Enterprise Direct Sales for Agency Startups

RAIN is a digital agency founded by Andrew Halla that operates across three offices (Utah, New York, Nicaragua) with about 100 employees. The agency specializes in strategy, creative, and development, working with major enterprise clients like Beachbody, Campbell Soup Company, Facebook, Walmart, and Puma. In 2015, RAIN generated approximately $14 million in revenue and was projected to reach $17-18 million in 2016, primarily through enterprise retainers ranging from $50-75,000 per month.

Omelette is a creative agency based in Culver City, LA with 80 employees working with major brands like Red Bull, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Pokemon, and AT&T. The agency specializes in branded video content and social media strategy, with a focus on converting creative content into measurable business results. Ty Stafford, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree at age 27, leads content strategy efforts and works on high six-figure projects like Red Bull's campaign to drive can sales through social content.

OutCold is an experiential marketing agency founded by Fritz Heffinger that specializes in creating mobile brand experiences using converted shipping containers and vintage vehicles. The agency did $2.5M in revenue in 2015 and works with major brands like Nordstrom, creating immersive on-the-road campaigns that prioritize authentic consumer interaction over traditional media buying. Fritz aims to scale the agency to $10-15M within 2-3 years as brands shift budgets toward experiential and guerrilla marketing.

Jay Baer built Convince and Convert into a multi-million dollar strategy consulting firm with three equally-sized revenue streams: speaking (approx. $1.2M annually), corporate sponsorships (approx. $500K+ annually from podcasts), and consulting. The company operates a unique sponsorship model where corporate partners pay to host and sponsor content properties including six weekly podcasts, a top marketing blog with 4 million annual visitors, and numerous educational resources.

Franklin Cole is a sales funnel architect and advertising strategist who helps high-revenue entrepreneurs ($10M+) scale their businesses through strategic Facebook advertising and funnel optimization. He generates revenue through monthly retainers plus performance-based compensation, and has driven over $40 million in combined client revenue by spending $3-3.5 million on ad campaigns—demonstrating a 12x+ ROI. His approach focuses on mapping profitability paths before spending any money and optimizing for revenue-per-lead metrics.

Talking Shrimp is a copywriting agency and online course founded by Laura Belgraine, an award-winning copywriter with over 20 years of experience working with major brands including Bravo, NBC, Disney, and HBO. The business operates on a 50-50 revenue split between copywriting services (bringing in $30,000 in August alone) and The Copy Cure, an evergreen online course created with Marie Forleo that teaches people to write persuasively and authentically to drive sales.

Lexicon Branding is a naming agency founded by David Placic that has pioneered the field of brand naming over four decades, having completed approximately 4,000 projects. The firm combines creative teams with proprietary linguistic research involving 253+ employed linguists and a network of 108 linguists across 76 countries to create distinctive, memorable brand names like Sonos, Pentium, Blackberry, Vercel, and Azure. Their three-step process (Identify, Invent, Implement) blends creativity with linguistic science, using sound symbolism research and small creative teams to generate names that provide asymmetric advantage in competitive markets.

Duarte Incorporated, founded by Nancy Duarte, has become the world's leading presentation design and storytelling agency, having crafted over 250,000 presentations for iconic brands including Apple, Google, TED, the World Bank, and Al Gore's groundbreaking 'An Inconvenient Truth.' The company pioneered modern presentation design in the early Macintosh era and continues to help Fortune 500 companies and world leaders master the art of persuasive communication through story structure, empathy-driven design, and visual clarity.

Irrational Labs is a behavioral science consulting firm founded by Kristen Berman and Dan Ariely in 2013 that helps companies like Google, TikTok, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and PayPal improve product engagement and user behavior through applied behavioral economics. The company works with hundreds of clients using their proprietary "Three B's" framework—identifying specific behaviors to change, reducing barriers (logistical and cognitive), and highlighting immediate benefits—achieving measurable results like 24% reduction in misinformation sharing on TikTok and 20% increase in appointment bookings for One Medical.

Scalable is an operational consulting and advisory firm founded by Ryan Dice that helps entrepreneurs build systemized, scalable businesses. The company does approximately $10M in annual revenue with healthy margins, but generates significant additional value through deal flow access—including a $300M company investment that could provide outsized returns if it goes public. Rather than licensing their operational framework model like competitors (EOS), Scalable maintains an internal-only service model to preserve access to high-quality deal flow opportunities.

Sarah Kornblet attended a Tropical MBA seminar in 2012 with 44 other listeners and subsequently became a successful attorney specializing in legal services for online entrepreneurs. The episode explores her journey since the seminar and emphasizes how business ideas develop and mature over time.