When we talk about Large Media reaching $3.5M in year one, the reaction is usually one of two things: either "how?" or "I don't believe that." Both are fair responses. Agency economics are notoriously difficult, and year-one revenue at that level is genuinely unusual.
But the real story isn't about a magic formula or a lucky break. It's about a set of decisions — some intentional, some made in the middle of things going sideways — that created the conditions for that kind of growth. And most of them are things that any founder building a services business could do.
Decision 1: Narrow the Positioning Before You Have Clients to Narrow It For
The most common mistake new agency founders make is trying to be everything to everyone because they're afraid of leaving revenue on the table. The math seems to support this instinct: more potential clients means more revenue opportunities.
But it doesn't work that way. In a crowded services market, being general means being invisible. When Large Media launched, we made the deliberate decision to position specifically around Fractional CMO services for growth-stage companies — not digital marketing services, not social media management, not "full-service" anything.
That specificity scared us at first. It felt like we were leaving ninety percent of the market on the table. What it actually did was make us instantly recognizable to the ten percent who needed exactly what we offered. And that ten percent has a lot more money than the diffuse ninety percent who might have hired a generalist.
The fastest path to revenue in a services business is extreme clarity about who you serve — not maximum reach to everyone who might possibly hire you.
Decision 2: Price for the Value You Deliver, Not the Time You Spend
Agency pricing is broken almost everywhere in the industry. Most agencies price based on hours — a model that creates a perverse incentive where the agency is better off being slow — or on a percentage of media spend, which aligns the agency's revenue with budget size rather than outcomes.
We priced from the beginning on the value of what we were delivering: senior marketing leadership that would otherwise cost a company $200K–$350K in salary, benefits, and equity. Priced against that benchmark, our retainers felt like exceptional value. Priced against a typical agency's hourly rate, they looked expensive.
We chose to be priced against the right benchmark. That decision compressed our sales cycle and attracted better clients.
Decision 3: The First Client Is a Strategic Decision, Not Just a Revenue Decision
Your first significant client teaches you more about your business than the next ten combined. They shape your processes, define your service model, provide your first case study, and become the lens through which every subsequent prospect evaluates you.
We were deliberate about our first engagement — probably too deliberate, in retrospect, because it slowed us down getting to revenue. But the discipline of asking "does this client make us better?" alongside "does this client pay well?" has paid off consistently.
The clients we've learned the most from and gotten the best results for have all shared a few characteristics: founders who were genuinely willing to hand over the marketing seat, companies with real products and real customers, and leadership teams that valued the truth over comfortable reporting.
Decision 4: Hire for Character Before Skill
The first several hires at any services business will largely determine the culture that the company carries for years. We made a few early hiring mistakes — people who had great resumes and poor judgment, people who were technically skilled and politically difficult, people who could execute brilliantly inside a defined scope and fell apart when the scope changed.
What we learned — slowly, expensively — is that marketing judgment and intellectual honesty are more important than technical skill at every level. Skills can be developed. The willingness to tell clients and colleagues uncomfortable truths cannot.
What We'd Change
We'd have invested in operations infrastructure earlier. The first year was high revenue and chaotic delivery — we were scaling faster than our processes could support. We spent the second year fixing systems that should have been built in the first six months.
We'd also have documented our positioning and service methodology more rigorously from the beginning. The intellectual property that drives Large Media's results took years to codify in a form we could transfer to team members. Starting that work earlier would have made us better faster.
But we'd make the same fundamental bets — narrow positioning, value-based pricing, strategic client selection, and character-first hiring — every time.