In binary, 1010 is the number ten. It is also the smallest sequence that contains both of the only two states a digital system can occupy — on and off, signal and silence, one and zero. Every photo on your phone, every word in your inbox, every line of code that runs your business is built from that alternation. When I named this company in 2014, that is what I wanted over the door. Not a clever phrase. Not a name that boxed us into a single service. The foundation of digital, written in the language digital actually speaks.
It also happens to be my birthday. 10/10. The number was sitting in the back of my head before I ever thought about putting it on a business card. And the third layer: 10/10 is a score. A standard. Every piece of work that leaves this agency should meet it. Three meanings, one number. It was never supposed to be anything else.
This June, Digital1010 turns twelve. Here is how we got here.
Wall Street First
Before there was Digital1010, there was Merrill Lynch.
I was working there when the 2008 financial collapse hit. The kind of moment where you watch an institution that felt immovable start to shake and realize that no institution is actually immovable. The layoff came. It was not a surprise by the end, but that did not matter. Layoffs never feel like something you were ready for when they actually happen.
The work taught me something I have used every day since. In financial services, the product is not the trade. The product is trust. People do not hand over their savings because of a slick pitch. They hand it over because they believe the person across the desk is going to do right by them when no one is watching. That became the foundation for how I think about client relationships, even now, two careers later.
Learning Brands at Street Level
I landed at BFG Communications. Field marketing first, then account executive. The accounts were national ones: Camel, Coca-Cola, Graco, Snyder's-Lance. The kind of work that teaches you how brands actually operate at scale, how decisions get made above the agency level, how the gap between strategy and execution is almost always larger than anyone wants to admit.
I was good at it. The clients knew it before my bosses did. That tends to be how it goes.
The Conversation at Bluffton BBQ
While I was still at BFG, I had dinner at Bluffton BBQ in Bluffton, South Carolina with two guys who had been on my team in different capacities: Jason and Mike. I put the idea on the table. Let's start an agency together.
They could not take the risk. They did not believe it was the right move, or did not believe I could pull it off. I understood it.
Shortly after that dinner, BFG let me go. They offered to put me back in a field role. I had already done that life. I did not want to live out of a suitcase anymore.
So I started looking. The interviews I got were not small. I got flown out to Atlanta to meet with BBDO. I got flown out to Denver to meet with another major shop whose name I cannot remember, only that it was big. Real conversations. And then they went silent. Both of them. No offer, no explanation. Just the particular quiet that large organizations deliver when they have moved on and do not feel the need to say so.
I started Digital1010 alone in June 2014. Not because I had always dreamed of owning an agency. Because I had been laid off twice, the people I trusted did not believe in the vision, and I decided nobody was going to control my income again. Marketing was the skill set I had. Building a business around it was the move that made sense.
How It Grew
The first version of Digital1010 was one person with a set of skills and a list of things he was not going to do anymore.
The work started where all agency work starts: campaigns. Running media, creating content, finding audiences. The fundamentals. We got good enough at those that clients started asking what else we could do, and what came next was websites. Then SEO. Then CRM and automation, the plumbing that connects the front of the funnel to the back.
And then something shifted.
The shift was not sudden. It was gradual and then all at once, which is how most meaningful changes actually work. The tools started to feel insufficient. Not wrong, just insufficient. The problems clients were bringing to us were outpacing what off-the-shelf platforms could solve. So we built. Hello Automations became a white-label CRM for service businesses, designed to do what the major platforms do without the overhead that does not serve a mid-market client. Orbit became our SEO attribution platform, built because the existing analytics tools could not close the loop between search and revenue the way enterprise clients actually need. Mission Control became the operating infrastructure for how the agency itself runs.
Then AI arrived at scale. Not the ChatGPT moment, which got a lot of attention but was mostly about novelty. The moment that mattered was the one that followed, when it became clear that AI was not a productivity hack. It was a restructuring of what operations could look like if you built for it instead of bolted it on. We built for it. Most of the industry is still in committee about it.
A friend who has known me for a long time read an early draft of this piece and told me I undersold how fast it moved. He is right. The agency did not evolve in a straight line. It moved in jumps. Each jump required scrapping a set of assumptions that had been working and replacing them with something that was not comfortable yet. That is the version of the story that does not make it into the networking description.
Where It Stands
213 clients over twelve years. Small businesses finding their footing through publicly traded Fortune 500s. Average client tenure of more than two years, in an industry where the standard is closer to one. A small team that knows what they are doing and stays.
Years after that dinner at Bluffton BBQ, I hired Mike as the photographer for one of our client shoots. Not out of spite. Just proof that the bet paid off.
None of this happened because of a plan. It happened because the rule never changed. The rule was never about comfort or familiarity or what we were already good at. The rule was: what is the right tool for what the client actually needs in the world that exists now.
That rule is harder to follow than it sounds. It requires you to be willing to be wrong about your own assumptions on a regular basis. It requires you to outlearn what you already know. It requires you to build things you have not built before instead of defaulting to the thing you could build in your sleep.
Twelve years in, it is still the only rule worth keeping.