Thomas Donohoe and the trouble with a good idea

Everybody would take a meeting. That was the problem. Thomas Donohoe had built an offering he believed in, and prospective buyers were happy to discuss it. Then came the part where someone was supposed to sign. Conversation, it turned out, was a poor substitute for revenue. The calendar could look splendid while the business looked rather less so.

Looking back in 2019, he described the early failure plainly: after five months in business and 45 days of selling, nobody was buying. He changed the product line to fit what clients would actually fund. Within nine months, he said, the business was profitable. The lesson had arrived without the courtesy of being theoretical.

There is something useful about beginning a founder's story here. A good idea can earn compliments long before it earns its keep. The distance between those two responses is where Donohoe's account of entrepreneurship becomes interesting. He had to listen to the answer customers were giving with their budgets, even while their meetings appeared to say something more encouraging.

Level Agency, founded in 2010, became the enterprise associated with his name. Its origin contains a question that follows him through advertising, writing and leadership: what happens when an attractive explanation meets an actual result? In his case, the explanation had to change. The business got another chance.

An agency built from the other side of the table

Donohoe had been a buyer of agency services before becoming a seller. That matters to the shape of Level. Patrick Patterson, who would eventually help buy the company, remembers a client-side beginning: in 2010, their employer outsourced their jobs to an agency. They wanted to create the kind of agency they themselves would have wanted to hire.

Patterson initially helped in a consulting capacity, then spent about two and a half years in the technology startup world. He joined Level in 2012 to run operations. The partnership developed over years, rather than being assembled at the moment someone needed a succession plan.

The commercial problem was the gap between marketing activity and a business outcome. A company could commission pieces of digital work while still being left to join those pieces together. The attraction of a more connected agency was straightforward: fewer gaps in the journey from an advertisement to a customer.

That is a less glamorous founding proposition than inventing a new advertising medium. It is also easier to understand from the client's chair. Someone has to make the handoffs work. An impressive part is of limited comfort when the whole machine refuses to start.

Four things before the fireworks

Donohoe's preferred teaching device is a small number: four. In his explanation of digital marketing fundamentals, he returns to brand-name search advertising, retargeting, custom audience targeting and landing pages. These are his baseline priorities. He presents them as work executives should understand before becoming absorbed in more elaborate purchases.

The distinction is about sequence. Brand search addresses people already looking for a company. Retargeting reconnects with previous visitors. Custom audience advertising uses an existing customer or prospect list to reach a defined audience. A landing page gives the campaign a destination designed around a response. Together, they describe a practical route through a buying process.

His argument places a responsibility on the executive. A CEO does not need to perform every specialist task, but should know enough to question the work, much as the job requires some understanding of accounting or sales. Delegating an unfamiliar subject does not make the consequences of that subject disappear.

He also pays attention to an unfashionable detail: making it easy to get in touch. Give prospective customers several ways to respond, then examine which routes they use. An advertisement can do its job and still deliver someone to an unnecessarily difficult front door. A little less friction can be a more useful ambition than another flourish.

A campaign is never simply “done”

In a 2019 LinkedIn post about search advertising, Donohoe argued that the line between a viable campaign and a disappointing one could be surprisingly thin. His advice was to inspect the details when results were poor or merely adequate. A campaign's existence was no guarantee that its execution was good.

He was talking about the craft behind the checkbox. A team can be capable, hardworking and pleasant to deal with, yet still miss pieces that affect acquisition costs. The existence of a paid-search budget does not answer the questions that budget ought to provoke. Who arrived? What did they do? Did the spending lead anywhere useful?

The post belongs to 2019, and its platform-specific confidence belongs to that moment. The more durable observation is about management: approving a channel and examining its execution are separate jobs. Calling something a search campaign tells you where the money went. It tells you considerably less about whether the work deserved it.

A second post, on branding, makes a related demand. Donohoe asks companies to identify who they are in the marketplace and why a buyer would choose them over competitors. A brand can become a comfortable object to protect. His question forces it back into a competitive setting, where a prospective customer has alternatives and no obligation to admire the internal presentation.

The playbook leaves the office

In November 2019, Donohoe published The CEO's Digital Marketing Playbook with Koehler Books. The book gave his operating philosophy a portable form. Its intended audience included executives responsible for customer generation in business-to-business and higher-value consumer markets, where the journey to a sale can involve more than an impulsive click.

Its structure is revealing. A glossary comes early, followed by strategy and team structure, then the Core Four and more advanced tactics. There is a certain democratic insistence in starting with vocabulary. A senior title does not automatically confer fluency, and a meeting becomes easier to manage when everyone understands the nouns.

The book's ambition is to bring the language of digital advertising into an executive's working knowledge. Search, social networks, display advertising and email are treated as channels to be understood and ordered. The useful question is what to build first, and what the next layer is supposed to accomplish.

He took that teaching work into interviews as well. His Sarder Author Talks conversation with Vaishali Jain gives the book an extended spoken companion. The interviewer asks the questions; Donohoe gets room to explain. For a subject often compressed into a slogan or a slide, the longer format allows the connections between tactics and business decisions to remain visible.

Learning to leave the room in other hands

The more personal difficulty was authority. In his Growth Think Tank conversation with Gene Hammett, Donohoe described learning to give senior people room to lead. Assigning a title and responsibilities was easy enough. Resisting the urge to take over when he felt like it took longer.

He acknowledged the cost of his own management style and the importance of hearing unwelcome feedback. He also described himself as a farm kid from Pennsylvania and said he had left Carnegie Mellon's MBA program. His account of learning business was full of mistakes he had made himself, rather than a neat progression of borrowed wisdom.

This is where the early sales failure and the leadership problem meet. In each case, the founder has an appealing picture of how things should work. Other people supply inconvenient information. A customer declines to buy. A capable colleague needs more space. Progress depends on how much of that information the founder is prepared to accept.

Donohoe's language about ownership is demanding because he applies it to the person at the top. A leader who wants accountability elsewhere has to make his own errors discussable. There is a practical generosity in that idea: colleagues can spend less energy interpreting the boss and more energy doing the work they were hired to do.

“The three of us built something special over the last eleven years.”

Thomas Donohoe · March 2021

Eleven years, then the keys

On March 31, 2021, Level announced its sale to Patterson and Patrick Van Gorder, formerly its president and executive vice president. The two became equal partners. Donohoe stepped back from business development and strategic leadership, keeping a relationship with the agency as chairman emeritus and adviser.

The buyers were executives he had hired. That gives the transaction a human continuity beyond the change in ownership. The people taking over had already been helping run the place. After years of working together, the company would continue under familiar leadership while its founder pursued another chapter.

“The three of us built something special over the last eleven years,” he said when the deal was announced. The sentence gives the achievement a plural subject. For a founder who had spoken candidly about learning to stop taking over, the handover makes a fitting turn in the story.

The following month, Cuisine Solutions appointed him chief marketing officer, effective April 21. His remit covered global campaigns, advertising, public relations and business development with business customers. The setting had changed to sous vide food production, with buyers across restaurants, retail, airlines and hotels. The underlying question of finding and developing customers travelled with him.

His public LinkedIn profile now identifies him as CMO of Alloy Roofing and places him in the Charleston, South Carolina metropolitan area. Synergy Plus Marketing also lists him as an executive consultant. The roles extend a career that has moved between building an agency, explaining its methods and taking marketing responsibility inside other businesses.

The first sales meetings remain a useful opening scene because they contain the friction that makes the later career intelligible. An idea needs a buyer. A campaign needs a result. A trusted executive needs authority. Each sounds obvious after the lesson has been learned. Donohoe's story is more enjoyable, and more useful, for admitting how much work can precede the obvious.