There is a moment in every working person’s life where you look around the room and ask yourself a question you can’t take back.
Is this it? Is this where I belong? Are these the people I want to spend my life supporting — professionally, financially, personally?
That moment can be a catalyst. Or it can be a quiet resignation. A decision to keep your head down and accept that this is just how it is.
I had that moment in my mid-forties.
I was in upper management. Waiting on a Teams call for a boss who was, as usual, fifteen minutes late. I looked around at the people on the screen with me. Good people. Kind people. People who had worked hard and delivered.
When our boss finally appeared, his eyes were red-rimmed. He was moving fast, speaking in a way that barely tracked, speeding through bullet points in a sloppy PowerPoint like he was trying to outrun the slides. We were up. Significantly. The numbers were good — genuinely good. It was acknowledged briefly and moved past like it was inconvenient.
Then the founders came on. A married couple. And they were not happy.
We had tripled revenue in a year while decreasing spend. I am not exaggerating. And their response was this: It’s not good enough. We missed too many opportunities. We need to work harder and go after the dollars we left on the table.
Then, one by one, they went around the room. Calling out each person by name. Tearing apart their performance in front of the entire staff.
I have been working in some form since I was eight years old. In all that time I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made a scene — and even then it was a quiet conversation with a direct supervisor, not a public moment. That’s not who I am.
But as I watched them work their way around that room, picking apart people I had come to genuinely care about and respect — people who had given everything they had with little to no support in the process — something shifted.
I was 46 years old. And I could not remember the last time someone sat me down and told me I was doing a good job. That I was valued. That what I brought to the table mattered.
I am not naturally someone who thinks well of himself. But I am very good at what I do. And I had the numbers to prove it.
I was exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. I had given everything I had to people who were only capable of taking. And I was done.
When they called my name and started in, I stood up and left without saying a word. I submitted my resignation that night and never went back.
I had been a tool. I had served a purpose. And when the purpose was served, the expectation was simply to serve harder — with less acknowledgment, less support, and less humanity than before. It was never going to be enough. It never is. That’s the model. Push for more. Extract until there’s nothing left. Move on.
I had watched it happen to good people my entire career. And I had let it happen to me.
But somewhere in the exhaustion and the anger, I saw something clearly for the first time.
There is a better way to do this.
A way where everyone walks away from the table with something real — and with their dignity still intact. Where decency isn’t mistaken for weakness. Where disrespect isn’t a management strategy. Where the people doing the work are seen as exactly that — people.
What We Do Differently
Most agencies are built on the same model I walked away from. Find the client. Sell them everything. Extract the maximum before they figure out it isn’t working. Move on to the next one.
It’s the same extractive logic dressed up in a nicer pitch deck.
We don’t operate that way. Not because it isn’t profitable in the short term — it is. But because it’s wrong. And because I have been on the receiving end of that model enough times to know exactly what it does to people.
Here’s what ICG actually looks like in practice:
We start with a diagnosis, not a sale. Before we recommend a single service or touch a single channel, we want to understand what’s actually happening in your business. What’s broken. What’s missing. What’s being wasted. Most of the time the problem isn’t what you think it is — and the last thing you need is someone selling you solutions to the wrong problem.
We tell you the truth. If something isn’t working we’ll say so. If you don’t need a service we won’t sell it to you. If your budget is better spent somewhere else we’ll tell you that too. Honesty isn’t a differentiator in most industries. In marketing it somehow still is.
We measure what matters. Not vanity metrics. Not impressions and follower counts that make a report look good but don’t move your business forward. We care about leads, revenue, retention, and return on spend. If we can’t connect what we’re doing to something real in your business, we shouldn’t be doing it.
We treat you like a partner, not a transaction. Your growth is the goal. Not the retainer. Not the upsell. Not the case study we’ll use to get the next client. When you win, we win. That’s the only version of this that makes sense to us.
And we treat the people doing the work with respect. Full stop.
I built ICG because I believe you can run a serious, results-driven marketing operation without leaving a trail of burned out people and disappointed clients behind you. Decency and performance are not in conflict. You don’t have to choose between doing good work and treating people well.
The room I was sitting in that day taught me exactly the kind of company I never wanted to build.
Everything about ICG is the answer to that room.
