Agency to Ridge Merger
Share
Sean Frank shares how he transitioned from running a marketing agency to becoming part of Ridge Wallet.
"I made my first million dollars off of an ad agency. Facebook ads came out in 2012, and I learned how to do them while working at an agency with my CMO Connor. The agency sucked - 200 people working there, probably 500 clients. The average client was around for four months. It takes sixty days to onboard them, they get thirty days worth of work, they're like 'this sucks,' and then thirty days to offboard them.
I thought, 'Imagine if I just did this but kept clients for a year - I'll make so much money.' So I started an ad agency with 10 clients. Eight of them you've never heard of - they've gone extinct. One was Ridge Wallet, and one was actually MUD\WATER, which has gone on to crush it.
We took Ridge over - father, son, best friend who started this business. They got to about $5 million a year in sales. The dad was a special ed teacher, Daniel was going to be an accountant, and this thing caught fire. Their expectations when they got to $5 million were like, 'This is the best thing that's ever happened.'
Me and Connor, being young, thought we could get to $15 million, then $30 million. I remember telling Connor, 'I think we can do $100 million a year selling this wallet,' and he looked me in the face and said, 'There is no fucking way in hell we're gonna do that.' This was around 2017.
The owners didn't really want to run it much anymore - they didn't want to manage people. So I said, 'Cool, we'll do everything else.' My agency got built around running Ridge Wallet. We did their customer service, product importation, all marketing, web development. I'm charging them like $200,000 a month. They ended up being 60% of all agency billables for my tiny agency.
At a certain point, they said, 'Hey, we should just merge.' So me and Connor took an equity stake, everyone in my agency went in-house to Ridge. I sold off the agency to one of the people who was running it. That was probably 2018, and since then Ridge has gone from $30 million a year to over $200 million."