Go behind the scenes running a marketing agency in Grand Rapids. See real client work, systems, and lessons from building Launch Kit week by week.
This week in Grand Rapids, MichiganI'm giving you the real breakdown of what it looks like running a marketing agency at 27 years old. Not the highlight reel. The actual week. The client shoots, the tech decisions, the meetings where we admit we don't know something and bring in help, and the runs that keep me sane in between.
If you're building something of your own, I think you'll see a lot of yourself in this.
Monday morning starts with a walk to our office here in downtown Grand Rapids. For any of you new here, I started Launch Kit back in 2020 after graduating from university. We're up to seven full time team members now, working with businesses on their websites, photo, video, social media, paid ads, and CRM.
The mission this year is $750,000 in sales. Every week I bring you along for how we're progressing toward that number.
A big chunk of this week went toward something I've been wanting to get right for a while. Analytics.
Here's how I think about building a business and building out marketing for clients. There are three phases.
Phase one is get started. Post content. Run ads. Get a website built. Most people who fail, fail right here. They never actually get in the game.
Phase two is figure out what to measure. Once you start posting and running ads, you'll get results. But you'll start wondering what's actually working. This is the phase most people skip or get stuck on. They end up staring at vanity metrics like impressions or followers, but they can't connect their inputs to their outputs. And when you can't see the fruits of your labor, you lose motivation. You feel lost. You quit.
Phase three is optimize. Once you've got your dashboard and reporting cadence figured out, you go back to focusing on great content, great ads, great offers. But you can only get here once you can actually visualize your progress.
So this week we brought on Databox, a data analytics platform, to be the hub for every client's reporting. I spent time this week mapping out the infrastructure. How client accounts get set up. What data sources plug in. By the end of the week we had it fully built out across all 19 of our marketing clients.
It's funny. All roads eventually lead back to making great content. But you have to walk through the forest of measurement to actually get there with confidence.
Tuesday we went mobile for a full day of video production with Buist. This was day two of the project. We started at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Center here in Grand Rapids, interviewing their superintendent and grabbing b roll, then drove down to Kalamazoo for more footage.
Here's what happens after a shoot like this:
Production days like this only work because everyone knows their role and trusts each other to execute it. Nobody does it alone.
Wednesday morning we met with LeadScout for a Go High Level workshop, and this ties into something I talked about a few weeks back. Being willing to hire people smarter than you.
We're genuinely good at Go High Level. We build lead tracking, marketing emails, and reporting systems for clients all the time. But there are always going to be situations that go beyond what we know. LeadScout is a great example. They're a SaaS business, not a typical service business, so their CRM setup is more complex. Users come in from the app store, the web app, a freemium model, a paid model. More data sources, more moving parts.
So we brought in Mike, our go to Go High Level consultant who runs his business up in the U.P. with his wife. We spent 90 minutes with Mike and the LeadScout team building a blueprint for how their automations should be structured before we start building anything. Get the architecture right first. Nobody wins if you build it wrong and have to redo it.
Being willing to say "this is outside what we know" and bringing in the right person is something I think more agency owners and founders need to get comfortable with.
Thursday I cleared my calendar to finish the Databox build across all our clients. This kind of focus is something I've come to recognize in myself. I don't know if it's a strength or a weakness. When I lock onto something, I genuinely cannot break away from it until I see it through. That focus has helped us build some of the best systems we have at Launch Kit. It's also made it hard to shut my brain off some days.
By Friday, mission accomplished. Databox fully set up for marketing and ads clients. I'm already thinking through how we'll use this in our April Pulse meetings with clients.
Outside of work, running has become a real part of how I recharge. Friday I kept things chill to get the recovery score up. Saturday morning I ran 13 miles, including a stretch with Grounded Run Club, a local running group here in Grand Rapids I had never run with before. About 80 people showed up. We did a 5K loop around Millennium Park before I ran the rest of the way home.
If you're building a business, I think protecting some kind of recovery ritual matters just as much as the work itself.
If you're a founder or small business owner trying to figure out your own version of phase two, getting your measurement and reporting dialed in, that's exactly what we help clients with inside the Launch Kit Mastermind. You get access to our actual SOPs, ClickUp templates, Go High Level snapshots, and weekly Q&A calls where you can ask me anything directly.
