put it in writing here.
The thing we got wrong first
Aginto started in Sarasota in 2011. One desk. A lot of nerve.
In the early years I did what most founders do. I watched revenue. I set targets against it. I made decisions based on which door looked most likely to produce a check this quarter. That approach works well enough to keep the lights on, and it will absolutely keep you busy.
What it won’t do is tell you which work is worth doing.
Somewhere along the way the question changed. Instead of asking what a client was worth to us, we started asking what we could be worth to them, and what they could be worth to the community around them. That sounds soft. In practice it’s the most useful filter we’ve ever built, because it kills bad-fit engagements before they start and it makes the good ones obvious.
What that actually looks like
We commit a percentage of revenue to nonprofits. Not of profit. Of revenue.
We do pro bono work for missions in Sarasota and Manatee counties, and we don’t treat it as a lesser tier of service. We run a Thanksgiving meals initiative. We run a backpack drive before school starts. We sponsor and show up for Chamber programming, including categories we’re not eligible to win, because those rooms are where local businesses actually find each other.
None of that is a marketing strategy. If you do it as a marketing strategy, people can tell, and it doesn’t work. It’s just what we decided the company was for.
The part nobody believes until it happens
Here’s the outcome, and I’m aware of how it sounds.
The growth came anyway.
Our best clients came from those rooms. Our team stayed, because people want to work somewhere that stands for something more specific than growth. Our referrals come from people who watched us do unglamorous things for organizations that couldn’t pay us. Fifteen years in, the revenue we stopped chasing is the revenue that showed up.
I don’t think this is magic and I don’t think it’s a formula. Plenty of generous companies fail. What I do think is that impact and growth are far less opposed than most business advice assumes, and that a lot of owners are burning themselves out optimizing for a number that would have arrived on its own.
Our mission is to do meaningful work for great businesses so they can have a greater impact in their communities. The award is not the point. It’s just the first time somebody outside the building said the approach was working.
Thank you
To our clients: this is yours. You let us try things. You picked up the phone when we called with a strange idea. That trust is the entire business.
To our team: you hold the standard every day, whether anyone is watching or not. Tre, thank you for carrying this with me.
To the Manatee Chamber and the volunteer judges, thank you for the work you do for small businesses in this county all year long.
And to the other finalists in our category: you’re incredible businesses led by amazing leaders. We were honored just to be counted among you.
Back to work Monday.
Chris Williams is the Founder and Managing Director of Aginto, a full-service digital marketing agency and Google Premier Partner in Sarasota, Florida.
