There is a tidy fiction at the center of modern marketing: when growth slows, the business needs more attention. More search traffic. More impressions. More clever little videos that appear between a cousin’s vacation and a man restoring a cast-iron pan. High10 Digital, a Louisville agency founded in 2019, has built its most interesting work around a less flattering possibility. Perhaps the attention is arriving. Perhaps the business is simply leaking it.
Consider an HVAC company that competed against newly consolidated rivals with bigger budgets. The obvious prescription was more advertising. High10 found something more useful: the company qualified for manufacturer co-op dollars, but the process of getting ads approved and reimbursements filed needed an owner. The agency took responsibility. Over five years, it says, that work recovered an additional $350,000. The money was reinvested, and the client’s gross residential income grew 18.68 percent across four years.
The money was already in the room
This is the clue to High10. The company calls itself a “business agency formed by growth advisors,” an ungainly phrase that becomes clearer in practice. Research, analytics and operating details come first; SEO, paid media, social, creative and public relations are the instruments that follow. The agency does not merely ask how many leads a campaign produced. It asks which leads the business can use, what they are worth and whether anyone can trace them to a sale.
For a regional plumbing and decorative-hardware showroom, the first problem was identity. The company was well known as a locksmith and nearly invisible as a high-end showroom. The second problem was memory: it had no CRM to connect inquiries, campaigns and revenue. High10 helped install the company’s first one, met monthly with its website partner, developed content aimed at the right sort of buyer and ran paid campaigns around sales and community events. Online leads grew 197 percent over three years, ending in a record sales year in 2022.
What failed first was the story about the customer
Many campaign postmortems begin with the ad. Wrong headline. Weak image. Bid too low. High10’s public work suggests the earliest failures often sit farther upstream. A retailer was treating e-commerce as a small appendage even though certain high-margin products had national pockets of demand. A Fortune 100 innovation group was spending effort across verticals without knowing which stakeholders were productive. The showroom thought its regional reputation meant one thing; customers remembered another.
What changed the decisions was not inspiration but segmentation. High10 isolated profitable products, promising geographies, useful verticals and the language buyers used when they intended to solve something. For the Fortune 100 group, monthly market intelligence helped discard unproductive targets and coordinate the sales message. The company reports a 13 percent increase in conversions and an 84 percent drop in cost per conversion. The crucial move was subtraction.
High touch, with a spreadsheet
Gunderson leads a compact team whose titles reveal the operating system: research and strategy, media, optimization, client relationships, creative, content, social and public relations. It is not a software company disguised as an agency. Clients buy human judgment and execution - ongoing consultation, campaign management, content, design, technical cleanup and measurement. Public fee cards are absent; engagements range from concentrated campaigns to continuing partnerships, with media budget sitting beside agency scope.
The tools are familiar - Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, analytics and dashboards. High10’s distinction is the order in which it uses them. In a seven-day Thanksgiving campaign for a swim retailer, it started with margin and geographic demand, then built Google display and search ads plus Facebook targeting. The campaign produced 106 attributed sales and a reported 1,090 percent return on ad spend. In another assignment, it forecast clicks and registrations for eight soccer camps before launch. All eight sold out within six weeks; the busiest location expanded from 36 to 50 participants.
The sequence worth stealing
You do not need High10’s platform access to copy its most useful habit. You need the discipline to delay the channel conversation until the business question is precise. The agency’s case studies reduce to four moves.
This also explains where High10 sits in the market. A specialist PPC shop may manage bids more narrowly. A research consultancy may deliver a handsome deck and leave. An internal team may know the business better but lack the bandwidth to operate across search, social, creative and PR. High10’s pitch is the connective tissue: one group moves from market intelligence to execution and back to measurement.
The conditions matter. This model depends on a measurable conversion, enough margin to fund acquisition, access to usable customer and sales data, and a client willing to change operations when the evidence points beyond marketing. A campaign cannot rescue weak fulfillment, an uncompetitive offer or a sales team that never records what happened to the lead.
Now search has escaped the search box
High10’s current bet is that the same business-first logic can survive the AI transition. It has expanded SEO into what it calls SEO+ or “Search Everywhere Optimization”: conventional rankings joined by AI answers, social discovery, video, reviews, public authority and branded search. This is sensible as a map, though harder to attribute than a checkout or camp registration. The agency’s own standard should apply: show where influence began, where validation happened and which business outcome followed.
That standard may be High10’s most portable idea. Marketing technology keeps making activity easier to manufacture and harder to interpret. AI can produce the proposal, the copy, the image and a reassuring chart. It cannot decide what the business should count as progress. Someone still has to notice that the co-op form was never filed.
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