Today, Adam Edwards and I are thrilled to announce our launch of Aftergrowth, a modern growth agency for the AI era.

Choosing a name is always a special part of launching something new, and this one has a few layers for us. By traditional definition, aftergrowth is the growth that comes back after a crop is cut, often coming back stronger. For brands, it represents the new growth that’s possible in the AI era: growth after AI. And for Adam and me, it represents a second opportunity to build something special, with amazing people, in a category we love.

Many of you know us from the first time around: our decade leading the performance marketing agency Metric Theory. From 2012 until we sold the shop in 2020 to S4 Capital, we had the privilege of assembling a team chock-full of incredible growth marketers and fantastic humans, who delivered results for brands like GoFundMe, Traeger, Lyft, Dropbox and Coinbase. We deployed billions of dollars of ad spend, showed 8+ years of consistent growth, and won awards like Search Engine Land's Agency of the Year and Ad Age's #1 Best Place to Work.

In the years since our exit, AI has served the agency market the largest disruption to its business model in decades. Our category has weathered seismic shifts before, but AI’s potential is of another magnitude. It is forcing legacy shops to face some really difficult questions: What happens to the fee model when we no longer get to bill for human executional hours? How do we differentiate our work if everyone is operating with the same AI models, and where does human creativity still matter? How do we staff an agency when AI is consuming significant executional work? The right answers keep evolving, and the pace of change is relentless.

AI is reshaping the buyer journey at the same time, compressing what used to be dozens of searches and site visits into a few zero-click interactions with mostly trusted AI recommendations. Adam digs into what that means for the growth marketing playbook in Growth Marketing in the AI Era.

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to watch this disruption to the agency market I love from three distinct vantage points: advising PE funds and leadership teams on agency M&A and operations, leading a well-regarded strategy and creative agency through its AI transformation and repositioning, and, most recently, helping lead an AI transformation business across a range of services categories. Despite the trepidation of many in our industry, I’m bullish: this disruption creates an opportunity for newer, agile agencies to lead brands to outsized growth. A few specific insights from those experiences helped seed our thesis for Aftergrowth:

1. Legacy revenue creates resistance to change. Bloated staff plans billed on FTE time allocation give legacy agencies a strong incentive to protect the operating and billing models they were built on.
   
   

2. Clients are moving faster than their agencies. Client expectations around value, billing and how much execution AI can handle are further ahead than almost every shop in the industry.
   
   

3. AI transformation at scale is really hard. True adoption requires rewiring years of processes and habits across an agency’s staff, and most larger shops are falling well short of the investment and change required.

4. GEO is the blind spot, or persistent headache, for most brands. Marketers are struggling with limited performance visibility, CFO pressure to prove ROI, and the cross-discipline orchestration it takes to deliver results.

Those gaps, our continued passion for the craft of growth marketing and a bit of nostalgia for working with people of the caliber we had at our last shop led us to launch Aftergrowth. Our operating model runs on frontier AI infrastructure built in from the start, paired with senior teams of growth marketers who spend their time on the strategic work that now drives results. In all our years working together, one of Adam’s and my true superpowers has been bringing together exceptional talent, and we expect it to matter even more under our new model. Ultimately, we launched something new because delivering for clients in the AI era requires an agility that agencies retrofitting for AI can’t match.

Our initial suite of services includes paid media, SEO and GEO, and performance creative, all supported by strategy and measurement. Our integrated teams are focused on a scoreboard set with each client around incremental new customers and revenue, and our pricing models are designed to align our teams with actual client outcomes.

We’re incredibly excited to be launching. If you're a marketing leader in our network wondering whether you have the right agency for the AI era, we should talk. We're already working with our first clients, and we'd love to show you the first moves we'd make for your brand. We're also scaling the team quickly, so if you're among the best in growth, check out the open roles in the careers section of our site.