Ten years, 500 clients, and the incubator that built my biggest work.

I started Any Color You Like in 2010. Most of the work was websites, and most of the clients came from four areas: golf, CBD, nonprofits, and real estate. Clients over the years included PGA Magazine, Aunt Fannie's, Upstate Forever, and the Keller Williams Asheville headquarters office.

The agency.

Websites were the core of the business, and the client list grew to more than 500 by the time it closed. The team grew with it, to more than 20 people at the 2019 peak. Three were in-house and 18 were contractors, local and overseas, brought in as projects needed them. Revenue grew more than 500% from 2014 to 2019.

The incubator.

Starting in 2016, I put the agency to work building new businesses alongside client work. I called the role Venture Calendarist. The agency took an ownership stake in a new venture, sized to what we thought the business could be worth. In return I took a fractional leadership role, usually CMO or COO, and the agency put its services behind the launch. Every venture needed something different, so the terms were set case by case rather than by formula.

It started with Gulliver's Pantry and picked up speed from there:

• Gulliver's Pantry (2016 to 2019)
• Women's Golf Day (2016 to 2020), where I was the founder's first hire. This is the official start of the incubator.
• Hemp Flower Naturals (2017 to 2019)
• Apotheca (2018 to 2019)

The golf chapter started in late 2013, when I built Elevate Golf's first two websites for a stake in the company and became its CTO. In January 2016 the three agencies merged: Any Color You Like, Elevate Golf, and Golf Web Design, running as one company under the Golf Web Design name. I was a partner and CTO, and together we passed 300 active clients and seven figures in revenue. The full story is in the Elevate Golf case study.

The hardest call was leaving. In September 2016 we agreed the best path was to split. I spun Any Color You Like back out with every client it had brought into the merger, and Golf Web Design kept going on its own. It's still running today. We each came out ahead in our own way.

I wound Any Color You Like down across 2019 and closed it in 2020. Apotheca was taking off, and I wanted to move my career out of service work and into long-term brand and growth builds. Over the course of that year I handed my clients off to other agencies.

The one thing I'd never do again is undersell the work. Over those ten years I made a good number of clients far more money than they paid me, often charging a fraction of what the work was worth to them. Now I price on what a site, app, or product can do for the business. After 500-plus clients, I know what that is.