My Absurd, Winding Path To Building A Marketing Agency

If you think you know where your career is headed, you’re probably wrong.

None of us can imagine how opportunities will unfold, when, or in what form. This is a fact as true in your career as it is anywhere else in life.

That’s why I’d like to tell you the story of how my failing board game business morphed into a successful marketing agency.

I’m not telling you this because I have it all figured out. I’m good at what I do, but this isn’t some wild success story. It’s just a true one.

I feel like a lot of what I hear in podcasts, see on LinkedIn, and read in books is a little too neat. Like it’s had the struggles either airbrushed out or carved into deep canyons that only the bravest, boldest, Greatest Men™ can overcome.

Life and business doesn’t always make neat narrative sense. So let me give you instead a story of sweat and serendipity, and I’ll let you decide what meaning to take from it.

“Successful” is a weasel word. It gets bandied about like it has intrinsic meaning. It doesn’t—it’s an ink blot. A Rorsarch test.

So let me break that down into two parts first, and then I’ll give you the full story.

When I talk about Pangea Marketing, I call it a mom-and-pop shop. I run it alongside my wife, Maria, from our household not too far from Chattanooga, Tennessee. We and our toddler-aged son enjoy financial security and comfort.

I’m not going to tell you we pull in revenues that make an eyewatering sum with a bunch of zeroes. But what I can tell you is that we recently bought a home that we plan to stay in for a long time. I can tell you that we can go on vacations, pay for childcare, handle unexpected medical bills, and save a good deal for retirement.

It’s rare for folks our age to be able to say this so plainly. And I’m self-aware enough to also know that we’re fortunate people to be able to say “our hard work is being rewarded.”

There’s room to grow, too. We can roll out new offers, provide new services, hire staff, and turn client acquisition flows on and off (to an extent). We have optionality, and I think any career that gives you that is a career worth keeping.

You know the old story: million-dollar corporate lawyer, dead inside. It’s a cliché because it’s true. “The light’s not on, but I still work.”

Just because a job puts money in your pocket doesn’t mean it’s a good one. And likewise, you can spend five years building up a business and wake up one morning and say “this is the Bad Place.”

I’m off by 6 pm almost every day, and it’s a rare day that I work weekends. There are days were I can log off and take my kid to the park because it’s nice outside. I’ll take stress out of my office somedays, but not that often. And I have more happy days than unhappy ones, and by a comfortable margin at that.

If you ask me, a career that brings in money, has room to grow, and is based on reasonable hours is, ultimately, a good one. Bonus points if it’s creatively engaging and intellectually stimulating too.

I was 21 years old with an MBA from a state university, first kid in my family to go to college, and with no context on how to handle the professional world outside of the classroom.

I felt isolated, confused, and didn’t really know how to start a career. And though it was all very much in my head, I felt like I was in a storm, looking for any damn port that I could dock into. So I took the first business idea I could stand and I ran with it. The idea I landed on was a card game I’d first sketched out as a kid: War Co.

I started work on this game in 2015, but the idea itself stems back to my childhood. To quote an article I wrote way back when:

To make a long story short, I took it to Kickstarter and on my second attempt—not my first—raised $12,510. That was enough to order a print run of 500 units, cover costs, ship units, and turn a modest profit.

No one tells you how weird bootstrapping can get. I quite literally launched the campaign on my lunch break—in a bathroom, no less. I pulled out my laptop, I logged onto public Wi-Fi, and I launched the campaign. I fired off some prewritten tweets—yes, tweets—to spread the word. Then I went back to work.

I had it printed in China and freight-shipped to a warehouse in north Georgia. My brother and I picked up the games in our beater cars. I was driving a 1990 Toyota Camry with a rear bumper that rippled like the ocean.

This ended up being the ultimate crash course in marketing, as well as supply chain management and logistics, business management, and a lot more. These are practical skills that I use every day even now.

Not that I called it that. Rather, I started a blog called Brandon the Game Dev. When I was making my first game, I was so out of water, that I thought “I have to make sure no one ever feels like this again.” So I wrote everything I wished I knew in that blog.

Turns out, I was better at SEO than I was at game development. And this realization changed my life.

As I kept writing on Brandon the Game Dev, something straight-up weird happened. My posts—especially a postmortem on my failed second Kickstarter in 2018—started to get serious traction in Google. I didn’t have some master plan, but the numbers told a story: a couple thousand monthly visitors, then ten thousand, then more.

In 2019, one of my blog posts about fulfilling game orders caught the eye of the CEO of Fulfillrite. He reached out for a simple blog post exchange. We got to know each other, and before long, he flew me up to New Jersey to meet in person and to ask for some short-term marketing work.

But the work kept coming, and we ended up growing our companies alongside one another. I ended up forming the agency because I needed a tax entity for my work with Fulfillrite, but it wasn’t too much longer before other clients started coming too!

You should also know that I was still working IT at a local hospital at the time, writing blogs in the early morning or late at night, and editing copy on lunch breaks. It was hectic and I was overworked to the extreme, but I was buoyed by the fact that I liked the work, and I didn’t want to waste the momentum.

In 2019, Pangea Marketing was a side hustle with a fancy name. But sure enough, it kept picking up steam. I’d get a referral, or a new company would stumble on the blog. I started offering not just content, but email campaigns, ad audits, funnel design, website copy—whatever I knew how to do well and that got results.

None of this growth was explosive, but it was pretty quick. There weren’t any “viral” posts or overnight successes or venture capitalists or big whale clients. But the results added up.

Over time, I stepped away from the games world. The last board game my company released, Tasty Humans, was made in 2019 and shipped during the “normal” part of 2020. After that, I shifted my focus entirely. By 2021, I had enough steady work to go full-time. I left my hospital job, and Maria and I made the leap. It wasn’t long before she had full-time work with the agency herself.

From 2022 through now, Pangea has grown in fits and starts. We’ve taken on projects ranging from B2B to professional services to crowdfunding. We’ve helped some clients 10x their revenue. We’ve helped others diagnose why their projects didn’t work. But mostly, we’re proud to be part of ambitious projects, rolling up our sleeves and making things happen.

We’re not trying to become a hundred-person agency. We want to keep this agency light and tight, stay profitable, and have the ability to say yes to the right opportunities—and no to the wrong ones. That does imply growth…but it doesn’t imply unlimited growth or a cover story on Forbes.

The fact is: we’re lucky enough to work mostly with good people, for good pay, and on good timelines. Along the way, we had our first child and moved into a long-term home. We’re working hard, yes, but we’re also living.

And so much of this is owed to the flexibility afforded to us by the business, which itself traces back to that strange little card game I made back in 2016.

As you can imagine, a story this winding has shaped how I think about marketing. I’ll share that philosophy here, too—but not today. I’d rather not end this post with the word count of a Russian novel!

What I hope you take away from this post isn’t just that I got lucky or made smart bets—though both are true. I’ve simply come to believe that careers aren’t puzzles you can solve in advance. They’re experiments. And if you’re willing to keep learning, trying, and helping others, you might just find your own version of success too.

Need help marketing? Book 30 minutes with me and we can chat!