The most valuable marketing company in San Diego did not begin with a marketing plan. It began with a mop. In college, Grayson Lafrenz was running a janitorial business and, like any owner, wanted more customers. He hired an SEO agency to get them. The reports came back full of rankings and jargon he could not connect to a single new contract, so he did the thing that quietly starts most good companies - he decided he could do it better himself.
He was right. The in-house SEO work outgrew the cleaning company. Brands he helped rank soon asked whether he could also handle their Facebook and Google ads. In 2012, Power Digital was born out of those requests. Fourteen years later it is a private-equity-backed growth-marketing firm reporting around $220 million in revenue, and its clients run an estimated $800 million in advertising spend through software the company designed itself.
01 / What it doesAn agency that decided its real product was software
On paper, Power Digital is a full-service agency. It does search engine optimization, paid media, social, creative and brand work, public relations, conversion rate optimization, email, affiliate, influencer, Amazon and retail marketing. That list alone would make it a generalist among thousands of shops. The difference is what sits underneath all of it: nova, a proprietary machine-learning platform built on Snowflake that ingests data across every channel and hands strategists the growth levers instead of a stack of disconnected dashboards.
Most agencies rent their technology - a license here, a reporting tool there. Power Digital built its own. nova combines quantitative and qualitative data from Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Shopify and Salesforce into one environment, then surfaces where the next dollar should go. The company launched nova Intelligence as an application layer in 2023, added an Insights AI feature set, and shipped a measurement product called fusepoint in 2025. The roadmap reads less like an agency's and more like a software company's.
Business outcomes, not vanity metrics.Power Digital's operating promise
02 / Who it servesEcommerce brands, boardrooms, and the people who buy companies
Power Digital's client base spans ecommerce and direct-to-consumer brands, B2B companies, retail, healthcare and consumer goods. But the most distinctive customer is not a brand at all - it is the private equity firm. The company built a dedicated practice that points nova at portfolio companies to expose hidden growth levers that can move a valuation. In a world where most agencies pitch campaigns, Power Digital learned to pitch diligence.
That reframing matters. When your buyer is an investor deciding what a company is worth, impressions and click-through rates are beside the point. The conversation becomes revenue, customer lifetime value and incrementality - the numbers that show up in a model. nova is reported to guide roughly $800 million in annual ad spend across more than 400 companies, which is less a marketing statistic than a scale statement.
03 / The problems it solvesThe gap between activity and money
The frustration that started the company is the same one it now sells against. Marketing generates enormous amounts of activity - clicks, reach, engagement - and very little of it maps cleanly to revenue. Channels are measured in silos. Attribution is contested. A brand can look busy and unprofitable at the same time. Power Digital's argument is that the fix is not more dashboards but a single data layer that connects spend to outcomes, then applies machine learning to find the quick wins at volume.
For a growing brand, that means knowing which customers are worth acquiring and which campaigns actually move the business. For a private equity owner, it means seeing where a portfolio company's growth is being left on the table before the next board meeting. The through-line is the same: turn scattered marketing data into decisions someone can defend with a number.
Power the relentless pursuit of growth.The company mission
04 / How it's differentOwning the stack, and buying the rest
Two strategic choices set Power Digital apart from the field of independent and holding-company agencies it competes with - firms like Tinuiti, Wpromote, Jellyfish and Media.Monks, plus the in-house teams and analytics platforms every brand now considers. The first choice was to build nova rather than rent a stack, which turns a services business into something closer to a software-enabled one. The second was to grow through acquisition as much as through new clients.
Power Digital assembled its full funnel by buying specialist agencies - adding PR, paid media and content capabilities - and then wiring them together with its own data platform. In December 2023 it acquired the conversion-rate-optimization firm Endrock Growth and Analytics. In February 2026 it acquired Cardinal Digital Marketing, expanding capacity and headcount again. Roll-ups are common; the discipline that makes them work is having a system to unify what you buy. For Power Digital, that system is nova.
05 / The business modelRetainers, but productized
The revenue base is classic agency economics: retainers and project fees across the marketing funnel. What changes the shape of the business is the software layer sitting on top. nova gives Power Digital a differentiator that is hard to copy, a reason clients stay, and an asset that scales better than billable hours. Growth arrives from two directions at once - existing clients expanding their scope, and acquisitions folding new specialties into the same platform. The private equity practice adds a third, higher-altitude line of business selling growth diligence to capital providers.
06 / The money behind itNine years bootstrapped, then a check
Power Digital's funding history is a patience story. Lafrenz self-funded the company for roughly nine years, building the machine before taking outside money. Periscope Equity recapitalized the firm around 2021. Then in March 2022, Court Square Capital Partners - a private equity firm with about $7.5 billion in assets under management - made a strategic capital investment to fund the nova platform and further acquisitions. The sequencing is the point: the outside capital came in to accelerate something that already worked, not to invent it.
07 / The expertiseStrategists, analysts, and a founder who learned to sell at Xerox
The company describes its people as consultative marketers, creatives, analysts and technologists - a mix that reflects the software-plus-services shape of the business. The leadership story has a nice symmetry to it: Lafrenz learned to sell at Xerox under an executive named Jeff Mason, and Mason is now Power Digital's CEO while Lafrenz serves as Chairman. The apprentice hired the mentor.
Culture is treated as an operating asset rather than a poster. The firm runs on eight stated principles, from integrity and autonomy to a deliberately unbuttoned one - balance hustle with humor. It reportedly draws around 5,000 applicants a month, and in early 2026 Ad Age named it a top place to work. The conference rooms named after San Diego bars are a small tell: this is a data-driven firm that has decided seriousness and personality are not opposites.
The apprentice learned to sell at Xerox, then hired his old boss to run the company.On Lafrenz and CEO Jeff Mason
08 / Where it fitsBetween the agency and the platform
The marketing-services market is splitting. On one side are holding companies and independent agencies selling human expertise; on the other are software platforms selling automation. Power Digital sits deliberately in between - an agency with a proprietary platform, or a platform with a full-service team, depending on which side of the table you are on. That middle position is where a lot of the industry is heading, and Power Digital arrived early by accident, then stayed on purpose.
It is worth remembering that all of this traces back to a college student who could not make sense of an SEO report. The company he built is, in a sense, the report he wished he had gotten - one that connects marketing activity to money a business owner can actually use.