How I Sold My Creative Agency With Nothing But Creative Creative

In 2012, I co-founded Denizen Company. We bootstrapped it with what little money we had, started working out of garages and pitching spec work and making spec work. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no connections (I grew up in Iowa and got a degree in English). No financers (do you call them financiers?), nobody in a holding company— honestly, nobody even in an ad agency knew who we were. We were nothing. Kids with laptops in LA. 10 years later, the degree to which we had no idea what were doing has become even more apparent.

But, in 2021, Denizen was acquired by a global advertising agency called Sid Lee. On a multiplier. And I still didn’t know what I was doing.

I’m not a business person. None of us were, despite occasional efforts to appear that way. We had no investors. We never even took a business loan because they seemed scary. We had no sales team— we tried a few times but it never worked. Yet, somehow, we built a company that was valuable, profitable, and branded well enough to cross the threshold and enter that rarified space of acquisition. How?

Good creative.

The work is always going to be about making a client happy and satisfied and justified in their spend. It’s about making the client who stuck their neck out for you feel like the smartest person in the office. But if that’s as far as you’re going to define “successful” work, you are going nowhere. That is the siren song of the echo chamber.

Creative is too fungible a word in the ad industry. It means a million different things, but more often than not, comes to denote a transactional exchange of a product. It is a token of money paid and deliverables returned. This is a problem most agencies can’t escape— and it turns creative into livestock. This is where the Goliaths will always falter. It’s why the Internet, even now in 2023, levels the playing field for any kid from Iowa with a laptop in LA. Creative is the solution if creative is the point rather than a token. But it takes full devotion to such an endeavor to achieve it.

Denizen sold because our creative kept the creative in creative. That doesn’t mean it was fancier or more poetic or cooler— mostly it wasn’t.

What it means is we had an audience in mind; an audience beyond our client. We were making work for the people who weren’t paying us. And, in turn, they multiplied the value of our creative— hundreds of millions of views and engagements and shares and memes— which multiplied the value of our business enough to earn an acquisition from an agency 100x larger than us who, nonetheless, we beat across several bake-offs.

The creative is the thing.