get chosen
before
the search begins.
We've started, owned, bought, grown, and sold agencies over 40+ years. With $500M+ in new business behind us, we know what it's like in your chair, because we've sat in it.
Now we're bringing that lived experience to agency founders and leaders who want the next move: how consideration sets really form, how pitches are won before they're scheduled, how to build a growth engine that holds up in an AI-shaped market.
We've scaled independent agencies from 1 to 800 people, as founders, owners, acquirers, the acquired, and investors.
We've been on nearly every side of the table this business has.
That's why Cowboy exists. Most agencies don't lose because the work is bad. They lose because they get found too late, framed by someone else, on a list they never should have been on. We work on the decision before the decision, so you're already the obvious call before the search starts.
The outbound shops get you into the search. We give you the strategy to sure you're chosen before it begins.
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Lifetime revenue won through net-new ARR and project sales. Not total account value, just the business we put on the board.
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We've scaled independent agencies from 1 to 800 people, as founders, owners, acquirers, the acquired, and investors. We've been on nearly every side of the table this business has.
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Four decades starting, owning, buying, growing, and selling agencies. We've made the calls you're facing, with our own money on the line.
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Founder, owner, acquirer, acquired, investor. We've sat in each seat, so we read agency growth the way the people across the table actually do.
Advisory Team
Sam Meers
Sam Meers has spent more than 40 years in advertising and marketing, most of them as the person responsible for building the business.
As founder and president of Meers Advertising, he ran an independent agency for 25 years specializing in healthcare and financial services, two categories where the stakes are high, the buyers are sophisticated, and vague positioning is a liability.
Later, after Meers was acquired by BarkleyOKRP, he helped lead one of the most successful new business runs in the history of independent agencies, taking the shop from a regional player to a national competitor going head-to-head with holding company agencies.
Along the way he developed deep expertise in growth strategy, pricing models, new business development, and the kind of positioning work that actually holds up under pressure.
Sam wants Cowboy to give independent agencies access to the same thinking that shaped some of the industry's best growth runs. He works with leaders who are ready to move but want someone who has been out there before riding alongside them. He's a member of the 4As Gold Forum, co-host of the Kansas City Marketing Legends Podcast, and a persistent advocate for change in how agencies position, price, and grow.
Jason Parks
Jason Parks was most recently a partner and Chief Growth Officer at BarkleyOKRP, one of the largest and fastest-growing independent agencies in the country, where he led new business, marketing, and the firm's expanding project and consulting work.
He spent more than a decade shaping the BarkleyOKRP brand, rising from account leadership to EVP and Managing Director before taking on growth leadership for the firm. Earlier in his career he was a partner and idea director at Adamson Advertising, leading campaigns for ESPN, Marmot, and the Missouri Lottery.
As Chief Growth Officer, he was behind one of the strongest new business runs in the independent agency world: 20 new clients in 20 months, helping drive 40% organic growth and record revenue, with wins including Planet Fitness, Winnebago, Haribo, U.S. Bank, and Motel 6.
Jason is one of the most well-versed subject matter experts in the agency growth ecosystem, with relationships across search consultants, industry publications, and network groups. He's come up against nearly every agency in North America, directly or indirectly, and been through almost every business situation there is, which gives him a keen sense of how to play and how to win.
Jason wants Cowboy to help independent agencies win the business they're built to win. He's also an investor in 19York, the "anti-holding" network backing independent agencies on their own terms. A regular voice on the Mirren and ANA stages, he's been named to Kansas City's 40 Under 40 and serves on advisory boards for William Jewell College and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Our Services
Explore our range of services designed to help you move forward with confidence, wherever you're headed next.
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The sharpest version of why a client chooses you, and walks past everyone else. We pressure-test your proposition until it holds up in the room, not just on the site, the way we've built it in categories where vague claims get punished and sophisticated buyers decide fast.
Type: Project
Duration: 3-4 Months
Investment: $$$
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Why growth stalled, and a concrete plan to restart it: where you sit in the consideration set today, where you should, and the route between. We've scaled independent agencies from one person to eight hundred, and made these calls with real stakes, not from a slide.
Type: Project
Duration: 2-3 Months
Investment: $$-$$$
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The plan that puts your agency in front of the right buyers before they ever start a search. Getting chosen before the search begins is the whole reason Cowboy exists, and we've spent careers learning how consideration sets actually form, and how to land inside them early. Built as a one-time strategy or an ongoing engagement.
Type: Project or Retained
Duration: Custom
Investment: $$-$$$
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Win the business you're built to win. Pitch architecture, positioning, and the calls that decide a room, drawn from leading some of the most successful new business runs in independent agency history. For one high-stakes pitch or your whole pipeline.
Type: Project or Retained
Duration: Custom
Investment: $$$-$$$$
What We See
Procurement got smarter. Clients run leaner. By the time a review is announced, the people running it have already talked to peers, scanned the landscape, and formed opinions they won't say out loud. The decision feels open. It mostly isn't.
Agencies still pour their energy into the part of the process that's visible: the brief, the deck, the room. The part that actually decides it happened weeks earlier, in conversations you weren't in.
The buying moment moved, and it didn't move toward you.
Clients are running agency proposals through AI tools to scan, score, and shortlist before a human weighs in. The same tools shape the consideration set itself, pulling from whatever your public footprint says about you. Your positioning gets read by a machine before it's ever read by a person.
Most agencies haven't noticed. They're optimizing for a human evaluator who increasingly arrives with the machine's read already in hand. Get misread by the algorithm and you're cut before anyone champions you.
AI is now a buyer in the room, and it's reading you first.
Walk the websites in any category and the language blurs together: full-service, integrated, strategy-led, results-driven. When everyone makes the same promise, the buyer defaults to the safest, cheapest, or most familiar name. Differentiation collapses right when the shortlist forms.
The agencies that get chosen early aren't louder. They're legible. A client can say what they're for in one sentence, months before a search, which is exactly when it counts.
The quiet killer: look like everyone, chosen by no one.
Ready to Ride?
Our Passion
We're passionate about this industry and the role agencies play in building great businesses, brands, and opportunity. We started Cowboy to help independent agencies grow and thrive on their own terms, drawing on careers spent building and growing agencies ourselves.
