The Guy Who Scaled a Marketing Agency to $6.5M by Selling Problems instead of Services

The Guy Who Scaled a Marketing Agency to $6.5M by Selling Problems instead of Services

Tony Bradberry didn’t found Grey Matter, but he’s the one who turned it into one of the fastest-growing agencies in the country.

The firm was originally a lifestyle business, hovering under $500K per year. Then Tony joined as employee number four, and four years later, they’re on track to hit $6.5M in revenue this year.

Their strategy is surprisingly simple: talk less about what you do and more about what your customers are struggling with.

Here’s how he’s pulling it off.

1. Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m Tony Bradberry, Managing Director and partner at Grey Matter. I actually didn’t start the business, but I joined four years ago to help scale it. At the time, it was a small team with a solid reputation but limited growth. The original founder exited, and I took on a minority ownership position alongside a couple of partners. We’ve been building ever since.

2. What does your company do?

We’re a B2B growth marketing agency. A lot of agencies focus on tactics. Instead, we focus on goals. You tell us where you want to be, and we build the strategy and execution to get you there.

That can mean anything from ad management and website design to CRM implementation and martech tool development. We do all of it, but always with growth as the target.

3. What’s your backstory, and how did you get here?

I graduated during the 2010 recession when nobody was hiring in marketing. So I started in inside sales at a company doing IoT and law enforcement tech. I stuck around for 11 years and eventually became Director of Marketing for the holding company.

Then a recruiter called about a small agency looking to scale. I told my wife, “This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but let’s go for it.” I left a steady job and joined Grey Matter. It’s been a rocket ship ever since.

4. How did you approach growth once you joined the business?

The agency had a strong pipeline, but they couldn’t retain clients. Too few people, too many projects, and not enough systems.

So I focused on building out the delivery infrastructure. I hired fast, growing from 4 to 10 employees in four months, and introduced pod-based teams. Each pod has a team lead, paid ads person, social person, etc., and we figured out exactly how many accounts each team could support.

To slow demand and protect service quality, we raised prices. The higher pricing let us pay for stronger talent, which solved our churn problem.

5. What’s worked best for attracting and retaining clients?

We’re Google Ads-first. That’s been our best channel by far. But our real advantage is the message. Most agencies say “we do this, we do that.” We don’t talk about ourselves. Our ads and landing pages focus entirely on the client’s problems.

When people land on our site, they feel understood. That gets them on a call. Then we earn their trust.

As for retention, it’s about having the right people. We’re fully remote but US-only, so we’ve been able to hire the best talent from anywhere. That’s been a game changer.

6. How’s the business doing today, and where are you headed?

This year, we’ll do about $6.5 million in revenue. Growth slowed a bit; it was “only” 20% this year, which is still strong, but not what we were shooting for.

We’ve been on the Inc. 5000 list three years in a row and in the top 1000 each time.

Looking ahead, we want to hit $10M in revenue within the next two years. To get there, we’re building our own AI-powered tools and software, both for internal use and to sell directly. We think that’s going to unlock the next phase of scale.

7. Was there ever a moment you thought it wasn’t going to work?

I think anyone in this position has those days. You wake up and feel like the sky’s falling. But we’ve always had a predictable sales pipeline, and that’s helped us sleep at night.

Even if a client churns, we know we’ve got leads coming in. That’s a luxury a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have. It’s taken the pressure off during the rough patches.

8. What do outsiders not understand about your industry?

They think marketing is magic.

We’ve had to undo a lot of damage from people who were sold on the idea that some kid with a laptop and a few cold emails could turn their business around overnight.

It’s created a weird dynamic where clients expect you to guarantee results, or only get paid when something closes. But that’s not how professionals work. You don’t pay your doctor only if the surgery is successful.

Time is expensive. And working with the wrong people for six months can put you even further behind.

9. What tools do you use to run your business?

We use Slack and Google Workspace to run the company.

We’re a HubSpot Platinum Partner, and all our sales and marketing go through there. For project management, we’re currently on Wrike but migrating to Monday next year.

We also use AI, but mostly for research and analysis. Not content creation. Our teams use it to synthesize large datasets and build outlines, but everything customer-facing is still human-built. That may change if clients want more volume, but for now, we believe in the human touch.

10. What’s been the most helpful content or book for you?

I read a lot of articles, more than books. I like short, timely takes over long, dated deep dives.

That said, one book I always recommend is Great Teams by Don Yaeger. It’s about what high-performing sports teams do to win, and how those lessons apply to business. I played sports through college, so that resonated.

It’s shaped how we build and manage our team.

11. If you had to start a brand new business today, what would it be?

I’d probably start an MVP dev shop. We got into software development through tinkering on Replit. The tools now are so good you can build a weekend prototype for a few hundred bucks.

If I had to start over, I’d go on Reddit, find people with startup ideas, and offer to build their MVP for a small fee and equity. You could spin up five or ten a month and build a portfolio of SaaS bets pretty quickly.

12. What’s your best advice for other founders?

Sell the problem, not the product.

If you walk into a pitch talking about features, people treat you like a commodity. But if you start with their pain and show you understand it deeply, you earn trust. And trust is what closes deals.

Our Takeaways

1. Don’t sell services. Sell the problem. Grey Matter’s growth comes from reframing their pitch around what clients are struggling with, not what they offer.

2. Google Ads work really well if you know how to use them. Their entire $6.5M pipeline runs on Google Ads, with a strategy built around problem-centric copy.

3. Raise prices to slow demand and fund better service. They increased pricing to reduce churn, then used the margin to hire stronger talent and scale delivery.

4. AI is for leverage, not shortcuts. They use AI to analyze data and build frameworks, but still rely on humans for creative work.