How do you scale a juggernaut?

Jacoby & Meyers wasn’t sitting around waiting for me to save their marketing. They were already a giant in California. Huge advertising budgets, serious case volume, and an operation that had been doing this long before I showed up. So walking in and announcing that I was good at social media wasn’t exactly going to stop the meeting.

I came in as a test. Another potential source of cases. Something worth trying, with no particular reason to assume it would become anything bigger. Fair enough. We started at $15,000 a month. An opportunity to show what I could do, earn some trust, and hopefully become a useful addition to an already successful operation.

Things have escalated a bit since then…

The Opportunity

How do you become valuable to a firm that already has damn near everything?

You have to produce enough to matter.

A handful of cases might change the month for a small firm. At Jacoby & Meyers, the bar was considerably higher. I needed to demonstrate that paid social could deliver meaningful volume at a cost per case that made sense for their business. And then keep doing it as the budget grew.

That’s where a lot of promising tests fall apart. Something works at a small spend, everybody gets excited, and the economics go sideways when you put real money behind it. The opportunity was to earn a much bigger role by proving I could handle a much bigger budget.

How I Did It

I gave them something more useful than an enthusiastic presentation: numbers they could make decisions with.

I built the creative, launched the campaigns, and established what we could actually produce with that initial budget. Signed cases, cost per case, and enough evidence to justify the next increase.

Then we kept earning the next one.

Behind that process was constant creative testing, increasingly sophisticated campaign management, and technology that helped me understand where the results were coming from and what to improve.

Every increase came with the same responsibility: make the results justify the spend.

That $15,000 monthly test has grown into well over seven figures in weekly spend. The budget kept growing because the performance kept giving them a reason to grow it.

The Takeaway

There’s something particularly satisfying about becoming useful to people who don’t desperately need you. Jacoby & Meyers had options. Plenty of them. They could afford to test me, decide it wasn’t worth the trouble, and move on without losing much sleep.

Instead, what started as a question mark became one of their largest sources of cases. That’s a very different relationship from being the interesting social media guy they decided to try.

And it’s the part of this story that matters most to me. I earned a place in an operation where the expectations were already high, then kept proving I belonged as those expectations got higher.

At that size, being a novelty has a pretty short shelf life. Eventually, you have to be useful.