Geoff Wasserman on growing The Brand Leader and giving people room to lead.

Wasserman founded The Brand Leader in 1999 after several years working in financial planning while taking on marketing projects at night and on weekends. Earlier sports marketing roles with the Expos and Braves had introduced him to the work he enjoyed. Relationships continued after those jobs, including work for the Greenville Braves and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Before leaving his day job, he asked existing clients whether they would hire him full time. Their interest gave him a starting point, although the decision still meant giving up a comfortable income and a recent promotion. He describes the transition as a decisive leap after a long period of testing the work.

Looking back, he distinguishes getting himself a dependable job from building a company that could operate beyond him. He initially became the account team, copywriter, and art director. That arrangement produced work and revenue, but it also placed limits on what colleagues could learn and what the business could become.

One change Wasserman would make is spending time inside an established agency before founding his own. He believes that working under experienced leaders would have exposed him to processes, client relationships, and management practices that he had to discover gradually. Early employees learned largely from him, which meant his own blind spots became the organization’s blind spots.

He later found outside perspective through a monthly peer group of CEOs, consultants, and mentors. Those conversations covered personal life as well as contracts, operations, and culture. He also describes advice from Joe Erwin that took years to fully appreciate: some recommendations became useful only when he and the company were ready to act on them.

The practical lesson is to keep useful advice available even when the timing is wrong. Repeated problems eventually reveal a pattern. When that pattern becomes clear, an earlier conversation can become the basis for a decision.

As The Brand Leader expanded, Wasserman sought leaders whose experience differed from his. The conversation describes a mix of agency veterans and people who had worked inside major brands. That combination helped the team understand both how an agency delivers work and how a client decides what to keep in house or assign to an outside partner.

He also credits younger colleagues with asking questions that experienced people can stop asking. Someone with a few years of experience may see a different way to organize a project without assuming the established approach is necessary.

That variety requires a founder to accept that other voices will connect with employees and clients differently. Wasserman treats this as a source of growth. Shared values can remain consistent while styles, backgrounds, and approaches vary.

Wasserman says the newer leadership team made decisions more quickly and more frequently than he had. He connects that pace with humility: leaders need to be able to tell a client or colleague that a choice was wrong, take responsibility, and change direction.

This does not mean ignoring experience or research. He describes several experienced people examining important decisions and consulting peers before acting. Confidence about the direction can coexist with questions about what the team might be missing.

For founders, the useful distinction is between delegating a task and accepting another person’s judgment. A team cannot develop real authority if every unfamiliar choice returns to the founder for approval.

For much of the agency’s history, Wasserman says its headcount moved between roughly seven and seventeen people. He describes those years as repeating a similar business cycle. Moving into a new phase required him to separate his identity from the company and recognize that his existing role was limiting the organization.

Instead of attending every employee and client meeting while gradually handing over responsibility, he deliberately stopped attending many of them. That gave new leaders space to establish relationships and a working culture without everyone checking what Geoff thought.

His role shifted toward the company’s future, while other leaders concentrated on daily operations. The arrangement still required collaboration, but it gave both immediate delivery and longer-term planning a clear owner. He describes finding more satisfaction in supporting the team from behind than he had expected.

Growth also required hiring before every role was covered by new client revenue. Wasserman recalls adding eleven people when a more conservative approach might have added three. The company planned to lose money for a period while it built the team and processes needed for larger opportunities.

He presents that as a considered decision made with an existing base of clients and discussions about their future needs. It was a financial risk with preparation behind it. He wanted to avoid repeatedly winning work and then scrambling to find the people to deliver it.

The same reasoning applied to separating jobs that had previously belonged to one person. Account management and project management serve different purposes. Art direction and design also require different kinds of attention. More focused roles helped the company build capacity without expecting every employee to do everything.

The agency’s investment in people included mental health support, benefits, and trust in how employees completed their work. Wasserman connects these choices to a broader effort to improve the quality of life inside the company.

Financial transparency became another part of that effort. He says the team began seeing monthly revenue, expenses, profit or loss, and budget information, while individual salaries remained private. Employees could then understand why a spending decision made sense or why the business needed to find new work.

Sharing difficult information also created opportunities for help. Wasserman recalls that when financial pressure became visible, colleagues offered client ideas and possible solutions. Problems that had felt like the founder’s private burden became work the team could understand and address together.

Wasserman uses three categories to examine work: tasks someone does badly, tasks they do well, and tasks where they have an exceptional ability. He wants people to spend more time in the third category. Simply removing the tasks they struggle with can still leave them too busy doing work someone else could handle.

Later in the conversation, he connects that approach with identity. His faith, family, friendships, and enjoyment of helping potential become reality gave him a way to understand himself beyond his title. That made it easier to reconsider his responsibilities and let other people receive credit.

He wants colleagues to have similar freedom. Someone may want to move from writing into design, discuss a mental health difficulty, or pursue a role the company cannot offer. He describes being willing to help an employee connect with another organization when that is the appropriate next step.

The closing image of guarding the door captures the cost of trying to prevent every departure. Wasserman argues that a founder can offer a good environment, treat people with respect, and remain clear about values. People then have room to decide whether they belong there.