AGS MAGAZINE: The making of an agency owner

A freshman at university, he jumped right into internships and later built his own business. Now, Deividas Tokaris is the Founder & CEO of Triple Scale, a creative Meta media buying agency. Tokaris talks about how he went from a junior media buyer to an agency owner, managing 20 people and €60 million in ad spend last year alone.

Starting from zero

Most college students spend their summers working in coffee shops, but Tokaris was looking for better, bigger opportunities. In his first year at university, he started as a junior media buyer in an unpaid role offered by a good friend who worked at an agency. He felt working for free would take him further than earning some money from other low-paying jobs, he thought: “I’m going to take a cut here. This is going to have a much bigger impact on my future.”

Sticking to his goal, he started a new internship at a local company, but it didn’t work out. Then he took on another internship around the same time. One failed, but the other succeeded, earning him his first salary as a junior media buyer. Within a year, he became a senior media buyer after hopping between a few agencies in quick succession. With hard work and trust of the people he worked with, he was able to get into good organisations and work with in-house brands.

After four years as a media buyer, he got burned out from the constant hustle. He quit his job and took a three-month break to reset. During that time, he realised he wanted to start freelancing. He posted on LinkedIn, and not long after, clients started coming in, along with referrals. People spoke well of him and wanted to work with him. It was a very natural transition. 

From there, Tokaris knew he had a decision to make: keep freelancing or build a business. “I always wanted to own a business,” he says. “I was always an entrepreneur in my heart.”

So he started his own agency.

Asked if there was ever a point where he wanted to walk away from it, he said, “There wasn’t really a point, but every day you ask yourself, ‘Am I on the right path?” As an agency owner, you’ll always have doubts because business is hard. But that’s just the reality of running one.

Playing the long game

One of the biggest challenges of running an agency is acquiring and retaining clients. But Tokaris has done a great job of keeping them, including some of his most profitable clients today, the same brands that paid the least when they started.

Getting clients is very hard at the start. You either acquire them through networking or through insane social proof. Tokaris intentionally capitalised on the latter. They work with brands that can’t pay them what they’re worth yet, setting up offer structures where they only benefit if they make it work for the client. More often than not, these are the clients who came to them from zero. For Tokaris, “The earlier you bet on a relationship, and if that relationship works out, the higher the trust you’ll get.”

While losing clients is normal for any agency, this belief is reflected in Triple Scale’s low churn rate. Their clients stay over a year in an industry known for client-hopping. A lot of them even stay three to four years. Aside from working with clients early on, Tokaris adds two more reasons they stick around.

One is expectation setting. You should set the right expectations from the beginning, so clients know what they’re getting. Under-promising and over-delivering is a model that works every time. The other is building a personal relationship between the team, the founder and the client. As a sole founder, Tokaris has a personal relationship with each client. A founder talking to another founder is a different kind of conversation than talking to a client success manager. Because there’s ownership on both sides, he says, “They know that I risk my stuff, so they risk theirs.”

Making the jump

For junior media buyers today who want to follow his path, Tokaris is upfront about one thing: not everyone should start an agency. If you’re a great media buyer earning €10,000 a month, with a good lifestyle and living conditions, and you enjoy the work, Tokaris says you should stick with it. But this isn’t meant to discourage aspiring business owners.

If you really want to be an agency owner, Tokaris encourages you to go for it. The fastest way there is to work at a top-tier agency for two to three years. It’s important to work at an agency because it’s the perfect environment to learn from senior colleagues and talk to clients directly. Progress moves fast, but it can be highly stressful. He also recommends hopping between agencies so you can upskill faster, keep challenging yourself, increase your salary and save up to launch your own agency.

For Tokaris, you have to know what it really takes to build an agency, starting with what it is, and what it isn’t:

“An agency is not a website, not a company name, not a LinkedIn business page. An agency is your client portfolio and the trust you’ve built with the people in it.”

Building one means developing the skill set, getting clients, and hiring the right people. Along the way, there’s also outsourcing work and training junior team members. That’s the straightforward path to building a small agency.

Jumping from media buyer to agency owner shifts your whole scope. You’re no longer just a media buyer; you’re also a salesman, an HR person and a manager. But once you grow that agency to 100,000 a month, the whole game shifts again, and what got you there won’t get you past that point.

This article was originally published in AGS Magazine. Explore the latest issue for more in-depth interviews, straightforward analysis and informed perspectives from across the affiliate and performance marketing industry.