Celebrating 10 Years of Bospar

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I’m Eric Chemi, and this is Politely Pushy. Welcome to Politely Pushy. I’m your host, as always, Eric Chemi. Today, we are celebrating Bospar’s 10-year

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anniversary as we come to the end of the 10-year anniversary year. I remember the firm starting in 2015, and here we are at the end of 2025. So, 10 years fully completely in the books, that calendar year ends. So, I’m joined by the original people who’ve been here the

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entire 10 years with, you know, Tom, Chris, and Curtis. Thanks so much for joining me today. I don’t know how we got all of us at the same time on our calendars. Everyone’s so busy. I’ll start with Chris, the Bo in Bospar. Did you think we’d be here

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at the end of 2025? Bospar would have made it through its first decade and survived all the ups and downs of the economic recessions and COVID and the big VC bubbles and and and booms and the bus and all of that. Here we are standing today. We’re all still alive.

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>> It’s been a heck of a 10 years, hasn’t it? Yeah. You know, I think we we when we started Bospar, we were thinking Bospar forever and um that’s the kind of ride that you’re always getting if you’re in the tech business. So, a lot has happened to us, but I think you can

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define us by where tech goes. That’s where Bospar is always riding the wave right in front of it. So, it’s been exciting, but it’s all felt just like it should have felt. When you all started, I’ll send this to Curtis. When you started, what

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was the goal? Was the goal, hey, in 10 years, I want to have a certain size or certain revenue, a number of clients, number of employees. Did you have a goal or was it just so overwhelming at the beginning that it’s just let’s just try to get through the first year?

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>> I think it was a bit more of the overwhelming and let’s just try to get it through the first year. And we, you know, at that time really had our heads down about making sure that we were getting the work. And the thing is is that once we announced this new uh company,

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our clients came out of the woodwork from all different places to work with us. And so it was really kind of a gold rush, if you will, about how our company was going to grow. And so we were so caught up in the momentum and so caught up in what was happening to us that we

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didn’t really seem to think, oh, we’ll be here 10 years, we’ll be here 20 years. We were just thinking about how can we capture all this new business and all this excitement. >> I think part of it was that we were thinking about ways that we can offer a

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more capable service. I mean we the three of us have been together even longer than the 10 years and we came from a larger agency which in many ways was less capable than what we are able to be because we are directly involved in the client work and uh we are able to

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deliver the senior level work every day and so I think that’s one uh of the driving forces where we thought gosh we really need to do this >> um point is a really good one you know when we first started all our clients and former Our clients were like, “Oh my

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god, you know, we have to have been working with a big firm to get a little of you. Now you will be literally our client contacts. That’s pretty amazing.” And really that stayed theme of Bospar for the last 10 years. I mean, we’re as an organization as flat as it comes and

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we love the business and doing the client work as much as we did the day we walked into it. >> What is that challenge of keeping that touch from the leadership? So you have to keep it small enough to do that, but you want to grow the business, but you

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don’t want to turn it into one of these giant global mega companies where all of a sudden leadership is not actually involved in any of the clients. How do you find that balance? >> Anyone? Well, I I’ll go first. I think actually the size that we’re at now,

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which I guess is okay to say, we’re, you know, in excess of 12 million a year, which is a lot of space to be able to have people of all kinds of skills and talents to bring together. But at the same time, I mean, if you have a good team, it’s really easy to stay

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completely involved, whether it’s regular team meetings with the client and internal or just the power of virtual. I mean, it’s much easier to stay close to your clients virtually in our environment than it ever was in bricks and mortar. >> Yeah. I mean, I think just managed

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growth has been really, really important to us and that we are structured in a way that allows us to do that. And so, we’ve not necessarily defined ourselves by practice areas uh as much as we have by working groups so that we can be involved in everything. And so that’s

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allowed us to be nimble enough to have even launched um a new uh offering around AI search optimization and you know things that larger companies just can’t get under development as quickly as we have. But we know things are moving so fast right now with uh AI and

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really what’s kind of defined 2025 behind us has been this gold rush that we’ve been able to seize upon by hiring the right people and creating the right technologies. >> Who would have thought 10 years ago no one’s talking about AI content? COVID

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wasn’t a thing. Like so many things have happened that have put businesses and industries just out of business in this past decade. What are some changes that you’ve had to make? I’ll go to Curtis with this one. Changes that you thought 10 years ago, okay, we’re going to set

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it up this way, but we need to structure it differently. We need to hire differently. We need a different kind of culture. Was there anything big like that that you had to course correct while running the company? You know, early on we thought that we would have

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one person who would handle all of Bospar’s marketing, their CMO stuff, and we found that eventually it just made so much more sense to distribute that work throughout the various teams and people who were doing that. And so that’s something that we have seen work much

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better nowadays. I think that partly the nature of remote work makes certain things a lot easier than if you were going to have an office or a desk. And so that whole spirit of remote first has really changed how we look at solving tasks and how we look at staffing

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teams nowadays. We think it makes a lot of sense to make sure that each team has people both in the east and west coast because you want to ensure that your teams are getting that sort of start of the news day coverage. Whereas, you know, when we were first starting out,

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we were, you know, a little bit conventional in our thinking that, you know, this is the, you know, finance team, they’re all hubbed in New York and this is the tech team, they’re all hubbed in San Francisco. But since we have evolved, we’ve really seen the

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benefit of the virtual model in terms of how it is a client service uh multiplier. >> Yeah. And I think we’re doing it in a way that maintains a specific kind of culture. Culture isn’t something that you just proclaim. It’s something that you practice. And so we are able to get

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together in groups all across the country all the time. And we are finding that that has really helped a lot in terms of making sure that folks stay connected with each other and are even kind of friends outside of the workplace. >> What about the future the next 10 years?

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Right. A lot of companies they get to this size then they look for a transaction. The owners look for an exit. Hey, we’re going to sell to a bigger company. We we got to we got to do other things with our life. We’ve done 10. I don’t want to do 20. What are

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the conversations behind the scenes among among the the three of you in leadership thinking about, you know, what what does that look like? Because because you can’t do it forever. >> I mean, you can’t do it forever, but you can do it for a mighty long time. And I

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think the thing is is that for a lot of us, I don’t know if there’s a thought that, you know, well, what would we do? Would we just, you know, sit on our douffs and, you know, do nothing? I just can’t imagine that. And I was talking with my husband Bryce about this uh when

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one company with a really good reputation said that you know they would love to you know come and knocking and he was like just what would you do? I don’t understand that. I just you don’t even have hobbies. So what what >> Bryce is like I do not want you in the house.

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You’re going to go to work every day. [laughter] You know, when we worked with Tetris, one of the things we discovered is a lot of people were saying that, well, I went back into tech or I went back into gaming because, you know, my, you know, wife or husband just complained about me

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doing nothing other than sitting at home watching TV. And I think that’s the same thing. You got to have some reason to do something every day. >> There’s always something on the horizon, too, to get excited about. I mean, when we’re thinking about what we’re looking

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at for the next five years, whatever it is, there’s a lot of opportunity here to become an a leader in AI search optimization, moving into regulated industries like financial services, cyber security. There’s so much happening that there’s no reason there’s

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no reason to stop because there’s always something exciting to do. >> And Chris, you were going to say something. >> Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. I mean, why on earth would you give up something? We have like the best of all worlds here, you You know, we have a

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thriving business, so we’re all doing very well from it, but we have the time of our life. I mean, why would we want to go to something lesser than what we have at Bospar 10 years into this game? People do crazy stuff all the time. Is there is there is there

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a moment you look back uh back to in terms of like ah like an aha moment like oh my goodness, like we’re doing it. We’ve got all these people now. We’re we’re doing it. we’ve signed a big client or like something where it all of a sudden crystallized maybe a couple

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years in that this is really real and concrete. I think it was 2018 when we won PR week’s outstanding boutique agency uh of the year award >> and so that was uh 20 what whatever year it was a long time ago we won the uh PR week’s outstanding boutique agency of the year award

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>> pull it up Curtis which one is it >> it’s one of the now many awards behind Curtis but the very first one was >> 2018 one >> yeah I feel like that was a very defining moment and then we most recently won just best place to work awards and so I think those

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certain things I think quite validate us. >> Any other moments? Just for nostalgia’s sake, one of my best moments I still remember was about a year into this and we still we were virtual from the day we opened our doors, but we got together occasionally and it was in my apartment

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and it was a two-bedroom apartment and about a year into it, we had about 20 people and we were having an all day session and in the living room it was full of people and whiteboards and then in the first bedroom that was set up as a little conference room where people

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could do their cell phone calls in each corner. And in the other bedroom, we had a photographer taking our pictures because we had never put any staff pictures on our website yet. And that was the entire apartment. Every room of it was just brimming with Bospar

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mushrooming here. And we’ve had many wonderful experiences, but that to me will always capsulate what we are. And it still feels that way. It still feels as good as it did that day. >> Curtis, what about you? moment that stands out? I know you you showed us the

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PR award. Is there any other moments that stand out for you? >> Well, the whole reason we started winning awards was when we were in a new business presentation and someone said, “I don’t know. I need my agency to swap ideas at the water cooler.” And if

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anyone’s ever visited any agency water cooler, that’s gross. Those water coolers are disgusting. But that really was the moment where I thought we really need to show that we are award-winning. And just today as we’re recording this, we won or we were nominated for 11

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different categories by PR week and we are keeping up with some of the biggest uh agencies in the world who are hundreds of times larger than us. And so my point to that guy later on was because we don’t have a water cooler, we’re able to invest in people and

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that’s what’s truly award-winning. I have heard stories from founders, you know, leadership teams who have said the the startup culture, starting a business was so much harder in reality than I thought it was going to be. And if I’d known it was going to be this hard, I

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never would have done it. Do you three agree with that? In in hindsight, was this harder than you guessed? Or was it easier than you guessed it would be? >> It’s harder.>> If you knew it was this hard, if you knew it was going to be this hard, in

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hindsight, would you have still done it? [snorts] you know, I was interviewing for a job uh at uh real chemistry and or you know the previous name of its you know previous iteration and during that meeting they kept on hammering well you need to treat this as your own shop and

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you need to do it as if this was your own place and you need to show ownership and finally I just said you know what I want to save you all a lot of time you’ve convinced me I need to start my own shop and I think we should just leave this interview here and I’ll just,

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you know, let you find someone else. And >> did you really do that? Did you just say that and walk out? >> I did. I did. It was it was an absurd moment to me as they just kind of grinded and hit their hand and stared at me and it was almost like it was they

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were creating percussion with that. And so after that, you know, I called the team and said, you know, I I think we should do this. And so I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say that it’s easy because it’s not. And when you’re starting out, everything is a big deal. Whether you’re on a

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different, you know, call and someone’s calling you, someone might interpret that as, oh, you don’t have enough bandwidth. Where you might have a calendar invite and the uh Zoom line is not correct. Oh, well, that might signify that you don’t have the technology. When you start out,

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everything is a signal for something bigger. And sometimes that something bigger is merely your own fear or insecurity. But to say that it is a walk in the park or it’s really easy is is frankly silly because there are so many things about starting a new business

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that you don’t know until you do it. And then as you’re doing it, you’re needing to create the muscle memory and the procedures so that you can do it the next day and do it easier and get other people to do it too. Doing a podcast like this as a new business would be

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quite daunting because there would be all these other things to do. But because Tom, Chris, and I have created a rich team who has muscle memory as well, we’re able to do things like this. And that’s what really makes a company like this magical is we’re able to scale

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because we have a lot of trust with each other and we’ve also brought up a lot of people to be as politely pushy as we are. >> Politely pushy. Any other final words from Chris or Tom or does everyone need to get back to work? >> I would just say that creativity beats

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size every time and so I’m proud that we’ve been able to work together for so long as we have and that we’re also still directly involved in everything we do. Yeah. And I I would just say yes, it’s hard and especially hard was you know we wrote the book on virtual. Okay. We and

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we’re probably still the only agency of size that is 100% virtual. That has taken work every minute that we are awake thinking about how you do business in that model to deliver the best. And everyone went through COVID but who ever saw AI coming. I mean six seven years

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ago we had our first neural networks client. That’s about when we were first jumping into cloud. What the heck was that all going to mean? So, you know, my favorite mantra is only when you learn how to see the invisible can you do the impossible. And that’s what our world’s

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about. And how would you ever do that except if you had control of your own destiny, which is what we have. And I’m certainly proud of my fellow founders here. I think we’ve done a fabulous job of defining our first 10, and we’re going to do even better job defining the next 10. So,

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>> on to the next 10. Well, happy new year. >> Looking forward to it. >> Happy New Year everybody. And the the next decade uh begins here. So, thanks everybody. Have a good day. >> You too. Thank you. >> Thank you to my guest and thanks for listening. Subscribe to get the latest

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episodes each week and we’ll see you next time.