Running an agency is usually framed as a headcount race. Toronto-based BaD Mktg is testing a different arithmetic: two full-time founders, a bench of freelancers and a pair of AI tools that handle much of the strategy and back office.
The two-person model
Ian Buck and Yotam Dor, who have worked together for at least 15 years, founded BaD Mktg in 2023 after spending years inside holding companies. The name comes from the founders’ last-name initials, and the setup is deliberately small. In three years, the shop has generated more than $2 million in revenue with no retainers and no junior hand-offs.
Buck told Digiday that AI lets the agency function like a team of roughly a dozen staffers. A custom tool called Goodie connects business systems and automates priorities, payments, vendor management and administrative coordination. Human financial checks remain in place by design.
AI as a strategy partner
The pair also built a private assistant inside ChatGPT, loaded with their past work and recorded conversations about the business. The environment is locked down so client material and the founders’ ideas stay private. Buck says the tool generates many rough directions, then the partners use their experience to identify the angles worth pursuing.
“What you see today is the worst it’s ever gonna be,” Buck said of current AI capability.
On the generative side, the agency now pitches concepts with a complete AI-produced spot rather than asking clients to imagine the creative. That visual shortcut, Buck said, helps clients react faster and removes much of the guesswork.
Why the speed matters
For marketing teams, the most striking number is the turnaround: concepting that once took about six weeks can now come back in six days or less. Buck said the founders often sit on finished ideas because sending them too quickly would look suspicious.
- Speed: Concepting drops from six weeks to six days or less.
- Scale: Two founders plus freelancers replace roughly a dozen staffers.
- Guardrails: AI stays locked down and human eyes still approve finances.
What marketers can take from it
The lesson is not that AI removes craft. Buck is clear that human judgement still finds the quality inside a large batch of AI options. The advantage comes from compressing the expensive blank-page phase and automating repetitive operations.
Teams can copy the operating principle without rebuilding an agency: record strategic discussions, train tools on past work, generate many options and apply taste before anything reaches a client.
Source: Digiday
