He Built Hawke Media Into a $600M-a-Year Agency

Where He Started

Erik had already built and sold two e-commerce companies before he started Hawke Media in January 2014. His pitch was simple: “I’m your outsourced CMO, and I’ve got a team behind me, and we can do this.” He’d bring in the client, hand the work to his business partner and a small team, and they’d go figure it out.

The first marketing expense he ever made was custom glasses, a buck apiece, handed out everywhere. He worked three days a week out of a Starbucks and two days a week out of a desk at an LA incubator called Amplify, where the guy running it overheard him hustling on calls and introduced him to a friend’s fast-growing furniture company, Lulu and Georgia. That became his first big client from a fee perspective, and he’s still friends with the founder today. A sunglass brand he took on around the same time became the second.

The first $10 million came in months, not years. Erik says the timing helped, Red Bull called him directly asking for help with “this digital stuff,” because in 2014 almost nobody in a big company understood it yet. His early financial framework has barely moved since: 30% of revenue back into growth, 35% into servicing clients, 15% into overhead, and a 20% EBITDA target, though he says Hawke actually runs closer to 22-23% EBITDA today.

The Client That Almost Broke Him

Not everything in the early days worked. Erik signed a client called 1015 Store for about $30,000 a month in fees in his first month in business, real money for a company that barely existed yet. He brought in an old business partner to manage the account, and that partner burned the relationship and blew it up within a month.

He kept hiring anyway and kept hustling for the next client. There was a second hard lesson a little later: one of his first clients couldn’t afford to keep paying him and offered equity instead. Erik took it, spent three years doing work for that stake, and one of those deals eventually sold, but as he puts it, it “wasn’t a lot to show for it.” His rule now is that Hawke will sometimes discount for equity, but it never waives its fees for it. “You realize people that are willing to give you equity don’t actually value their own business,” he says. The company still has to be capitalized before ownership is worth anything.

The System Behind the Growth

Hawke doesn’t sell a package. It sells itself as an outsourced CMO and marketing team that audits a company for free, figures out where the actual gaps are, and then deploys whatever combination of Meta ads, Google ads, web design, influencer marketing, PR or branding the audit points to. Erik says the lack of a typical engagement is a hard thing to build structure around, but it’s what the company has done for twelve years.

That model runs on data. Because of how Hawke’s contracts are written, the agency has collected real-time media and revenue data across its client base for a decade. It now has over 1,000 companies it has worked with in this year alone, and around 7,000 companies’ worth of marketing and revenue data flowing through its pipes. That data feeds Hawke AI, a tool the company started building in March of 2022, before ChatGPT existed, which now runs instant SWOT-style diagnostics on a client’s performance against the wider market. Hawke also sells access to it to other agencies for $250 per brand per month.

Growth has come from three places: Hawke’s own performance marketing on itself, relationships and referral partnerships, and acquisitions. Hawke has acquired 23 agencies so far, typically in the $1 to $5 million revenue range, looking for ambitious founders who want to be freed up to grow rather than run day-to-day operations. Erik is candid that acquisitions haven’t been the majority of growth, closer to 20% of the business once folded in, but the two biggest clients Hawke has ever signed both came through acquired founders.

Two and a half years ago, Erik also reversed the industry’s drift toward fully remote work. He opened a small “training wheels” office in Santa Monica with about 10 people, then moved the growing team into a 12,000 square foot former Headspace office he negotiated well under market rate. He required new sales and marketing hires to work in office. It cost him some people who preferred to stay remote, and he’s fine with that trade. The team in that office alone has since grown from 13 to around 60.

Where It Stands Now

Hawke Media runs marketing for around 600 brands at once and has worked with over 6,000 companies across 12 years. Last year’s gross revenue was $621 million, a number that includes client ad spend and budgets passed through Hawke, not just its own fees, which Erik is upfront about when he reports it. The company employs 220 people, runs a venture fund that has invested in over 100 companies, and wrote a book, “The Hawke Method,” now taught at Columbia and NYU.

Erik still hires by looking for people willing to work harder than most. He cites a stat he uses in interviews, that 98.2% of people would rather work 25 hours a week for $125,000 a year than 70 hours a week for $300,000. He wants the other 1.8%. The company’s reputation has also started doing work on its own: after a client cussed out his team over an issue Hawke didn’t even manage, and Erik fired the client, that same person later badmouthed Hawke at an industry event and got shut down by other people in the room who knew the work Hawke had actually done.

What Made It Work