How Creator Marketing Built a Scalable Business Model with Ryan Davis

What if your entire go-to-market strategy had to change overnight?

In this episode, you’ll hear how Ryan Davis, co-founder of People First, pivoted from political influencer marketing to public health campaigns at the height of the pandemic—and used that momentum to scale a thriving agency.

Ryan breaks down how they won high-budget clients, built strong referral pipelines through white-label partnerships, and used newsletters and case studies to close million-dollar deals—without chasing every shiny object.

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to pivot, position, or power up your agency or service-based business, you don’t want to miss this conversation.

Keypoints & Chapter Markers

00:00 – Launching a business… right before the world shut down
04:00 – Finding a “blue ocean” in an overlooked niche
08:13 – Turning case studies into real campaigns
14:35 – The long sales cycle and building trust through newsletters
20:04 – How AI is changing the agency model (and hiring)

Want to connect with Ryan?

People First: https://peoplefirst.cc/

Influencer Impact: https://people1st.substack.com/

The Month In Digital: https://monthindigital.substack.com/

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About The Hosts:

• Tim & Cindy Dodd are the Co-founders of PEMA.io, based out of Miami, FL. Connect with Tim and Cindy: Instagram

About PEMA.io:

• PEMA.io is a Inc 5000 Outbound Marketing Agency specializing in Enterprise Sales & Appointment Setting. With over 7-years and 1,000+ clients served in the industry, PEMA is the leading agency for cold outreach appointments & systems. Learn more about PEMA.io here: www.pema.io/discover

Chapters

• 0:00 Launching a business… right before the world shut down
• 4:00 Finding a “blue ocean” in an overlooked niche
• 8:13 Turning case studies into real campaigns
• 14:35 The long sales cycle and building trust through newsletters
• 20:04 How AI is changing the agency model (and hiring)

Transcript

00:00
I just spoke at a digital marketing class at NYU and one of the things I told them was that you need to become prompt engineering experts. You need to understand what the AI offerings are, how they can benefit you, because any organization you're going to walk into, they're going to want people to understand how to bring efficiencies to their roles. And those tools do that. And when I'm talking to somebody, you know, when I'm, when I'm hiring right now,

00:28
And I'm talking to somebody and I'm like, you know, what's, how do you feel about, know, the, various, uh, know, uh, Chetchupee tea, like, uh, are you, working with any of these? And if folks are not, you know, I'm like, oh,  yeah,  come on guys.  This  is it. This is the moment. Like you said, it's happening now.  What was it? The CEO of Shopify was basically like, you're not allowed to hire anybody unless you can justify why we can't use AI to fulfill that role.

00:55
Yeah, and I think, you know, used to be a big brag, you know, hey, we're a hundred million dollar company and like, look at the size of our team and you have all these people coming out on stage.  And I think the next brag is going to be like, hey, we just hit a hundred million revenue and here's our team. And there's eight people behind the back. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it was Scott Galloway, but he's been credited for saying it, but we are close to the  solo founder of billion dollar business. That's going to happen in the next year or two.

01:23
Welcome to The Takeover with Tim and Cindy, where we show you how to dominate  every area of life  and business. Let's get winning.

01:33
Welcome to the show, Ryan Davis.  Thanks for having  me. Man, I want to jump in super quick just into how you grew your business because it's where you and I are both in the marketing world. It's one thing to market a company and it's another thing to market marketing or Legion or influence marketing business because it's  hyper competitive. mean, you're up against people who do marketing and sells professionally. So you really have to be the best of the best. So I'm excited for our audience to listen in today because

02:01
I want to hear how you did it, how you're breaking through and how you're cutting through the noise so that our audience can walk away with some practical tactical information on how to grow and scale. Yeah, definitely. So I'll give you a little background. I came to marketing through politics, which is kind of unusual. In 2004, I worked with this guy named Howard Dean who ran for president. had a very forward looking tech team.

02:26
And out of that race, I went on and kind of worked in a few other campaigns running their digital strategy and then got invited to join an agency called Blue State Digital, which is best known  for the Obama campaign. owned by WPP and they do, you know, it's a big digital comms firm and I ran their social media  department there for years. So  fast forward another couple of years, I started a small agency with a good friend of mine focused on web development and digital branding.

02:56
And was doing that  for a while, but was really his number two.  And my friends and I started talking about how there was no creator marketing in the social impact space. So this is about five years ago. There's influencer marketing everywhere, you know, in travel, in beauty, commercials really figured it out. But nonprofits, social impact, political, these folks were not embracing creators. So we started people first with the idea that we would be focusing primarily on political creators.

03:26
And my co-founder Curtis Hoagland, he comes from a more traditional, like big agency background, like commercial agency background. And then of course I came from the nonprofit and political agency backgrounds. We both had like a diverse set of contacts without like a whole lot of overlap. So when you're starting a business, you got to decide, am I going to start this by myself? Am I going to build a core team? And I think, you know, when we first came together, we were like, we compliment each other a lot because we are bringing, you know, really diverse networks to the table. So.

03:56
Let's kind of dive into when you think about, cause I think what's interesting is politics is cutthroat too. So it's some marketing and sales, those are very competitive industries to be in. As you and I both know, there's, there's a million lead generation companies, there's a million marketing companies. And you found a unique niche where  you essentially felt like, there's not anyone truly answering the niche here. As people would say, you found a blue ocean where there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of need.

04:24
Was that kind of intentional in your mindset or did you kind of stumble upon that? Meaning like, did you look for where that blue ocean of opportunity was or did you just kind of see it and go, hey, we should probably do something there? So we were looking at a couple of different opportunities  and this one sort of started to  percolate. this offering didn't exist and the election cycle, the 2020 cycle was about to happen. So we're like, okay, well, this is a...

04:50
perfect time to go out there to the market and see if there's any interest because  now would be the time. And so we went out and we slowly got a little bit of interest, but it wasn't like crazy, but it was enough to validate the idea and say, okay, there's like a market here that's underserved.  And if we can figure out how to build a product that is responsive and can be impactful for campaigns, we can get in here. And so that was how we started.

05:18
You know, it's just a handful of campaigns through connections, lot of knocking on doors. You know, for every 10 emails you send, you might get one reply. For every 20 you send, you get a meeting maybe. And these aren't cold. No, these are friends. These are people you kind of know, you've worked with. Like those numbers are really good if you're cold.  Incredible if they're cold.  But then something happened that  nobody saw coming. And that was the COVID pandemic.

05:45
So here we are. We've just launched this this brand new business. We've got a plan We know what we're focus on and all of sudden it's unclear what political marketing is going to look like You know what is gonna happen over the next year or so? So we quickly realized that that our offering of like, you know creators real people could be used in a public health capacity So we began to kind of pivot  really quickly to pitching

06:12
health departments and other organizations saying, hey, we can get doctors, nurses to join in and talk about the importance of mask wearing, the importance of vaccination, et cetera. So that's how we expanded into public health because the opportunity existed. Either we're going to just ignore this thing, or we're going to lean in and figure out like,  maybe we can help. Maybe there's a business opportunity here. What's interesting too is because I'm at our company, we talked to  literally thousands if not tens of thousands of companies over our history.

06:41
And one of the biggest things that I saw is a lot of people that during COVID that did well at pivoting and readjusting and restrategizing ended up coming out stronger than they were before. But a huge percentage of companies that were, mean, they were big, they were thriving, I mean, multimillion dollars, some in the eight figures, 10, 12, $15 million. They  never quote unquote recovered from COVID, but it was like, literally you dig into it and it's just simple as that. It's like they kept trying to do the same thing over and over.

07:11
in a new marketplace in a new environment, expect the old results. So you quickly made that pivot, which is interesting because I, the people that I talked to that are like, we were at the EEC 5000 this last year, fastest growing companies over three years. And that was from 2020 to 2023. What was your growth rate? And that was also a very common theme is people found the opportunity in the new environment. And so walking through like kind of your mindset on growth and scaling.

07:40
in the midst of crisis? Like, how did you guys view that? Yeah, so the first thing was, you we were trying to figure out like everybody else was, well, how is this going to affect what we're doing? Is there going to be a similar budget in the elections? Is traditional campaigning going to happen? You what is this going to look like? What happened then is that there was a shift into digital in the political and  in places like public health, right? Because

08:06
Nobody's outside. So you're not spending on out of home. You're not doing billboards. People are at home. They're on their computers. They're watching TV. So this is shift. So we identified that we could do this. We figured who is the lowest hanging fruit in our network  that could get us like literally the world's smallest version of this going. And we had a friend who worked for a small health nonprofit and literally we were like, we will do this at cost if we can just get a case study out of this.  Go meet. get a case study of like

08:35
of 20 people talking about the importance of mask wearing. We turn that into a little brochure and then we start  making lists. Okay, who do we know at the big health organizations? Who do we know  at the state? What agencies are going to do this work  and going to want to work with us? And then basically did the process of like saying, this is crazy stuff happening right now. We've got this model we think can help that  we invented for politics, but it's ready to go for public health.

09:04
And here's the case study to show how it works. And we had that case study like, you know, within weeks of like the  pandemic happening. So as things are shutting down, you know, as the conversation is shifting, we're ready to go with this offering. And we've got an example and we're starting to kind of like  sell versions of it. That's powerful. Now let's kind of like think about the next step in the base. So you were willing to, and  if you're, people are listening, like, and didn't catch it, you're willing to do like, Hey, let me do something that covers our costs or no costs or.

09:33
do something for free to build a case study on, build some momentum on. You then took that to hit up your warm network. Now with this case study that helped you grow, what did you do to continue to grow? I mean, was there a point where you go, okay, we've pretty much hit our whole network or have you sustained that just tapping into your network over and over? Like what kind of happened at that next phase of growth? Yeah. So, you you've got the low hanging fruit and you hopefully you can convert that. So we get that case study. We take that case study to the people that

10:02
We're, we're too good to go to  initially, right? Too big of an organization wouldn't take a chance. You know, of those organizations we got, I think there were like five that we, we pursued really aggressively and we got one to bite.  And they bit pretty big though with pretty sizable campaign. And that began to kind of produce a lot of the content that then we were able to  kind of say, we have this content that's kind of in, you know, it's in field. We made sure that we were early with the content.

10:30
early with the examples, people just felt really confident with us. Now we're kind of known as a group that can do this. So that was an opportunity. We hadn't even considered that. You when we sat down all of our planning, we never once said public health. And then all of a sudden now, five years out, public health is like a third of my revenue. And I'm pretty sure in December, 2019, you weren't thinking about like what 2020 campaigns were.

10:57
actually going to look like at that point, though you had to get scrappy and it sounded like you put in that extra work to get going, to get that thing going. Now you said it's a third of your revenue right now. Where did it go from there  and how did you grow into the different industries?  Hey there, we're going to be coming out with a lot of new content to help you level up  in all areas of life and business.  Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you're listening so that you get immediate updates.

11:25
as soon as a new show is released.

11:29
So we continued diversifying the public health offering.  most of our clients are not direct to the main client, right? We work with a lot of great brands, but it's often through an agency, whether it be a paid media shop, creative shop, PR shop. So we realized early on that it was just way too hard for us to  sit down with a brand and get them to sign with us to be their agency of record for influencer. Because like five years ago,

11:57
agency of record for influencer, you know, was barely a thing, right? You had a social shop, you had a paid shop. So we figured we would get in on these doors. So we did a lot, like a lot of webinars geared towards folks who work in right in the middle of the agency, you know, not the CEO, not the VP, but the directors, you know, the folks who have control over budgets, who are doing strategies. And we said, here's how you can bring a creator into, into your organization. Here's how you can offer it. And then we had, we went in with a very collaborative.

12:27
sort of attitude. Look,  we're happy to white label. We don't need to sit at the table and be with the client, right? That's not my favorite thing to do, right? But if I'm building case studies, if I'm building relationships, I'm happy to do that. And so over time, we started building up these agency partners that we had different types of relationships with, but that began to send us all really good deal flows because we were so easy to work with. You know, we were responsive, low drama, you know, and the content was really good.

12:55
So that was building those referral agencies became like a  real key part of our strategy.  So is most of your business through white label with the agency strategies or  is it 50-50 mix, something like that? I would say 50-50  seems fair. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. And just thinking about like  when you're...

13:18
Closing a deal is it prime is it mostly like hey, here's what we do And it's pretty much as long as you get in front of the right person. They're like sold Let's do this or how does your sales process work? And how did you make sure to dial that into to make it a no-brainer for your clients to sign up? know, that's like the really hard things. It's a long sales cycle  Five years ago. Nobody in public in public good was saying like well, where do I buy influencer? Right, so we spent a lot of time in education a lot of time persuasion and then you know

13:48
So there wasn't even a budget allocated for that. Didn't exist. Didn't exist. You had to pull that budget from somewhere else. Right. Exactly. And that's changing. It's changing slowly. So the sales cycle is really long because nobody has, you know, especially when we started, nobody had like a budget line item for influencers. So we were coming in with agencies that we were taking money out of paid, et cetera. So the sales cycle is still pretty long. It's gotten shorter. We have a much better inbound.

14:17
kind of lead system coming in and you know, we built out a podcast and an email newsletter. I do a lot of  outbound, you know,  work like this talking about  what we're up to. So we get a lot more, a lot more inbound, but the sales cycle is slow. We will have conversations with someone  and you know, we won't hear from them for seven months. We'll see they're open in our monthly newsletter though. So that's nice. And then all of sudden they'll reach out and they've got a half million dollar project. So.

14:45
Agencies are like that because they don't know what they've got going on necessarily. They don't have everything sold  and you know, the more conversations we have, even if it doesn't lead to  a deal today, you know, it leads to  a deal in a few months or  another conversation. So  it has been, it has been my struggle to figure out how to close deals faster and how to make the client feel the urgency. it's a, it's a process you're in right now, how to shorten that side. Yeah.

15:14
And have you noticed a correlation between  those who are opening up your newsletter more often and those who close? is it some do, some don't? Or if they're opening it, I guess, are they much more likely to come back to you say, hey, actually, we need help now? Yeah. I mean, the theory is they're keeping us like top of mind. You know, we built a newsletter up and it's been a really good thing for us. It's got like 3000 subscribers. We've been doing it on, on Substack. It's very specific to our niche of like influencer in social good.

15:43
we go through and we look at who's opening and  it's a lot of people we would love to be working with.  And we try to bounce that line between how salesy we can be in the newsletter and how, you know, we want you to read the newsletter and come out with like actionable things you can do to  help your organization be better online and not just feel like we're trying to get you to buy, you know. But those folks do stay engaged and we have competitors now in the space, especially in politics.  And we want to make sure that, you

16:12
people are thinking of us as like thought leaders. Yeah. I like, well, let's kind of switch over to  what's your, biggest challenge or roadblock right now with growth? Like where, would you say is the biggest area that you need to improve to keep the growth of the company happening? So we are growing  well on larger ticket clients  and they're great. And they move slow and they take up a lot of

16:39
resources of staffing resources of tech resources. I'm right now in the process of doing a fundraising round to build out a product to open up this massive creator database  community that we've built to  small businesses  and nonprofits that only have a few thousand dollars and want to work with a couple influencers and don't have 10, 20, 30,000 or way more to work with like a white glove campaign like we would run for them.  So.

17:09
access to our creators, access to the portal, and in my mind, access to 60 % of the organizations that right now just can't afford to work with us. So that's your biggest thing is tapping into more of the SMBs? Yeah, SMBs and smaller organizations and smaller campaigns across all of our three verticals. Would you say, is that more so of just like a marketplace or is there a sign

17:36
Clients management in that process as well. This will be more like a marketplace  right now the agency side of things We have a lot of client management, you know But we get  requests from people who have a few grand and we just can't I'm like I can't do anything for you like I can't throw resources at this but if I had a  Product where they could log in and they could work with three creators. They could do all that You know, that's what I'm trying to do and because right now I'm turning away those people

18:04
And that's a huge chunk of the market that my competitors are going to be able to service if I don't.  So then what's, what's the next phase for growth for you? it building out this,  raising some capital, building this out for the, for the smaller markets and  what does it look like on both sides of the business? Yeah, it's, it's building out  the platform. So it is good to go  for  a spring 2026  and you know, can be used in all those.

18:30
political campaigns  that'll be coming up  in the midterms. And then, you know, at the same time,  we are, you know, working to continue to build up the  higher ticket business. We've been focusing on more regulated industries, you know, things like pharmaceuticals, financial products. You know,  what we've learned in politics and public health has taught us how to navigate complex regulatory environments and

18:58
Yeah, I a lot of influencer shops, they don't want to touch something like that, but we have like the... got all that HIPAA compliance and stuff. exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's awesome. by this time, so you're, you're going to have the platform launched next year. Is that going to be just a service to small businesses or can you see that also helping to streamline your current operations with your bigger clients? Oh, it's most definitely the product.

19:21
what we're building to streamline internally. There's a lot of efficiencies that didn't exist four years ago when we built our initial tech. I AI barely, you we have some machine learning in there to help us with things like pricing, but compared to what exists now, it's really exciting to think about how we can bring that into the community to benefit the creators and the clients. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, we've been working on our own internal AI-powered software.

19:46
for a while now and it is, it's absolutely, and every single role in our company, like there, everybody has to bring new AI innovations to their roles. And it's, I think we're all going to look back on 2025 as one of the most world changing years where, I mean, you either adapted strongly with AI and building out the right softwares or you got left behind. And I think there's a huge opportunity. I mean, I know for us,

20:11
It absolutely changed the game, not just on the results we can get for clients, but also the efficiency on which we can onboard somebody and lower the cost for, we're going to have to do these big onboarding fees. it just, really does allow us to kind of like you were talking about, finally allows us to tap into that. We're doing more work with those smaller businesses because now we have such an efficient way to be able to service them without it being this huge management overhead. And so every time I hear you talking about managing clients, then I see a little bit of a

20:41
a little bit of a pain in the way there. I'm like, Oh, I know you're talking about brother because a lot of that when you have the right processes in place can really lighten that load for the client management. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And only AI bit for a second. I just spoke at a digital marketing class at NYU. And one of the things I told them was that you need to become prompt engineering experts. You need to understand

21:08
what the AI offerings are, how they can benefit you, because any organization you're gonna walk into, they're gonna want people to understand how to bring efficiencies to their roles, and those tools do that. And when I'm talking to somebody, know, when I'm hiring right now, and I'm talking to somebody and I'm like, know, how do you feel about, you know, the various,  know, Chetchupi tea, like, are you working with any of these? And if folks are not, you know, I'm like, Yeah. Come on, guys.

21:37
This is it. This is the moment. Like you said, it's happening now.  What was it? The CEO of Shopify was basically like, you're not allowed to hire anybody unless you can justify why we can't use AI to fill that role.  And I think, you know, it used to be a big brag, you know, Hey, we're a hundred million dollar company and like, look at the size of our team. And you have all these people coming out on stage. And I think the next brag is going to be like,

22:02
Hey, we just hit a hundred million revenue and here's our team and there's eight people behind the gap. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it was Scott Galloway, but he's been credited for saying it, but we are close to the solo founder of billion dollar business. That's going to happen in the next year or two. I've heard that there was some private text  group between like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and all that. I don't know if it's true. It sounds like an interesting story, but

22:28
I heard that that information came from that private text group. It sounds to me like it was probably made up. I don't know who in that private text group. sounds,  but doesn't it sound true enough? know,  it doesn't sound unrealistic.  It doesn't. And I think it's  absolutely going to happen when you just like look at just becoming a good prompt engineer and teaching your employees how to be good prompt engineers. How you're like, oh, and then maybe you develop out a little bit of software to connect everything. And all of a sudden you're like, oh wow, we can literally do.

22:57
10 times the scale that we could do before with the same staff.  Yeah, no, it's powerful. Well,  Ryan, I want to make sure people get an opportunity to reach out to you whether they actually need help with your services or they just want to connect with you. What's the best way for our audience to connect with you, Ryan?  You can check me out on LinkedIn and I also publish a monthly  sub stack called the month in digital, which is all about the latest in digital marketing. So yeah, easy to find.

23:23
Awesome brother, it's been great having you on the podcast and remember domination is not a destination, it is a way of life.  Stay winning.