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Go behind the scenes of a marketing agency in Grand Rapids. See how Launch Kit tracks leads, closes deals, and helps small businesses grow with a simple CRM and sales pipeline.
If you are new here, welcome. My name is Kevin Kamis and I am the founder of Launch Kit, a marketing agency based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Every week I bring you behind the scenes of what it is actually like to build a marketing agency from scratch. This is week three of 2026. Let's get into it.
I like to start each week by looking at the numbers. Our goals for 2026 are $750,000 in sales and 31 new clients. As of Monday, January 12th, we are sitting at $23,800 in sales and two new customers acquired. We have a long way to go but that is exactly why I document the journey. It keeps me accountable and hopefully gives you some insight into what growing a small business actually looks like in real time.
Monday afternoon I walked over to the JW Marriott for the Econ Club luncheon. Arthur Brooks was the guest speaker and I have been a fan of his for a while now. I read his book Build the Life You Want last year and just listened to him on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson a few days before the event. So his ideas were fresh on my mind.
I will share something a little personal. One of Arthur's most well known exercises involves two questions:
I first came across these questions while listening to the audiobook on a long run. I was several miles in and in a really good headspace to think. The answer I came to for the first question was development. Not in an economics textbook sense but in the sense that I want to see people continuing to become the best versions of themselves in their personal and business lives. If the option was Kevin is alive and everything stops or Kevin is gone and everything keeps going, I pick the second one. Maybe that sounds like an obvious answer but that is genuinely what came to me.
For the second question, what do I live for, I challenged myself to think beyond family. The answer I landed on is that I believe I am alive to help people build the best version of their business. Which is pretty fitting given what I do every day at Launch Kit.
Here is one of the most exciting updates from the week. We posted a new job listing on LinkedIn for an Associate Digital Marketing Specialist. This person will join Evan's pod and work on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Google ad campaigns as well as website design and management using Webflow.
One of the best parts about creating content around your business is that when it comes time to hire, you instantly have a much larger and higher quality pool of applicants. People have already seen what it is like to be part of your team. For each of our recent job postings on LinkedIn we have had over 200 applicants. That is the power of showing up consistently and documenting the journey.
By the time we wrapped filming for the day we already had applicants coming in and I had scheduled an interview. If you are a business owner and you are not creating content, this is one of the biggest reasons to start.
A big box arrived from B&H this week. We now have a fleet of three Sony FX3 cameras plus an FX30. This means we are fully equipped to handle whatever production needs come our way. It is a big milestone for the team and I am pumped about the creative possibilities this opens up for our clients.
I wanted to pull back the curtain on something that has made a massive difference for Launch Kit. If you are a service based business doing any kind of lead generation, this is gold.
The whole system starts with your website. You need a clear call to action. For us that is a free marketing review. When someone clicks that button they fill out a simple inquiry form that gives us the information we need to have a productive discovery call.
Here is how the flow works:
No back and forth emails. No phone tag. Just a clean automated process.
From there we organize everything into two pipelines. The first is our leads pipeline with four simple stages:
If they are qualified, the lead converts into a deal in our deals pipeline. At that point I have already sent them a proposal and we are tracking the deal through to close. We also track how each deal heard about us. Was it Instagram? A client referral? Organic search? ChatGPT? This lets me run reports to understand which channels are actually driving revenue.
This system is simple and that is exactly why it works. If you need help building this for your business, this is included in our website offering at the growth level and in our digital marketing plans.
On Friday we headed out with Reagan for a production day with Dura Pro Painting, one of our longest standing clients. We shoot photo and video with them twice a month, run their social media, manage their ads, and handle their website. They are a full stack client with us.
I wanted to film this one because it is a great example of what service based businesses in Michigan and other cold weather states should be doing during the winter months. Most of your competitors are sitting around waiting for spring. That is fine. But you can use this time to create marketing campaigns that set you up to come out of the gates strong when the weather breaks. Do not go dormant. Use the off season to your advantage.
Week three was a good one. We are building something real here at Launch Kit and I am grateful you are along for the ride. If this is helpful and you want to see how this all continues to unfold, make sure you subscribe and I will see you in next week's episode.
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