Most advice on how to start a creative agency assumes a runway: a plan, a website, a pipeline. Nick Stagge’s version took three days and no money at all. He posted on LinkedIn that he was going out on his own as a fractional CMO, and within a week he was running an agency he hadn’t registered yet, billing around $70,000 a month. Six years later The Grounded Company is one of three agencies he runs, still bootstrapped — no loan, no investors, not even his own savings. In Episode 4 of the NoRobots Podcast, Vlad asks him how that happened and what he’d do differently starting today.
Sixty jobs before nineteen
Nick worked around sixty jobs before he turned nineteen, including talking his way into managing a store with no relevant experience. What he took from it wasn’t hustle mythology — it was a tolerance for discomfort. He got comfortable learning on the fly, and comfortable leaving when something wasn’t working.
The useful residue is a specific kind of calm: if this doesn’t work, something else will come along. That belief is what made starting an agency from zero feel survivable rather than reckless.
The post that accidentally started a company
After stints in-house at Skullcandy and GoPro — both through IPO and after — and a run as CEO of a video production house, Nick decided he didn’t want to work for anyone and didn’t particularly want anyone working for him. He’d be a fractional CMO. He posted exactly that on LinkedIn.
Two leads arrived within ten minutes. Both closed inside twenty-four hours: Dixxon Flannel, who brought him in to build their retail program and who he still works with six years later, and Breville. That was Monday.
Wednesday brought a call from another production group. They had brands they couldn’t serve at their prices and were parceling them out. Except the caller had the wrong idea about Nick — he thought Nick owned a creative agency. When Nick started to correct him, the man explained the actual situation: ten brands, already signed, waiting to be onboarded Monday, because the agency that was supposed to take them had just folded.
Nick said yes. He spent Thursday and Friday setting up a business license, a bank account, and an email address. Monday he started onboarding ten clients while simultaneously hiring designers. Those ten were $50,000 a month in retainers, on top of Dixxon and Breville.
Sell it before you build it
Asked what his first step would be starting from zero today, Nick doesn’t hesitate: sell it before you build it. If you can’t sell it, don’t build it.
His second agency is the clean example. Grounded clients kept asking whether he knew an ad buyer or an email marketing manager. He started referring people out, then white-labeling the work under Grounded contracts — learning the process, keeping the client relationship. Only when that white-labeled business hit roughly $35,000 a month did he spin up Adapted as its own agency and bring the freelancer in-house.
The thing that irritates him is the opposite pattern: founders with a logo, business cards, and a website who have never spoken to a single potential customer. The first conversation should be about what problems someone has, which of them you can solve, and what that’s worth to them. Deliver against that and you have a company.
What actually works in content now
Content has a shorter shelf life than ever, and platforms decide who sees it. So the job is to stop the scroll and start building trust. Expecting a first touchpoint to convert a sale happens occasionally, but as a strategy it doesn’t last.
Nick splits creative into two categories that behave differently. Foundational work — brand, website, packaging — is closer to compound interest: hard to attribute, slow to pay off, but everything else rests on it. Marketing content is the opposite: test constantly, let data decide.
His teams run this in two-week sprints, deliberately borrowed from how dev teams work. Ship something, give it two weeks, read the data, iterate, overlap the next sprint. When a formula starts working, put 70 to 80 percent of your effort into scaling it and keep the remaining 20 to 30 on new ideas — because every winning formula eventually expires.
Whose opinion wins
Clients arrive with strong views about how their brand should look. Nick’s rule for handling that is neat: on foundational work, the client’s opinion matters more than anyone’s. On marketing creative, the customer’s opinion matters more.
The job is bridging those two, not picking a side. Lean too far into marketing and the brand becomes soulless, a blip that disappears. Stay too rigid on brand and you’ve built something you love that nobody cares about.
Ten years of LinkedIn, one year of crickets
The post that started the company didn’t come from nowhere. Nick had been posting on LinkedIn regularly for about a decade. The first year produced nothing — no business, no traction. He was writing thought leadership, recapping articles from his own field, which he now describes as a sales pitch everybody could see through.
What changed was writing like a person: the trip to Iceland, the problems in the business, the difficulty of balancing work and life. It still didn’t produce leads immediately. It produced conversations, podcast invitations, and magazine columns — and those compounded into the moment when one post could land two clients in a day.
Lead flow today is word of mouth, partner referrals, and organic social. Across all three of his agencies, he has never run an ad and never sent a cold email or DM.
Things that don’t scale
Nick writes handwritten letters to clients and seals them with wax. Not on a drugstore card — on something custom.
His argument is that this doesn’t just close deals, it keeps them for years, because clients start treating you like you’re in-house. He knows about their lives; he’s held their kids in the office. He credits his teenage son with reframing why any of it matters: behind every client is someone whose business feeds a family and a team.
Client red flags, in order
Nick has walked away from leads and terminated contracts. His filter runs in a strict sequence.
People first: smart, ambitious, communicative, respectful. If those four aren’t there, nothing else matters. Product second — early on he took on a product he privately didn’t believe would sell, and it didn’t; he eventually walked away because he couldn’t keep taking the money. Third is willingness to invest. Not big budgets, but not endless nickel-and-diming either. He recently ended a negotiation where concessions kept being met with fresh demands.
“We’re the carpenter and AI is the hammer”
Clients do arrive asking for AI-generated creative at a discount. Nick’s answer: they use AI as a tool, but they’re not replacing the carpenter with the hammer — and if that’s what a client wants, they’re not the right agency.
His objection is practical rather than romantic. Today AI hands you the average, the middle, assembled from what your competitors already did. He points at the identical templated flyers everyone’s neighbours produced last summer. If you’re Nike with an in-house AI team and unlimited budget, fine. If you’re doing $10 to $50 million a year and lean on AI for creative, you become interchangeable.
The template trap makes the point for him: clients come asking his team to make them templates because the ten thousand existing ones aren’t working. The problem isn’t which templates — it’s templates.
What’s next
The plan for the next 18 to 24 months is to double revenue and hire a GM or CEO to run Grounded. The hard part isn’t the revenue target, it’s that the growth has to come from somewhere other than Nick. He’s already pulling himself out of day-to-day client work, staying in quarterly reviews but out of deliverables.
His reasoning is honest about himself: he’s a builder, and the moment he’s only maintaining and optimizing, he’s both bad at it and bored — which would eventually cost the team and the clients. Notably, none of this is aimed at an acquisition. He wants someone else running it well, not a sale.
For a different take on saying no to clients and earning that right as you grow, see our episode with Josh Webber of Big Red Jelly.
Find Nick at thegroundedcompany.com or on LinkedIn, and watch the full episode on YouTube.
