The business cards were square. Tucker Matheson remembers them as looking as if they had escaped from Hitch, the 2005 romantic comedy in which Will Smith teaches awkward men to become smooth. The resemblance was not necessarily a compliment. In 2018, Matheson and Christopher Jones carried those cards through Expo East in Maryland, walking booth to booth and pitching marketing help to makers of CBD drinks, cold brew, beef jerky and nearly everything edible between them.
Twelve months earlier, the pair had been at PwC, helping around billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions. Now they were asking tiny consumer startups to spare a piece of an already tiny marketing budget. The career whiplash makes for a good anecdote because it contains the whole venture in miniature: serious financial training, an unglamorous sales problem and a belief that the numbers and the message belonged in the same conversation.
Matheson later described the departure from PwC with a phrase founders reserve for moments they hope never to repeat: “burning the boats.” They had no clients, company name, domain or website. His father supplied an admirably parental review of the plan, asking whether he was starting a YouTube channel. Matheson and Jones were, in fact, building Markacy - a consultancy that would try to make marketing answer questions a finance team could recognize.
“We had no clients, no company name, no domain, no website - it was truly burning the boats.”Tucker Matheson on Markacy’s beginning
An accountant walks into an ad agency
Matheson’s path to marketing did not begin in a copy room or behind a camera. At Suffolk University in Boston, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 2010 and a Master of Science in Taxation in 2012. His graduate record included a fellowship, an outstanding graduate student award and summa cum laude honors. He later returned as an adjunct professor, teaching personal financial planning. The habits are visible: define the investment, understand the constraints, follow the cash.
He joined PwC Advisory in 2011 and spent seven years in consulting and M&A work. That meant transformation projects, senior stakeholders and transactions with enough zeros to discipline the imagination. It also exposed what he and Jones saw as a patch of open ground. Traditional strategy consulting could live at a polite distance from execution. Digital agencies could optimize a channel without confronting the economics of the wider company. The “front office,” as Matheson put it, was white space.
Their wager was that online commerce would keep taking a larger share of sales and that corporate investment would follow. Markacy would combine the rigor they knew with the channels clients needed. Media buying, creative development, analytics and strategy would sit beside forecasts, margin considerations and P&L targets. A click was information. Profit was the plot.
This is less obvious than it sounds. Marketing departments have their own melodious vocabulary: impressions, engagement, attribution, reach. Finance departments prefer a sterner dialect: contribution margin, cash, inventory, return. Matheson’s work has been an exercise in translation. He argues that a media plan should know what the business can afford, that customer acquisition costs mean little without lifetime value and that channel performance must eventually climb into the company forecast.
P&L, margin and inventory → media, creative and testing → revenue, retention and profitable growth. The bars illustrate the widening scope of the model, not measured performance.
The useful heresy: marketing is capital allocation
By 2024, higher interest rates and tougher fundraising had made Matheson’s argument timely. Growth could no longer be purchased with the same cheerful disregard for payback. He wrote that the connection between the CFO and CMO had become integral for consumer businesses. Agencies, in his view, should press clients on finance, inventory and strategy rather than celebrate click-through rates in splendid isolation.
His forecasts that year stretched across the changing media landscape. AI would stay and needed to be learned. Brands would require more creative volume as influencer work, user-generated content, whitelisting and TikTok consumed more budgets. Privacy rules would tighten. Traditional channels such as television, direct mail, outdoor and audio would recover spending as businesses looked beyond core direct-response platforms. Personalization would keep reshaping the experience.
The list is broad, but the governing idea is narrow. Tools change; the business model remains the examiner. Matheson’s Forbes Council essays made the same case from different angles: protect retention during a recession, measure omnichannel attribution according to a brand’s stage, cut budgets strategically rather than evenly and make profitability the condition for scaling a direct-to-consumer company. Marketing need not become timid. It does need to show its work.
His view of attribution is especially revealing. A young brand may need directional evidence while it builds enough history to support more sophisticated analysis. A mature omnichannel company can compare platform reporting with customer surveys, controlled tests and marketing-mix models. The point is not to crown one dashboard as the oracle. It is to match the method to the company, then admit what the method cannot see. False precision is still false, even when the percentage arrives with two decimal places.
Retention receives the same financial treatment. Acquiring a customer at an acceptable price is merely the opening scene. Repeat purchases, email and text relationships, loyalty programs, service and product experience determine whether that first transaction becomes an asset or an expensive souvenir. This is where Matheson’s finance training quietly improves the marketing story: the customer is not a conversion event but a stream of possible future value.
Recognition followed the operating results. Forbes included Matheson in its 2021 Next 1000 list for Marketing & Advertising. Markacy later appeared on Inc.’s national and regional growth lists. Those badges mattered because the firm had begun by selling an unfamiliar combination. Strategy consultancies, creative agencies and media buyers already occupied familiar boxes. Markacy’s job was to persuade a client that the useful answer might sit across all three, with a financial model keeping the peace.
Before the agency, a book about value
There is an earlier version of this instinct. In 2016, Matheson and Pichon Duplan published Fast Forward: What Is Your College Degree Worth? The book asked students to treat college as an opportunity requiring agency, not an expensive conveyor belt. Its promise was practical: leave with work that motivates you and in a sound financial position. Through a venture also called Fast Forward, the pair held student leadership conferences in Boston.
Education, consulting and marketing may look like separate chapters. Matheson makes them rhyme. Each concerns an investment wrapped in a story. College promises possibility but arrives with a bill. Strategy promises transformation but can expire in a deck. Advertising promises growth but can conceal weak unit economics beneath handsome charts. His recurring move is to place the promise beside the accounting and ask them to get along.
Suffolk recognized him in its 2019 “10 Under 10” alumni group. His remark at the time was warmer than financial: “For me, Suffolk has always been a place I can continue to call home.” He also served as a One Young World ambassador, another link to the student-leadership work that preceded Markacy. The career is commercial, but its first published concern was how younger people might steer theirs more deliberately.
The acquisition, and the next set of problems
Markacy’s client base eventually moved far beyond the trade-show booths. The firm worked across consumer categories, with growing companies, major corporations and private-market investors. It reached No. 935 on the Inc. 5000 in 2023, alongside regional rankings in the Northeast in 2023 and 2024. Its pitch remained consistent: integrate strategy, execution and measurement so marketing decisions connect directly to financial outcomes.
On November 12, 2025, 24 Seven announced that it had acquired Markacy. The buyer, backed by Morgan Stanley Capital Partners, described the firm as an addition to its end-to-end marketing capabilities and specifically highlighted performance marketing, AI consulting, measurement and strategy. It was 24 Seven’s twelfth acquisition and its fourth of that year.
Matheson’s response avoided the tidy inevitability that acquisition announcements often acquire in retrospect. The goal had been there from day one, he wrote, but “on the journey, you can never see it.” He credited Jones, thanked the team and described a path navigated with blind faith, passion, perseverance and “daily grenades.” The language is dramatic, though any founder who has tried to make payroll while inventing a category may allow it.
“A million problems solved, a million more to go.”Tucker Matheson
That older line, written before the deal, is the better ending. Acquisitions are milestones, not a cure for unfinished work. Markacy entered 24 Seven with a larger organizational platform and a shared ambition to grow in performance marketing, AI consulting, measurement and strategy. The finance-first thesis did not retire. It acquired more rooms in which to make its case.
And the square cards? They did their job. Bad design can be forgiven when it opens a conversation; beautiful dashboards deserve less mercy when they obscure the business. Matheson’s career sits neatly between those two artifacts. One was awkward and useful. The other, in the wrong hands, can be elegant and empty. He has spent years arguing for useful.