Social Engage / Founder / 2015 to 2018
I owned an agency. That's why I replace them.
What I found
In 2015 I founded Social Engage in Sydney: a fully remote agency before remote was normal, serving enterprise B2B clients including Dropbox and Malwarebytes. Running an agency shows you the business from the inside: what agencies can genuinely do, what they bill for anyway, and how the incentives really work.
What I built
A 15-person remote team generating more than $2M a year, kept honest by one policy: performance or nothing. The work that defined us was Malwarebytes. We led the marketing shift to a premium subscription model at a time when the category norm was freemium, Windows Defender was not yet a serious tool, and users were desperate for protection they could trust. The bet was that people would pay more for software that promised more and delivered it. Proactive positioning instead of reactive discounting, and it paid off. The agency averaged 300% client ROI and held 90% retention, and in 2018 it was acquired in a strategic exit.
What it made
A profitable exit, and something more useful: the operating thesis for everything since. I've spent the years after Social Engage building the in-house teams that replace agencies, and outperforming the agencies they replaced. I can do that credibly for one reason. I know exactly how the sausage gets made, because I owned the factory.
The thesis in practice
Burn The Funnel argues that agencies are structurally incentivized to rent you growth rather than build you assets. That isn't a theory I read somewhere. It's what I saw from the owner's chair, and it's why every organization I've run since builds instead of rents.