At Ben Kirshner’s agency, a recruiter’s approach could earn an employee a bottle of wine. The employee recorded the approach in a shared Google document. The company learned who was trying to hire its people. Whoever collected the most approaches in a year earned a trip to Napa. Other employers might have preferred everyone to be discreet. Kirshner had found a reason to make the information travel.
The arrangement was funny, useful and a little cheeky. It acknowledged that talented employees had options. It also gave the boss an unusually clear view of the market for their work. The wine was a small expense beside the cost of discovering, too late, that somebody valuable had accepted a better offer. A potential embarrassment became a conversation.
That bargain offers a useful way into Kirshner’s career. He founded Elite SEM in 2004; the agency later became Tinuiti. His working proposition was that a company could grow by giving the people doing its work more freedom, more information and a financial reason to care. In January 2023, he took that interest in how organizations function into a considerably different setting: Pennsylvania’s state government.
Before the agency, there was coffee
Kirshner’s introduction to search marketing came through Coffee for Less in 1998. He saw the returns available from pay-per-click advertising when GoTo.com was part of the early search economy. Selling coffee online gave the subject a practical edge. A visitor had to become a customer; a clever advertising idea still had to help sell something people would pay to have delivered.
His early career included 24/7 Real Media and a founding role at SendTraffic.com, which was sold to Traffix in May 2004. He graduated from George Washington University in 2000. The route into agency ownership ran through the work itself: advertising accounts, online retail and the business of finding customers on an internet whose commercial habits were still forming.
Elite SEM began in his apartment in 2004. In his later description of those beginnings, he handled the clients himself, reached the limit of what he could manage, hired somebody and gained room to sell more work. It is a pleasantly unceremonious origin. There was a customer problem, then a capacity problem. The next employee supplied the next bit of room.
The agency found recognition for its actual craft. In October 2013, it received the Best Agency award at the inaugural US Search Awards in Las Vegas. The distinction matters in a career often discussed through workplace culture: somebody still had to make the advertising work. A generous employer with disappointed clients would have had a much shorter story.
Put the incentive where the work is
Kirshner saw digital advertising as a business whose value depended heavily on the people managing it. As buying moved toward auctions and exchanges, the old advantage of aggregating media purchases could only explain so much. Someone had to understand the account, make decisions and keep learning as the platforms changed. Losing that person could damage the relationship the client had bought.
By 2016, Elite’s compensation model combined a base salary with commission tied to an employee’s book of business. The economic idea was easy to follow: responsibility for successful accounts should bring a share of the benefit. Transparency mattered alongside compensation. Employees could see the money coming into the business and the expenses going out. The company asked them to think commercially and let them see the arithmetic.
This was a demanding arrangement. The consequences of losing an account reached the person managing it. Freedom came with exposure to results, and the model suited some workers better than others. Calling employees entrepreneurs inside a company did not remove the company’s expectations. It gave those expectations a more immediate relationship to pay.
Hiring reflected the same concern with behavior. One of the agency’s values was gratitude. Interviews explored whether candidates actually helped other people. Kirshner described an analytics leadership search that had stretched beyond 18 months. The patience tells its own story: filling a chair was less attractive than finding someone who could work within the bargain already made with everyone else.
account→Share the
result→See the
numbers
The company grows beyond its initials
The revenue-sharing and employee equity model dates to 2007. Expansion beyond search into SEO, shopping feeds, display, paid social, conversion optimization and analytics followed in 2009. The company reached the Inc. 5000 in 2010. Growth was gradually making the original name a tighter fit. Customers had acquired more places to advertise, and the agency was following them.
The original apartment business had become an organization with multiple offices and clients including Hugo Boss and Eddie Bauer. Kirshner described its purpose in terms of the people around it, including employees, clients and family. That makes the ownership arrangements more interesting than a list of office benefits. They were an attempt to make a stated purpose show up in the way the business distributed its rewards.
Mountaingate Capital invested in 2017. Three acquisitions brought additional capabilities: OrionCKB in social advertising, Email Aptitude in email and creative work, and CPC Strategy in Amazon-focused ecommerce. Combining those businesses required more than a longer menu of services. It brought different teams, specialties and relationships into the same company.
On January 17, 2019, Kirshner announced that Zach Morrison would succeed him as CEO. Morrison had joined in 2005, and the two had worked toward the transition during 2018. Kirshner moved to chairman, with a continuing remit that included partnerships, business development, acquisitions and culture. Later that year, Elite SEM took the Tinuiti name. The founder had handed over the operating job before the sign changed.
New Mountain Capital’s investment followed in 2020. Morrison publicly credited Kirshner’s original ownership vision and said employees received payments through the company’s equity program, with participation continuing into the next chapter. A culture argument had reached a fairly concrete test: when the ownership changed, employees shared in the financial event.
A new customer: Pennsylvania
On January 24, 2023, Governor Josh Shapiro created the Office of Transformation and Opportunity and named Kirshner its chief. The office was intended to help businesses establish themselves and expand in Pennsylvania, coordinating work across government. It gave an entrepreneur a role inside the machinery that entrepreneurs frequently complain about. The title was expansive; the problems could be very small and very specific.
Kirshner’s account of his first day is revealing. After he updated LinkedIn, an old colleague contacted him about an LLC registration that had been waiting for weeks. He joked that he had become the commonwealth’s customer service department. A business trying to begin its legal existence had found a person to ask. The grand language of transformation had promptly met an unanswered application.
His argument for the office emphasized speed, predictability and responses that arrived when promised. Pennsylvania could compete through service even when another state offered stronger financial incentives. For a business waiting to begin construction, months matter. The thinking resembles his agency approach in one respect: look closely at the experience of the person who needs the organization to do something, then examine what is slowing that work.
The PA Permit Fast Track Program, created in 2024, brings project sponsors and relevant permitting agencies together earlier. Its purpose is to coordinate reviews and identify issues while a development is taking shape. In January 2026, the administration reported that OTO had provided hands-on support to more than 300 businesses during 2025. That is an office activity measure, rather than a count of completed developments, but it describes the breadth of the workload.
Speed has more than one audience
Government adds a complication that an agency’s client list cannot capture. A proposed development has neighbors, local officials and people who may dislike the project regardless of how efficiently its paperwork moves. By March 2026, data centers accounted for more than half the projects on the Fast Track program’s public dashboard. Community opposition was part of the story alongside the administration’s investment ambitions.
Kirshner said the program preserved environmental standards and public comment requirements. Its contribution, he explained, was coordination: project managers, agency communication and regular meetings. He described the goal as “quick yeses and quick nos.” Both answers have value to an applicant. Neither answer relieves government of the responsibility to consider people outside the applicant’s team.
For PennSTART, a transportation research test track in Westmoreland County, a project executive reported that the program had roughly halved permitting time and helped bring construction forward by close to a year. It is a specific example of the service Kirshner wants government to provide. It also leaves the wider question intact: a faster process must remain a process the public can trust.
“Quick yeses and quick nos.”Ben Kirshner, on the purpose of permit coordination, March 2026
The founder who made room
Long before the move to Harrisburg, Kirshner had developed a habit of questioning his own suitability for the job. In 2013 he asked, “Does my skill set get in the way of the company’s growth?” It is a more useful founder’s question than another declaration of personal indispensability. His eventual transfer of the CEO role gives the question some weight.
He has also kept a connection to teaching. He taught digital marketing at NYU, and Pennsylvania’s biography describes his later instruction of second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School. HBS named him to its 2025-2026 Executive Fellows cohort, collaborating with Jake Cook on the Digital Marketing and AI Workshop. The subject had moved some distance from the early paid-search market in which he began.
There are smaller details, too. He has said he holds a sailing captain’s license. His business reading has included Tim Sanders’s Love Is the Killer App and Patrick Lencioni’s work on teams. He credits mentors including Cameron Herold with helping him articulate the purpose behind his company. The repeated interest is how people behave together when there is work to finish.
The wine program remains a good place to leave him. It took a situation managers often fear and made it discussable. The employee could acknowledge an opportunity; the employer could learn something useful. In Pennsylvania, the questions arrive through permits and project plans. Kirshner’s job is larger now, and the people affected have many different interests. Someone still has to answer the message.