SAN DIEGO – When Bryant Walker first founded Tavo Interactive – a predecessor to his current company, Tavo Media Group – it was to create an entity to do freelance work through. Today, Tavo has bloomed into a full-scale, full-service marketing agency with 25 full-time and contractor staff and $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
“Initially it was founded as just a way for me to have a side hustle,” he said, adding that he changed his perspective after taking inspiration from “Traction,” a business book that pressed the idea that starting companies are about more than creating opportunity for its founder.
“I want this thing to be bigger than me,” he now says about his motivation to grow Tavo into a “legacy” that can support his and his team’s families.
Starts and Stops
Building that legacy has been a journey of stops and starts for Walker, who has worked in creative marketing and advertising for more than 25 years. He began his career in entertainment marketing and public relations in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“It was really fun. I cut my teeth working in traditional media,” he said, adding that over the rest of his career he branched into every aspect of the industry, including creative, strategy, analytics, web design, SEO and more.
In 2008, Walker founded his first marketing agency, Constant Motion Creative Media, along with some partners.
After four years, that partnership dissolved and Walker formed the first iteration of Tavo, Tavo Interactive, to facilitate freelance work while working as director of business development at PINT, Inc.
Founder & CEO
Tavo Media Group
“I knew that my vision for what I could and wanted to do, I didn’t have the capacity to do it the way I wanted to do it,” Walker said of his tepid dive into starting Tavo Interactive, which mostly focused on offering digital advertising and web development – services he could “easy to spin up” on his own.
By 2018, however, Tavo started picking up momentum with a handful of clients that hired Walker on retainer. He said his “Jack-of-all-trades” knowledge of marketing served him “well enough” to be able to service the clients’ diverse needs and by the end of that year he brought on a handful of contractors and by the end of 2018 had increased his monthly recurring revenue from $5,000 to $30,000. By the end of 2019, Tavo’s MRR was up to $60,000.
That momentum soon hit a pandemic wall, however.
“I almost signed a new office lease around February (2020) and my biggest client was in healthcare, so they got wind of the COVID stuff happening well before it was mainstream in the news,” Walker said.
Instead of pushing on with Tavo through the pandemic, Walker ended up taking an in-house job with that client, SavaSeniorCare Administrative Services, as vice president of marketing and communications and stayed there for two years helping the company with public relations related to the pandemic.
Walker re-founded Tavo Interactive as Tavo Media Group in 2022 with some pre-COVID clients that had “come back to life,” he said, but basically “started from scratch again” with only around $8,000 in MMR and one or two contractors.
“Now, we’re at about $300,000 a month recuring revenue. We’ve got 13 W2 employees and 10 to 15 contractors, depending on the workflow,” Walker said. “And now, even if all we do is conservatively close all we have in the pipeline and stop selling, we’ll be a $4 million a year business by the end of this year.”
Planning for More Growth
Walker, however, is planning for growth beyond his conservative estimate.
“I would like for us to be a $10 million a year business by Q2 of next year,” he said, adding that Tavo is currently recruiting for five to six roles in the company, including C-suite positions like a permanent chief operating officer to replace the fractional COO it had been using.
Tavo is also looking to expand its presence with offices in other markets that it is already growing in, such as Los Angeles where the company already has a remote team and several clients. Other markets include Columbus, Atlanta and the Bay Area where Tavo has been growing its presence in tech and biotech.
“We’ve got a fair number of clients and referrals from private equity groups that are trying to use us to help reshape some of these businesses that they are either investing in or acquiring,” Walker said, adding that the company competes with the big marketing agencies by offering the same level of service while being “way more agile with white-glove, attentive, experienced support.”
That support includes supporting both its startup and enterprise-level clients’ brands with near- and long-term strategies and making sure they have three to five “solid deliverables” in the first 30 days of signing with Tavo, Walker said. “Providing high-end, scalable services for mid-market to enterprise-level businesses – that is why our company is growing, because we are getting more of those types of clients.”
Tavo Media Group
FOUNDED: 2012
CEO: Bryant Walker
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Marketing firm
REVENUE: $300,000 MRR
EMPLOYEES: 13 full-time, 12 contractors
WEBSITE: www.tavomediagroup.com
CONTACT: (619) 330-6500
NOTABLE: This year Tavo launched its own business accelerator and jumpstart programs.
