Steven Gold and the problem with thinking big

An agency called Giant opened on April Fools’ Day in 2002. Steven Gold, Stephen Mullens and Larry Wolheim were its founders. The name had a little cheek: Gold recalled wanting a leaner business, with fewer of the encumbrances he associated with large agencies. A modest operation could still have a rather immodest sign on the door.

Gold had started in New York as a freelance copywriter, then moved west. He and Mullens eventually ran a San Francisco office for a New Jersey agency. Before launching their own firm, they talked with former colleagues and clients. Lunch with Wolheim helped bring the three founders together. The beginning was conversational, built around people who already knew the business.

The distinction between an agency’s size and its ambitions would become more interesting as Giant grew. Naming a company is a pleasantly brief exercise. Keeping that name attached to work people want to buy takes rather longer. Gold’s subsequent career supplies the less glamorous, more useful part of the story: hiring, delegation, new responsibilities and the occasional uncomfortable year. A founder’s first decision can fit on a business card. The consequences tend to require an organization.

The recession left room for ideas

By 2009, Giant was growing through a period that gave businesses ample reason to be cautious. Its revenue and billings rose 38 percent that year. Staff increased by about 30 percent, reaching roughly 45 at year-end and 50 by the time of its 2010 agency profile. Existing relationships and new business both contributed. The firm had become a place where other people’s careers could grow alongside the founders’ company.

Gold’s comments from that period focused on the relationship between an idea and the means of delivering it. Digital work was increasing, but he resisted defining the agency by individual tactics. “We believe in creating giant ideas,” he said. The useful question was which channels served those ideas. A new medium could offer possibilities without being allowed to write the brief.

That position gave his creative background a practical business expression. Clients needed a strategic partner that could also operate efficiently. Gold was discussing cost pressures, consolidation and the difficulty of finding staff at the same time he was discussing invention. In agency life, an elegant concept and a sensible staffing plan eventually occupy the same meeting. One makes the work persuasive; the other gives somebody enough time to finish it.

“We believe in creating giant ideas.”

Steven Gold, 2010

The tenth birthday needed more desks

Giant turned ten in April 2012 with evidence of a busy preceding year: ten new brands, more than 30 new employees and revenue growth of 33 percent to just over $17 million. It had moved into an office about twice the size of its previous space. Growth had acquired a fairly literal footprint.

Gold identified senior leadership as a persistent hiring challenge. The firm was investing in digital strategy and execution, including appointments for Jonathan Peischl and Nellie Newman. Adam Gelling’s promotion to principal expanded the partnership to five. These were additions to the structure around the work, as well as additions to the payroll.

A creative founder’s output is easy to picture as a sentence, a campaign or an idea scribbled in the margin. Here, part of Gold’s output was an organization that could handle more assignments. The larger office was the visible evidence. The more consequential question was whether enough experienced people could make good decisions inside it. Desks are relatively obliging recruits. Senior leaders have preferences, competing offers and opinions about how the place should run.

An award, then another kind of test

In 2013, Giant won the Manny Awards’ Category II Agency of the Year honor. That category covered agencies with annual revenue between $25 million and $50 million. The award announcement described growth of more than 50 percent in 2012, the addition of 40 full-time staff and an expansion into new space. Recognition followed a business that had moved beyond its earlier scale.

The award belongs to the agency and its collective work. For Gold’s story, its significance is the change in company he was helping lead. An operation that began with three principals had accumulated colleagues, capabilities and a wider commercial presence. The original partnership now sat within a much larger daily enterprise.

Awards make a convenient photograph of a moment. They are less helpful as operating instructions for the following Monday. Growth means new people must understand how work gets done, and familiar people must adjust to responsibilities that have changed. Giant’s later record would include leadership departures and a revenue decline. Placing that record beside the award gives the career a more credible shape. Success arrived in episodes, with the ordinary demands of management continuing between them.

The people who stayed in the picture

One of the more revealing threads in Gold’s career is the recurrence of colleagues. He hired Kristina Ellis as a copywriter at Harrison Wilson and Associates in 1999. When Giant opened in 2002, she was its sole copywriter. After a period of freelance consulting, she returned in 2006. By 2015, she was leading copy work and a team within the agency.

Joshua McCasland offers another example. He joined Giant in 2006 and was named senior vice president and executive creative director in 2016. Gold had worked with him for nearly a decade when the promotion was announced. An agency’s accumulated knowledge sometimes travels in very ordinary containers: the people who remember a client, recognize a recurring problem and know which colleague can solve it.

Gold also hired outward. In 2017, Giant brought in Andrew Wint as senior vice president of technology and Aaron Sklar as managing director of experience design. Wint’s remit included the marketing technology portfolio. The appointments show a business widening the skills available around a creative assignment. Writing remained part of the picture, alongside technology, design and the task of getting different specialists to produce something coherent together.

The copywriter takes the operating chair

On May 20, 2015, Gold became Giant’s chief executive officer. He had been a principal since the agency’s founding, thirteen years earlier. The formal change put financial operations, human resources and business operations within his leadership responsibilities. The same announcement introduced Jeffrey Nemy as chief financial officer, reporting to Gold.

The timing matters. This was a founder taking on an explicitly defined executive role after more than a decade of building the business. Giant was expanding its East Coast presence, and the appointment gave that next phase a clearer management structure. Creative judgment had to share the desk with budgets, staffing and the machinery of a growing company.

There is a familiar temptation to make a founder’s biography entirely about the founding. Gold’s CEO appointment suggests a second act worth equal attention. Starting an agency and organizing one at scale are different assignments, even when the same person does both. Nemy brought financial and operational experience to the team. Gold’s remit expanded. The job now required him to help make the conditions in which other people could do the work that had originally drawn him into the business.

2015 refused to behave like a growth chart

The agency’s account of 2015 described its first revenue decline since its formation, even though the year remained its third biggest. Several founding-era leaders moved on: Wolheim retired, Mullens left, and principal Mike Sperling departed. Gold became CEO during a period when the company’s familiar cast and commercial trajectory were both changing.

Giant responded by streamlining its organization, bringing in talent and adding capabilities. Gelling was named president in early 2016. The firm’s Philadelphia presence also gave its East Coast clients greater geographic proximity. The changes were concrete adjustments to the way the agency operated.

A smooth upward line would make this biography easier to illustrate and less useful to read. Gold’s career includes the period when an established business had to reorganize. A company can have one of its largest years and still face a decline; both facts can be true at once. The distinction matters to anyone who has ever looked at a good total and wondered why the office nevertheless feels unsettled. Scale brings resources. It also brings more relationships to maintain when people and circumstances change.

A sale with work still attached

In July 2018, Huntsworth agreed to acquire approximately 90.2 percent of Giant’s parent company for $72.2 million in cash. The sellers included Shamrock Capital and former and existing management. Gold remained CEO, with Gelling as president. Alongside other senior managers, they retained the remaining approximately 9.8 percent of the equity.

Giant had roughly 150 staff and had generated about $32 million in revenue and $7 million in EBITDA in 2017. The acquisition connected the San Francisco agency with Huntsworth’s existing Evoke-led marketing businesses. Its announcement described clients seeking fewer partners able to meet a wider range of needs.

The retained management stake came with future put and call arrangements, tied to earnings and subject to an aggregate cap. The announced cash payment was a transaction figure for a company; it was not a statement of Gold’s personal proceeds. As a career event, the sale joined ownership change to leadership continuity. The business he had helped found would enter a larger group with its management still involved. Sixteen years after the April Fools’ Day opening, there was a new owner and still plenty of work to do.

From running the agency to advising the business

Gold’s later roles move the story into advice. He is listed as an executive advisor at Coral Tree Partners, beginning in April 2022. The Los Angeles investment firm focuses on lower middle market businesses in media, entertainment and communications. Its approach includes working with executive advisors alongside its investment team.

The fit is understandable in business terms. An agency founder who has hired through growth, taken on operating responsibility and stayed through a sale brings experience of decisions that cannot be reduced to a valuation. Coral Tree’s stated emphasis on collaboration and management teams gives that experience a place in an investment organization. Gold’s title identifies an advisory role rather than assigning him the firm’s founding or dealmaking record.

He is also listed as a strategic advisor at MAHA Global from February 2025, associated with its Darwin reputation intelligence platform. Away from the organizational chart, Gold has described live music as a prompt for ideas and annual fly-fishing trips to Alaska as a vacation habit. Those details leave room for a person alongside the titles. His career has passed through creative work, company leadership and advice. The recurring task is deceptively plain: find the people and conditions that let an idea become work worth doing.