RAIN

Andrew Halla started his entrepreneurial journey at 26 with uClean.com, an e-commerce site selling janitorial cleaning supplies. Despite being a history major who wanted to pursue finance and accounting, Andrew decided to build something himself after a negative experience hiring a developer to rebuild his cleaning supply website. "I hired somebody to do it for me, had a really bad experience, and through the whole thing, I thought, you know what? I could do this better," he explained.

Inspired by his frustration with the initial developer, Andrew hired a few developers himself and launched what would become RAIN around 2001, when he was approximately 28-29 years old. Meanwhile, his cleaning supply business flourished—generating $200,000 in its first year and close to $1 million in the second year. By 2015, uClean.com was operating on autopilot under his wife's management, generating approximately $750,000 in annual revenue with 30% net margins. This early commerce experience gave Andrew valuable insights that would shape RAIN's approach.

RAIN grew into an enterprise-focused digital agency by building an integrated model that combined strategy, creative work, and actual development—a rare combination among large agencies. Rather than handing off creative designs to separate technology vendors, RAIN kept strategy, design, and development under one roof. By 2016, the agency had grown to about 100 employees across three offices in Utah, New York, and Nicaragua, with 90% of its business concentrated across just seven major clients. This high-touch, enterprise-direct sales approach attracted Fortune 500 companies.

RAIN's competitive advantage lay in their ability to bridge the strategy-to-execution gap. Major clients like Beachbody, Facebook, Campbell Soup Company, Walmart, and Puma valued this integrated approach. For example, when developing the Chunky Soup Super Bowl campaign, RAIN took a digital-first strategy that cost approximately $500,000 in digital spend rather than the typical $3-4 million for traditional Super Bowl airtime. The campaign generated 5.5 million views in two weeks and earned organic amplification when NBA player Draymond Green tweeted the video to his mother, who replied—a moment no paid strategy could guarantee.

RAIN's typical client engagement involved monthly retainers of $50-75,000 over 12-24 month periods. For project-based work like the three Facebook 10-year anniversary videos, RAIN charged $150,000 per video (totaling $450,000), with one video receiving major amplification when Ellen featured it on her show. While Andrew acknowledged that agencies are often dismissed as unscalable compared to SaaS companies, RAIN was generating $14 million in revenue in 2015 with projected 2016 revenues of $17-18 million, with net margins typically between 15-25%.

Andrew, now 41 and married with three children (ages 5, 9, and 14), has intentionally capped RAIN's growth at around 100 employees. "We like our size, you know, we want to grow a little bit, but not too much just because we feel like we're at a good, you know, good size to be able to compete at the highest levels, but not to have some of the headaches of being, you know, two, three, four hundred person shop." This philosophy reflects his core competitive advantage: maintaining close collaboration between strategy, creative, and technical teams where technology implications can be identified on day one rather than discovered during handoffs.