Garrett Mehrguth and the customer who disappeared

Garrett Mehrguth went back to the restaurant to collect his money. He had spent a month helping the business with its online presence, doing the kind of work a young consultant can sell before he has much of a consulting business. Yelp. Facebook. Menus. Fliers. Come back tomorrow, he was told. When he returned, the restaurant was boarded up.

There are more glamorous ways to begin a career in marketing. This one had the advantage of being difficult to misunderstand. A month of activity had produced no payment. The restaurant, meanwhile, had ceased to be a customer in the most comprehensive way available.

Years later, Mehrguth would explain an approach called Customer Generation, asking businesses to connect marketing spending to sales. His first restaurant job supplies an unusually concrete opening to that argument. A campaign can contain plenty of work and still leave its author standing outside a locked door.

Today he is the co-founder and CEO of Directive, a B2B marketing agency whose work has stretched from search advertising into communications and commerce. The distance between the two businesses is considerable. The question of what a customer is actually worth has followed him across it.

A soccer coach learns to sell

Before the agency, there was soccer. Mehrguth played at Azusa Pacific University, where he earned third-team All-Pacific West Conference recognition in 2012. He had already learned something about selling expertise by training younger players. As a teenager, he recruited families, organized sessions and discovered the economics of teaching several children together. A group could give the players competition while making better use of the coach’s time.

His public résumé records private soccer training from 2008 to 2013. It also contains a succession of jobs that rarely make a founder’s highlight reel: a soccer store, a university dining hall, event setup. These were businesses with physical tasks and recognizable customers. Someone needed a table cleared, an event prepared or a purchase rung through.

He completed his undergraduate studies at Azusa Pacific in 2013, then an MBA in 2014. His subjects included economics and international development. He wanted consulting work, but the recruitment machinery of the big firms offered little encouragement. He recalled having to select “other” when his university did not appear in an application’s list.

So he began looking for work himself. Fiverr offered a starting point: social-media calendars sold for $5. A hookah shop gave him a chance to learn search optimization. Tanner Shaffer, his college roommate, became his co-founder. The work was initially small, local and close enough to the customer that results could arrive as a ringing telephone.

The website is only one address

Search marketing suited a person willing to learn in public and test his answers. But Mehrguth’s argument gradually became broader than getting a client’s own website to the top of Google. He wanted the client’s brand to appear wherever a prospective buyer was already looking.

In a 2019 conversation about search, he described the importance of third-party review and comparison sites. A buyer looking for software might find a directory more useful than a vendor’s product page. If the results favor comparisons, polishing a vendor website indefinitely can become a rather expensive form of tidying up.

His advice was to examine the results themselves. What kind of information did the searcher receive? Which pages earned attention? Where could the brand participate? The approach asks a marketer to follow the buyer beyond the property the marketer happens to control.

His writing had been heading in that direction for years. A 2017 Search Engine Journal article challenged ranking first as an adequate goal. Another examined why SEO firms get fired. By 2019 he was also writing about impression-based campaigns and awareness. The recurring interest was the business consequence of the tactic, including the consequences a tidy ranking report might conceal.

“Have a business that didn’t fail.”

Garrett Mehrguth, recalling his original ambition

A sales meeting beats a souvenir

By October 2021, Mehrguth was describing a company with about 125 active accounts and 135 employees. Those are a dated snapshot, rather than a permanent head count. They nevertheless show how far the business had traveled from its early local jobs. Annual client engagements averaged around $150,000, he said in that interview.

The operating problem had changed. A software company could buy advertising, persuade someone to download a guide and call the download a lead. The sales team might then discover that the person had little interest in a conversation. The marketing department had acquired a name. The business still needed a buyer.

Mehrguth explained how Directive used LinkedIn conversation ads and incentives to encourage prospects to schedule a meeting directly. The interesting part was the choice of destination: a commitment to talk about the product. A gift card could secure attention; the product still had to justify the conversation and, eventually, the purchase.

His broader Customer Generation approach puts customer economics around those decisions. Who buys? What does it cost to acquire them? How much value does the relationship produce? Search, paid social and other channels become spending choices inside the same business model. A cheap lead can be expensive if it never gets any further.

The founder stays in the room

Building a service business also means delivering through other people. Mehrguth’s conversations with agency owners return to staffing, management and the repeated need to change what the business offers. The work continues after the sales call, which is an awkward detail for anyone attracted to the agency business mainly by sales.

In a 2025 discussion with Karl Hughes, he explored executive structure, focused service offerings, contracting and the relative merits of acquiring a capability or building it. He also challenged the appealing idea that an owner can simply rise out of the daily business. Clients keep changing their expectations. Someone still has to make decisions.

His interest in finance appears in less theatrical places, too. A 2024 Agency Life conversation dealt with forecasting, executive pay and setting stretch goals. These are the subjects that determine whether an ambitious business can afford its ambitions. They also make for rather different conversation from a victory lap about revenue.

He has described his working method as learning something, putting it into practice and using that experience to make something useful. “If you want to get better at marketing, get better at business.” It is a compact explanation for why a search marketer spends so much time talking about people, budgets and the quality of the product being sold.

Selling the lessons, including the awkward ones

The advice has become another part of his working life. Through Agency Academy, Mehrguth offers agency owners a community, coaching and teaching materials. His account of his own growth includes getting stuck around $3 million and hiring a coach before reaching $6 million. Asking for help belongs in his version of the founder story.

When he announced the course, he described five areas: sales, marketing, finance, operations and people operations. Lessons paired an explanation with a working asset and contributions from the Directive colleague responsible for that area. The intended customer was an owner who needed to make a growing organization work, beyond winning the next account.

That format says something about how he wants his experience used. A financial model can be opened. A sales deck can be examined. A colleague can explain the job from the other side of the founder’s desk. The material gives an owner something more concrete to argue with than a motivational sentence on a slide.

The current coaching offer includes financial review, sessions every two weeks and a 90-day plan. It treats growth as a sequence of decisions about the business in front of the owner. There is an agreeable lack of romance in that timetable. Ninety days is long enough to do some work, and short enough for the work to acquire a deadline.

The next question is for communications

The business is still changing. In September 2026, Directive announced an expanded communications division combining public relations, organic social, influencer marketing and paid social. Abe, the sister brand Mehrguth built with Larissa Williams around paid social, became part of that operation. Williams leads the communications division.

The announcement reported $30 million in annual agency revenue and set a $25 million target for the communications division by 2027. The second number is an ambition. Reaching it would require building a substantial business inside an already established one. Mehrguth said the company had looked for a suitable PR acquisition before deciding to develop the capability itself.

There is continuity with his earlier search argument. Buyers gather impressions in many places before they speak to a salesperson. Reviews, social posts, press coverage and other people’s recommendations can all enter the conversation. Directive now wants to connect more of those encounters to the same commercial questions that shaped its performance work.

The experiment also makes his own beliefs testable. Communications is being asked to show how credibility and distribution influence business outcomes. A founder who has spent years insisting on useful measurement has handed himself a larger and more complicated thing to measure.

Sunday has a different booking system

There is a life outside the account list. Mehrguth has spoken about keeping Thursday date nights with his wife, reserving Saturdays for family and trying to fish on Sundays. His company biography also mentions sailing. The ocean is a recurring interest, though it offers fewer opportunities to negotiate the conditions.

In that same account of his routine, he described keeping notes on his phone and working through them the following morning. The habit fits the public version of his career: ideas become tasks, tasks become a service, and a service acquires the less glamorous responsibilities of payroll and delivery.

The closed restaurant remains a useful place to begin because it keeps the story at human scale. Before the software brands, the forecasts and the divisional targets, there was a young consultant who expected to be paid for a month’s work. Today the numbers are larger. He is still trying to make sure the work ends with a customer.