I started Digital1010 alone in June 2014. Not because I had always wanted to own an agency. Because I had been laid off twice, the people I trusted had told me at dinner the year before that they would not bet with me, and I decided no one was going to control my income again.
That is the actual founding story. Everything else is the receipt for the bet.
The bet
Before June 2014 there was Merrill Lynch, where I learned the only useful thing finance teaches: the product is trust, not the transaction. Then BFG Communications, running Camel, Coca-Cola, Graco, and Snyder's-Lance accounts, the kind of national work that shows you how decisions get made above the agency level and how often the gap between strategy and execution is wider than anyone wants to admit.
Somewhere in there I had dinner at Bluffton BBQ in South Carolina with two guys I had worked with: Jason and Mike. I put the idea on the table. Let's start an agency together. They both passed. Not for them, not now, not with me. I understood the reasons. I went anyway.
A few weeks later BFG let me go. They offered to put me back in field marketing. I had already done that life and was not going to live out of a suitcase again. So I looked. BBDO flew me to Atlanta. Another big shop flew me to Denver. Both went silent after the meetings. No offer, no explanation. Just the quiet that large organizations deliver when they have moved on.
I named the company 1010 because that is the binary for ten, the smallest sequence that contains both states a digital system can occupy, and because that is the date on the calendar I was born on. The third reason was that 10/10 is a score, the kind of work I wanted leaving the building. None of those reasons mattered on day one. What mattered was that no one was going to control my income again.
What compounded
Twelve years later: 213 clients in the books. Small businesses through publicly-traded restaurant brands like the Aussie Grill work for Bloomin' Brands. Average client tenure past year two on a long-form retainer, in a market where most clients are gone before the first renewal. A small team that knows what they are doing and stays.
The work did not grow in a straight line. It moved in jumps.
The first jump was beyond campaigns. We were good at running media, content, and audience targeting, but clients started asking what came next. So we built websites, then SEO, then the CRM and automation plumbing that connects the front of the funnel to the back. Each new service was the answer to a problem the previous services exposed.
The second jump was building our own platforms when the off-the-shelf tools stopped solving the actual problem. Hello Automations is a white-label CRM for service businesses that does what HubSpot does without the enterprise overhead that does not serve a mid-market client. Orbit is an SEO and attribution system because Google Analytics will not close the loop between search and revenue the way operators need it closed. Mission Control is the internal operating system the agency runs on.
The third jump was AI as an operating model, not a feature. Most agencies bolted ChatGPT onto whatever they were already doing and called it a transformation. We restructured around it. Every workflow inside the agency has named agents with named owners and named guardrails, the same operating discipline I wrote about a few days ago reading from ClickUp's playbook. The agencies still in committee about this are six months from finding out that their committee is the problem.
The return
Each jump required scrapping a set of assumptions that had been working and replacing them with something that was not comfortable yet. The agency did not evolve in a straight line. It moved in compressed sprints between long stretches of conventional growth. That is the version of the story that does not make it into the networking description.
Years after the Bluffton dinner I hired Mike, one of the two guys who said no at that table, as the photographer for a client shoot. I did not hire him to make a point. I hired him because he was the right photographer. The bet had paid off enough that I could.
The rule that runs Digital1010 has not changed since the first day. It was never about comfort or what we were already good at. It 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 being willing to be wrong about your own assumptions on a regular basis. It requires outlearning what you already know. It requires building things you have not built before instead of defaulting to what you could build in your sleep.
Twelve years in, it is still the only rule worth keeping.
If you run a business that should be compounding and is not, send me a one-line note about where you are. I read every one.