What happens when two agency founders who've survived twenty years of shifting trends, changing technology, demanding clients, and their own evolution sit down together? We're about to find out.
Featuring:
In this conversation:
Ryan: Mike and Jonathan, ironically, both started your agencies a little over twenty years ago.
Mike: Starting an agency at the ripe old age of twenty-four, success looked way different than it does twenty years later. Honestly, at the time, I thought I knew better than everyone. I'd had one or two jobs out of college, and I thought everybody was doing it wrong — I knew how to do it right. I had nothing to lose but a rent payment and a car payment, so why not? And if it didn't work, I'd just go get a job somewhere.
It was about creating work that felt great, felt important, and felt like it was going to make a difference. In the end, there were ways to prove what success looks like for a client and what success looks like for an industry.
You're naive when you start — or at least I was — thinking I could just create good work and that would be enough. But where we are now as a culture, especially with things moving so fast, it's drastically different. I wouldn't even recognize myself as an agency owner back then.
Jonathan: I didn't really have a long-term vision for success. I was stepping into the unknown. At the time, I just wanted cool clients and to do really cool, impactful work, but I didn't have a definition of what that meant. Like Mike, I was in my twenties and very much in survival mode — thinking about how to get my next paycheck, how I'd pay for growth, and how I'd fund hiring people.
Those are the rudimentary, early stages of starting an agency. One of the big things I wanted was an internal picture of how I wanted to feel. It's a strange vision for success, but I wanted to feel at peace with my work. I wanted to feel secure, and like I had work I was proud of, but I knew I was stepping into a place of growth, and I just wanted to learn a lot.
Ryan: Both of you said the exact same thing. You wanted to feel like you'd done incredible work — not that you wanted the biggest client list, the most money, or a spot on a national billboard. It seems like what you really cared about was producing something incredible. Coming out of college, we all want to win awards. The most important thing feels like getting some kind of gold in our hand and a picture on a red carpet. Then we realize that's not reality, and it's not going to make our soul sing.
Mike: I think what really shifted — and I'm twenty years in now, so this probably happened somewhere around the seven-to-eight-year mark — was being a little selfish as a business owner and realizing that certain things needed to happen for the business to be sustainable, and those things relied on stability for me and for the people around me.
It went from "the badass work we're going to create, staying up late with a thirty-pack of beer in the office" to "What does profit margin look like? What does longevity look like? What does a client that lasts more than three years look like?"
We could build a community around this, help others support their families, and still keep "doing awesome work" in the middle of all that. That was really it for me: realizing this had to be a real thing, not just about the next job or the next cool thing we were making.
Jonathan: It's funny how small, incremental steps become so meaningful and powerful in the early stages. I felt that too — being able to hire a new employee, build a new skill, or take on a client I'd always wanted was incredibly meaningful. Those mini milestones are often overlooked when you read about how companies grow, thrive, and prosper. We were building an internal compass the whole time.
Ian: As a bit of an outsider, I see you both changing along with a changing environment and world. This landscape has shifted so much in twenty years. You may not have known or felt it at the time, but looking back, you had to adapt to new technologies and new customer and client expectations. It gets three-dimensional very quickly, and you both adapted well — not just in how you built your businesses, but in how those businesses operated in the broader world.
Mike: A hundred percent. What's interesting, Ian, is — I couldn't agree more, but I think the things that have made us different as an agency are the things that haven't changed. There's a customer service aspect we've always valued. The work's always good — we joke about that, we're not going to worry about it. We want to walk away from a client relationship with them saying, "We feel heard."
Jonathan: I think of the longstanding things too. One that stands out for us: over time, as we got into marketing, we thought so much about representing our client in market. Over time, I realized how much of it is about helping our client better understand their buyers, relate to their buyers, and build a deeper, more meaningful relationship. That's evergreen. What you said is so true, Mike — there are longstanding, almost evergreen kernels in our work that stand out and become more true over time.
Ryan: Ian, seven years ago, Jonathan asked you to join Ironpaper, and you've watched it evolve ever since.
Ian: One of the biggest changes I've seen is that when I started, it was a smaller organization, and John was the center of gravity — everything ran through him and orbited around him. He's the soul of the organization, but there are limits to that — we could only go so far with it.
I've seen John work elegantly with other people and build a team around him that he can trust, one that doesn't require him to be involved in everything all the time. It's let him amplify himself through the business in a way that wouldn't have been possible if he were still at the center of everything. Building a team and building systems and processes that let us scale has been a profound thing to watch happen incrementally over a long period.
Jonathan: Mike, I'm not sure if you felt this too, but it's a really internally gripping process to step away from the thing you're building and give power and control to your team, letting them become co-creators.
Mike: It was terrifying for me to do that. Once you make that leap, once you learn to trust, and once you realize that a lot of the time you're not the best person for the job you've been doing for years — that's the realization. And then seeing the impact that has on your ability to do the things you're good at, the things you should be doing, and the things that ultimately mean success for the business, and therefore something better for everyone involved. Huge realization moment.
Once you realize that a lot of the time you're not the best person for the job you've been doing for years — that's the realization.
Jonathan: I find myself co-creating like that with my team — Ian and I do that. He challenges me on what I focus on and what I don't. At first, it was hard. I felt like I was giving up things I really cared about, loved, and felt passionate about. But over time, I realized letting go is one of the most powerful ways to open a new door — where you put your energy and time, how you think about your role as the company evolves.
That's the evolution of the company: how everybody fills in and takes on new responsibilities. Ian has done such a good job of challenging me, and so have my other leaders.
Ryan: Both agencies have migrated toward working with companies and clients that do something genuinely positive in the world.
Mike: I think I hit a point where we realized we offered a service that could be of value to organizations regardless of whether they had the funds to pay for it, and that could really help change and move things forward.
We're in branding, so there's nothing more subjective sometimes than what a brand could possibly do — what a logo looks like, whether the website's nice, the messaging, all of it. But when we started working with a lot of nonprofits and doing pro bono work, we realized that what we were doing for these organizations was letting them do more of what they do best, which is help people and change lives.
It went from a personal project of mine — making sure we did a certain amount of pro bono work every year — to realizing the impact it was having internally on our team, with them saying, "This is the stuff we want to work on."
Jonathan: About fourteen years ago, I became a dad, and that started to change my mindset. I started thinking less about myself and more about impact on others — on my daughter, on what the future looks like, what the world looks like. That began a gradual shift for us. It wasn't overnight.
Mike, you mentioned that a lot of changes don't happen overnight; they happen gradually, with a lot of thought and reflection, pursuing this idea of companies that somehow make tomorrow better. Sometimes it's through innovation, sometimes through waste reduction or reducing harmful chemicals or environmental impact — whatever it may be, we have an ongoing dialogue about what kind of company we should work with.
I do a lot of interviews with new talent candidates, and one of the final things I always say is: this is hard work. We're in a very challenging corner of the world. These are complex problems we're trying to solve — B2B is naturally hard and challenging. If you take this on, it's going to be hard work, and we need to balance that challenge with some joy. Hopefully, when someone says, "Okay, this is a tough puzzle," solving it feels rewarding and meaningful.
I'm always upfront, even on sales calls: what you're trying to do here is really, really hard, and we have to look forward to coming to this problem every day. For me, the type of work we do has to balance the level of difficulty. If it's hard and it's not fun, no one wants to come to work.
Mike: Jonathan, that really resonates, especially going back to what we do in branding. We're only as good as the stories our clients have to tell. We're artists, we're designers, but we're not painting things out of nowhere — we're taking information we're given and telling a story the best way we possibly can. It's easy to do that with organizations doing good in the world, because there's no spin to it. These are wonderful people who want nothing more than to help other people, and telling that story is the best job there is.
Ryan: From a CEO's perspective, this is top of mind — today, and looking further down the road.
Jonathan: It's affecting us today, and it's a challenge, but I think it's allowing us to reinvent ourselves. We've talked about it internally as an opportunity to change and evolve our approach.
One of the most significant changes we're making is finding ways to create value for clients faster in the relationship, so when a client starts a new relationship with us, they experience takeaway value much earlier than they used to. We're challenging ourselves to increase quality first, rather than volume.
That's been a big focus: what experiments are we running today, how do we create more quality, and how do we reinvent jobs for a new agency era? I'm really excited about it — I see it as a huge opportunity.
AI is affecting us today, and it's a challenge, but I think it's allowing us to reinvent ourselves.
Mike: AI isn't impacting us all that much with our current client relationships, because we've already established the value they're getting. That said, I'm a big fan of leveraging it. It's allowed us to do the things we were already doing, faster. We're in branding, doing hundreds of interviews and a lot of research, and being able to compile that quicker, pull insights quicker, and test our human hypotheses against those insights faster lets us look in more diverse directions on a project. It lets us explore things we might not have had the time or budget to explore otherwise. We're using it as a tool internally.
Ian: There's common ground in what we're both talking about: intention. Your intention is to create great quality work, and the means of getting there is different from how it was in the past. These new tools come online, and suddenly you're approaching your work differently, but the intention is still there.
I'm excited about that.
Jonathan: Listening to the two of you, I'm thinking about the actual moments I have with my team and with folks across our business, and I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I learn about the inner workings of our team members and their talents.
Everybody's using AI in different ways that reflect who they are and how they're built. I've learned so much, even about a lot of our clients, in how they work and how they think. It tends to be a bit of a mirror — even the way I use AI is very much a peek inside my own mind. I've been so glad to get a deeper insight into our people and our talent, based on how they're trying to unlock new value and new workstreams with AI. For me, it's been a lot about talent discovery.
Ryan: You're both on sales and client calls all day, and that conversation has clearly evolved. You used to have to argue against price, or other objections — now AI is part of the mix.
Jonathan: The funny thing I've noticed is that a year ago, no one would name it — they'd call it innovation. "Tell us about innovation at Ironpaper." Now it's, "Tell me about AI." It's been accepted in a funny way, just through the language people use.
There's a spectrum, too. I had an RFP come in that said, "Please don't use AI to respond to this brief." Then there are others who say, "We're AI forward. We'd expect you to be the guiding light for us on AI."
Part of my job, when I'm looking for the best clients for Ironpaper, is figuring out where they live on that spectrum and how it maps to the value we're trying to bring to the relationship. I'd say it comes up on ninety percent of my calls. On the ones where it doesn't, I try to wedge it in anyway, because you can understand a lot about an organization based on how they're starting to position and think about it themselves.
Mike: I very rarely have conversations with new clients about it. We're often the ones to bring it up, because we're very open about our process while we're working on a project. That's interesting that you're talking about it so much on sales calls — I might be on the lookout for the word "innovation" now.
Jonathan: Right, maybe I just wasn't seeing it the whole time.
Ryan: Looking back at the foundation you built, is there anything you'd change? And what are you incredibly proud of — even if it happened by accident, or subconsciously?
Mike: I didn't have experience working in a large, or what I'd call a traditional, agency environment before starting Second Melody, and in a lot of ways that was beneficial. I was running and gunning, figuring it out on the fly, and I think that resulted in us creating our own way and being able to be different, because we didn't know any better. That said, I do think there are moments where I probably could have gotten somewhere quicker — landed a bigger client sooner, maybe — because if you know what you're up against a bit more, there's value in that.
A lot of the people who came on to Second Melody early on also didn't have traditional agency experience, so there was nobody in the room saying, "You guys should really be approaching pitches a little differently." Had that been the case, I might have fallen into more traditional ways of doing things that wouldn't have set us apart. So, who knows?
Jonathan: When you start a company, you're going to fail a lot, and one of the big takeaways I've had over the years is learning to adjust, adapt, and be resilient within the context of failure. Mike, I do wonder if being in an agency attracts people who want to continuously change and evolve, who have an internal growth mindset, because that's what we've experienced, and it's been a good recipe for us.
When you start a company, you're going to fail a lot, and one of the big takeaways I've had over the years is learning to adjust, adapt, and be resilient within the context of failure.
Mike: The appetite for variety, for sure. We try to keep things interesting, because I think people want to apply their talents and bring what they've learned from different industries into new places. What people are looking for today, honestly, rather than reinvention, is stability — but stability in the sense that they're able to do what they love, with variety built in. I like the excitement of new projects and new challenges, but I've come to appreciate much more the ability to remain focused on what we love.
Ryan: Well, with that guys — Mike Graham, John, Ian, thank you so much for joining, and I appreciate all your insights.
Mike: Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you.