“I wouldn’t buy a company where the founder leaves right away.”
An agency’s value depends on the people who do the work and the clients who trust them. For Tim Ringel, buying the business means understanding those relationships and giving people a reason to stay. At Meet The People, that starts well before a deal closes and shapes how founders work together afterwards.
Ringel started his first agency at 20 and later led marketing businesses at NetBooster and IPG. Now co-founder and Group CEO of Meet The People, he is building an agency group across the United States and Canada. He spoke with Startup Researcher about choosing founders, sharing ownership and turning acquisitions into growth.
Choosing businesses and founders
What opportunity did you see when you started Meet The People?
There was a gap in the middle of the agency market. A brand with a few hundred million dollars in revenue could feel insignificant inside a huge holding company, but its needs were too broad for a small independent agency.
At the same time, marketing was becoming more fragmented. A chief marketing officer had more platforms to understand and more specialists to coordinate. We wanted to bring those capabilities together while still giving clients access to people who knew their particular discipline.
We started about five years ago. Today, we have 12 operating companies and around 850 people across the United States and Canada.
How did you choose the first agencies to build that group around?
We looked for established businesses with strong reputations that were struggling financially during the pandemic. An agency that has been around for 30 or 40 years can have a reputation you could not quickly build yourself.
Our first acquisitions were VSA Partners in Chicago and Match in Canada. Both had major clients and years of experience behind them. Match was exposed to physical retail, which was having a particularly difficult time. We believed the underlying businesses were good and turned both from loss-making to profitable within about 18 months.
That gave us enough scale to start building. We then added healthier companies at fair market prices. Throughout that process, the same consideration applied: in services, most of the value sits in people’s knowledge and relationships. You have to understand who holds that value before you buy.
What do you need to understand about the founders before committing?
I start by asking why they want to sell. Founders often tell you they are all best friends, business is going well and the pipeline is full. Then why change anything?
As you spend time together, you may discover that one founder wants to keep growing while another wants to slow down, or that a client relationship is less secure than it first appeared. I have met some founders 10 or 14 times before closing. We have also walked away about a month before a deal because something did not feel right.
That is why Tom, my co-founder, and I keep the acquisition work in house, with one colleague supporting us. We outsource legal and tax diligence, but we want to understand the people and clients ourselves. Tom challenges the numbers; I focus more on the founders’ motivations. Before our Dallas acquisition, I also met the largest clients in person to understand their relationships with the team.
Keeping founders invested after the sale
What role do you want founders to have after selling?
Normally, I would not buy a company if the founder planned to leave immediately. Someone who has spent 20 years building a business has a strong connection to its people, its clients, and its reputation. I want that commitment to continue.
We try to let founders keep running their businesses independently, even though we own 100% of them. We do not usually overrule them unless we have a good reason.
They also gain peers. Being an entrepreneur can be lonely, and it is difficult to discuss your problems with competitors. In the group, founders can talk to people who have been through similar experiences. We introduce prospective sellers to founders who have already joined us, so they can hear directly what that relationship is like.
How do you get those founders to care about the wider group?
The deal has to encourage it. We do not use earnouts because tying a founder’s payout to their own agency’s performance keeps their attention on that agency’s profit and loss. We want them to introduce colleagues to clients and help other businesses in the group grow.
Instead, founders roll part of their ownership into equity in the parent company. If an agency 5,000 miles away wins a client, they benefit too. That gives them a reason to think beyond the business they sold.
We usually extend equity to key people in the second management layer as well. These are the people holding client relationships and important knowledge, regardless of title. We ask founders to share part of the opportunity with them. For someone who has worked in an agency for 10 years without owning any of it, having equity in the wider group changes their connection to the business.
Making the agencies work together
Does shared ownership make collaboration happen straight away?
It takes time. Finance, HR, and benefits have become repeatable parts of integration for us. The harder work is getting people to look beyond their own agency. Founders can initially be protective of their teams, and people need to meet colleagues before they feel comfortable working with them.
At a conference we hosted in New York, people from different agencies met colleagues doing similar work whom they had never spoken to. Those encounters help them see who they could work with and what they could do together.
We also have to listen when an integration plan does not make sense for a team. In Dallas, I wanted a change completed by year-end. The team explained that it would disrupt a client, so we moved it into the following year. We control the timetable. There is no reason to create unnecessary risk just to meet a date we set ourselves.
How does that cooperation translate into new business?
VSA is a good example. Clients approach it because of its reputation in creative work. Once that relationship exists, VSA can introduce them to our media agencies or a team that builds websites. Those agencies gain introductions while continuing to win clients of their own.
It is a very human process, and sometimes a chaotic one. I help make connections and stay involved with our largest clients, but I have to trust the agency leaders to run their businesses. Otherwise, I would be trying to run 12 companies myself.
In our July figures, 42.9% of net revenue involved clients working with more than one company in the group. We are growing 27% organically this year. After five years of building these relationships, we are seeing the businesses work together in the way we intended.
Beyond client introductions, what can agencies gain from joining the group?
They can access investments that would be difficult to fund independently. We spend around US$1 million a year building AI technology for clients and another US$1 million acquiring research and audience data. That helps our agencies do better work and deepen client relationships.
For example, our proprietary tools combine Google Analytics and Salesforce data to assess how a client’s next US$10 million in marketing spending should perform. Work that might take analysts, researchers and planners six months can be done within 24 hours. Our people can then spend more time executing the work.
That is how I think about AI. It gives us the ability to do things we could not do before. It can change jobs and take on the heavy work of making sense of data, but we still need people to build client relationships and take responsibility for delivering results.
Choosing what to build next
Does AI also change the kinds of agencies you want to buy?
Yes. We have deliberately avoided buying production agencies focused on disposable social content. Clients are already reluctant to pay for that work, many want to do it with AI, and the agency carries the reputational risk if something goes wrong.
Our business depends on executing ideas and being responsible for the revenue they generate. AI can help us do that work. But when we consider an acquisition, we also have to understand which parts of its business are being disrupted.
That is why the ability to invest in our own technology matters. If every agency relies on the same off-the-shelf tool, where is the differentiation?
What will it take to scale the group over the next few years?
My ambition is to build a billion-dollar business over the next three to five years through acquisitions and organic growth. That could mean roughly tripling our team to around 2,500 people. But the way we manage the group has to change as we grow.
Having 12 companies report directly to Tom and me is already too much. We are giving leaders responsibility across several businesses while keeping the agency brands. On the media side, one CEO already oversees three agencies and handles most of the day-to-day issues. We will extend that approach elsewhere.
We can also grow by making larger acquisitions, rather than simply doing more deals. I still want to spend the time understanding the people we would be working with.
I know the longer-term goal, but I do not have a fixed blueprint for every step. Each acquisition brings different people, clients and capabilities. The organization has to keep adapting to what we have built and what we buy next.