There’s no lack of competition in the digital transformation and creative enterprise space but in less than four years, CourtAvenue, the agency founded in Dan Khabie’s Del Mar garage with co-founder Kenny Tomlin, has shown itself to be a major force in the field.
CourtAvenue helps businesses accelerate their digital presence. Its clients include companies like Taylor Guitars, Qualcomm and Epson as well as the U.S. Air Force and API Abroad.
Founding Partner
CourtAvenue
CourtAvenue is the fastest-growing private company in San Diego, ranked by percent of verified revenue growth, as reported by the San Diego Business Journal, with a 3,883% growth in revenue from 2020-22.
The company brought in half a million dollars in its first year (2020), grew to $1.3 million in 2021 and last year brought in $21.1 million. Khabie estimates the company will be above $30 million in gross revenue this year. CourtAvenue also grew from 20 to nearly 100 local full-time employees.
“We don’t measure our growth by numbers alone, those are trailing indicators,” Tomlin said. “We measure our growth based on our pipeline of clients and talented people who want to work with CourtAvenue. Those two metrics are a testimony to delivering exceptional work and building a great culture and are the indicators that point toward continued exceptional growth.”
Founding Partner
CourtAvenue
CourtAvenue has worked with clients like Dell Technologies as a strategic digital consulting partner while also taking responsibility for managing other vendors they leveraged. CourtAvenue also helped Kia Automotive run and operate its digital business while working in the field to support Kia’s dealer network.
“We have seen exponential growth at CourtAvenue,” Tomlin said. “There’s no magic formula to explain our growth. It’s simply comes down to hard work and a dedication to delivering exceptional results for our clients.”
CourtAvenue today (Oct. 23) was named AdWeek’s “Fastest Growing Agency” across all tech fields. Agencies large and small from all over the world whose industry presence is on the rise and who have achieved significant growth over the past three years are considered for the distinction by AdWeek.
“This is just the beginning, the first of many chapters, but we sit with a lot of opportunity in front of us and believe the best is to come,” Khabie said. “Being a San Diego company and knowing our company was created and built out of a garage, we take a lot of pride in that.”
Khabie and Tomlin spent part of last week in New York as Tomlin was interviewed about the company’s successes by Nasdaq personnel. Nasdaq will be airing the interview across all its channels, including a video shown in Times Square.
Digital Media Transformation
Khabie started his career in business transformation in 1997 when he created the digital media agency Digitaria Interactive, Inc., which had a client roster that reads like a Who’s Who in the sports and entertainment business world, including Dreamworks, ESPN and the NFL.
After Digitaria was acquired in 2010 by London-based WPP, the world’s largest marketing services holding company, Khabie became a founding partner and global CEO of Mirum, a 2,500-employee digital marketing agency with offices around the world.
Ten years later, out of his Del Mar garage, he started CourtAvenue with former WPP colleague Tomlin, who lives in Texas, with the intent of offering digital strategy, organizational design, brand AOR, e-commerce AOR and product development.
Last month the agency announced the latest addition to its family under the “CourtAvenue Collective” umbrella: Gigantic Playground, a connected experience agency that “seeks to reimagine how we live, work, shop and play,” Khabie said on its behalf, “through experience design, software engineering, emerging technology and IoT connectivity solutions.”
The CourtAvenue Collective is the company’s arm for acquiring and/or starting companies strategically aligned to its core business; it also counts media/creative agency Modifly as part of the collective.
“The partners who created CourtAvenue worked inside one of the largest marketing holding companies and as a result, we believed it was critical to build a foundational business before acquiring companies,” Khabie said. “This has allowed us to focus on our people, build culture, find ways to succeed in a remote and in-person economy, build processes and continue to invest in our growth. Because we have been fortunate enough to be profitable from day one, we have taken a large amount of our capital and pushed it back into our business.”
CourtAvenue is also in the process of building some sophisticated Generative AI software “that we believe will have a major impact on our clients’ business,” Khabie added.
CourtAvenue
FOUNDED: 2020
FOUNDERS: Daniel Khabie, Kenny Tomlin
PARTNERS: Daniel Khabie, Kenny Tomlin, Michael Stich
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Digital Transformation Agency
REVENUE: $32 million
EMPLOYEES: 35 in San Diego and Orange counties; 125 nationally
WEBSITE: courtavenue.com
CONTACT: 844-COURTAVE
SOCIAL IMPACT: Khabie works with the nonprofit Lucky Duck Foundation
NOTABLE: An adjunct professor at San Diego State University, speaking about innovation and marketing, Khabie is also part of the LinkedIn Top Voices program, an invitation-only group of experts across the professional world.
