Everyone Wants the Whales: A Conversation with Taylor Wilson

For most of us, marketing is about getting noticed. After twenty years in it, Taylor Wilson decided the harder problem isn't getting attention, it's figuring out what actually deserves it. She has worked every side of the problem, enterprise and nonprofits, product marketing, growth, operations, and eventually her own agency, and then did something more interesting with what she learned: she turned a traditional growth and branding agency into a creative team you can rent on demand, without building the whole machine yourself. Her bet is simple. Companies don't need more people, they need access to the right people at the right time. We talked about agency models, brand versus revenue, AI, and what happens when producing content gets easy but standing out gets hard.

The gap she kept running into

Across every size and type of company she worked in-house for, one thing stayed true: there was always a gap in hands to get things done. At a 2,000-person company she had a product marketing title, a small team, and a decent budget. At a five-person startup it was just her and the CEO. At nonprofits big and small, the same shortfall. And the way out never fit. A million-dollar-a-year agency was out of the question for the small shops, and even the big ones wouldn't hand over that budget or approve another hire. So you were left hoping a freelancer was good, and still available six months later, or figuring it out yourself. Creative Shizzle is her answer: take what she'd learned about offshore talent, building creative teams, and doing the work herself in Canva, and offer an on-demand creative team people can hire month to month at an accessible price. Nobody in the agency world seemed to want to solve that, because they all want the 10-to-30-thousand-a-month retainers. She built it for people like her, the ones with a CEO breathing down their neck, results to hit, and no budget.

More salmon than whales

Agencies chase whales for the same reason SaaS companies prefer enterprise logos: it's comfortable. Charge 250 an hour, land a handful of big accounts, keep doing what has always been done. Taylor's read is that it's both habit and a reluctance to be disrupted. Her own path hasn't been easy and she's still optimizing plenty, but the premise holds: there just aren't that many whales compared with all the salmon swimming around, and the smaller fish need help. People have laughed in her face about the margins, asking how she makes any money working with small businesses, and sometimes she wobbles, but she keeps landing in the same place. She's onto something.

Selling a team, not a project

From the outside, a subscription for design and content looks clean. From the inside the operations are brutal, because the work flies in fast and everyone wants it yesterday. The hardest part is managing expectations on turnaround and revisions, so the rule is simple: one project at a time until it's right, and once you approve it, they move on. Two deliberate choices keep it running. First, the project-management system is the business, and rather than build their own, they run on monday.com, a platform clients already know, so there's instant familiarity. Second, no hourly billing. The creative-as-a-service model is priced on volume, how many things you need done at once. Plans start at a single active project; finish and approve it, and they pull the next item from your queue, which you can stock with ten or twenty projects in an hour. High-volume clients get a custom subscription. The paradigm shift trips some people up, "wait, what counts as a project?", so there's a little education to do, but it works.

The gap between a great brand and revenue

The disconnect founders feel between a great brand and actual revenue is, in her words, the holy grail. Marketing is a giant machine with a lot of switches, and people tend to flip only one or two, or they don't give it time. You turn the brand on, put it in front of everyone, and then you have to keep building trust through content, through how you market, through how you sell, and it compounds on itself. The trouble is everyone wants fast results: we put the blog up, why aren't there a thousand new visitors? She cited a stat from Donald Miller, whose StoryBrand community she's a certified guide in: something north of 80% of CEOs don't trust their CMO, a stark contrast to the near-automatic trust CEOs extend their CTO, you're the technical one, go figure it out. With marketing there's a persistent misunderstanding of how long trust takes to build, colliding with constant pressure for leads right now.

I offered a line I once saw in a shop in Turkey: if it's fast, it won't be good, and if it's good, it won't be fast. Her version is the brain surgeon, ten to fifteen years of school and residency because you want them to do a good job. Marketing is no different. It takes time to perfect, demands constant testing, and the humans you're marketing to keep changing, which is exactly what the rest of the company so often fails to see.

The TED talk and the imposter

Her TED talk has around 300,000 views, and I wanted to know whether a number like that changes how she thinks about her own message. It's validating, she said, proof she hit a nerve, but it sits right next to the imposter voice asking why she's the one saying this, a voice most people making content know well. She's been away from that stage for a while and feels ready to go back and build on it. There's a funny side effect too: she'll rewatch the talk, having forgotten her own lines, and catch herself thinking, that was a good one, I came up with that? The reason it landed, she believes, is that she put herself in it, talking about an illness that stopped her in her tracks. Everyone has their version of the thing that comes out of the blue and stops them, which is what made it relatable.

Treat people right, and growth follows

Ask her what number she was aiming for by now and you get an unusual answer: there isn't one. She's never run the business on a guiding-light metric the way most marketers, salespeople, and CEOs do, chasing the next KPI. She takes it as it comes, handles each growth moment or challenge as it arrives, and moves a baby step a day. It grew organically to about twenty people within two years, then retracted, and is now growing again. The premise underneath isn't a target, it's a behavior: treat people right, your customers, your team, and yourself, and growth falls into place. When she catches herself not living that out, the business suffers, so the work is to keep tapping into the mindset of building a happy culture.

She extends the same logic to protecting the team as a whole, not just each person, which sometimes means recognizing that one bad apple can throw the entire thing off. And she's clear-eyed that the model's flexibility, hiring into a growth spurt, pausing when contracts thin out, only works on a foundation of honesty. Telling adults the plain truth, "we're in a lull, stick with me, we'll figure it out", never costs you their faith. Trying to engineer around it does. She's blunt that the founder's hardest, least-anticipated job is the small awful decisions, telling someone there's no money for a role right now, and that it rips her apart. My wife, an entrepreneur, calls running a business chewing glass every day: some days it crunches off, some days it sticks in your teeth. Taylor adopted the phrase immediately. It is not for the faint of heart.

How the leads actually come

For the agency, growth has been overwhelmingly relationship-based and word of mouth, and only now, after enough time in the market, is a referral ripple effect kicking in. When she started it was just her, doing all the work, and what carried it was years of building a personal brand on LinkedIn, speaking at conferences, meeting people in person, long before she launched. That's the backbone. Paid ads are only a recent experiment. Her caution for anyone dreaming of going independent after a layoff: don't test the water with both feet. Launching off years of relationships and reputation is a different sport than coming out of nowhere to open an agency cold. It can be done, but it's a long, relationship-heavy game.

Human plus AI, not human versus AI

AI is making creative production dramatically cheaper, which raises the obvious question for someone whose whole company makes creative production accessible: does AI make Creative Shizzle more valuable, or does it erase the reason to pay her? She's not scared, maybe, she jokes, because we've already established a level of crazy here, she chews glass. Her bet is that pairing humans with AI is powerful, and it's already letting them do things for small-business clients that were previously unaffordable. A commercial that looks like it has real people in it used to be a hundred-thousand-dollar production; now they can make it with AI. For a business built around the small end of the market, that's room to scale up, not a threat.

The content reckoning

When content becomes effectively free and infinite, the game changes. For a long time the play was quantity, post ten times a day, grow by volume. With limitless AI output, we're already drowning in what people are calling AI slop, and Taylor expects a content marketing day of reckoning. It has to be good, and relevant to the specific person you're trying to reach. The goal shifts from training the algorithm that you're out there the most to training it that you're here for the right people, consistently. Consistency, quality, and relevance are about to matter far more than raw volume.

My own addition, which she agreed with: the real differentiator will be the unscripted conversation. If all your thinking comes from an LLM, you can't hold a no-holds-barred discussion without the guardrails falling away, and people are sharp enough, and disdainful enough of slop, to spot it. You can parrot the surface because it's just words, but you can't fake the experience of having built a business, hired and fired people, and run payroll and billing. Taylor had lived the proof. She hired another agency this year to raise her Instagram output, scripted content on subjects she genuinely knows, and still it felt wrong. She quit after two months even though she'd prepaid for a third, because she gets far more joy, and better results, holding up her phone and talking about something she actually did. People like that content more anyway, and they see through the bullcrap. Her corollary ties it back to consistency: if the work doesn't give you energy, you won't keep doing it, so why do it at all.

The do-over

If she started again today with no brand, no clients, no team, and 100K in the bank, the change she'd make is about focus. Chasing clients and revenue, you say yes to projects you know aren't the right fit, and those detours never work out well, not for her team, not for the client, because you end up building the plane while flying it, and, in her words, chewing glass on the plane. The lesson is a harder no.

Key takeaways

Build for the salmon, not the whales. The market everyone ignores, small businesses and nonprofits, is enormous. An on-demand, subscription creative team serves it at a price a retainer never could.

Price on volume, not hours. One active project at a time, pulled from a queue the client stocks, approved before the next begins. It removes the hourly-billing friction and sets clear expectations.

A great brand is not revenue on its own. Marketing is a machine of many switches, and trust compounds slowly. Most of the disconnect is impatience colliding with a demand for leads now.

Treat people right as the growth strategy. No guiding-light KPI, just a happy culture and radical honesty with the team. When she stops living it, the business feels it.

The volume era is ending. Infinite AI content means a reckoning toward quality and relevance. The unfakeable edge is lived experience you can defend in an unscripted conversation.

Frameworks worth stealing

The project queue

Replace hourly billing and vague scoping with a volume-based subscription. The client fills a queue with as many projects as they want; the team works one at a time, finishes it, gets approval, and only then moves to the next. It makes turnaround and revisions legible to everyone, keeps the team focused, and scales cleanly into a custom plan when a client's volume climbs. Pair it with an off-the-shelf tool clients already know, like monday.com, rather than building your own, so onboarding is instant.

Radical honesty with your team

A flexible team, hiring into growth, pausing in a lull, only survives on plain truth. When work thins out, say it directly: we're in a lull, stick with me, we'll figure it out. Adults respect the honesty and keep the faith. The damage comes from trying to engineer around the hard conversation, which is also the founder job nobody warns you about and the one that hurts most.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

There's not that many whales compared to all the salmon swimming around.

When you treat people right, your customers, your employees, and yourself, that's when growth falls into place.

It can't just be making stuff to train the algorithm that I'm out there the most.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? It's okay to not know. A recent gift of a line. Say "I don't know, but I can find out," and nobody actually minds.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? A coach told her to fire a client. She said she'd work it out, and six months later it was the same problem. She should have listened the first time.

What would you tell your younger self? Climbing the corporate ladder isn't everything, and that CEO you think is a jerk is carrying pressures you can't see. You think you know everything until you become the one making a thousand decisions a day.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? AI, and the feeling that she has to know everything yesterday. The pull to keep learning collides with running the day-to-day, and the moment she feels caught up, someone says something ten times smarter.

Favorite spot? Wildcraft Eatery on King Street in Boone, North Carolina, her little mountain college town. One of her favorite restaurants anywhere, and she's traveled widely.

Tool you can't live without? Her headphones. Always in her pocket for podcasts and audiobooks, so she can absorb and stay current on the go rather than sitting down to read.

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Taylor Wilson is the founder and CEO of Creative Shizzle, an on-demand creative team for small businesses and nonprofits, a certified StoryBrand guide, and a TEDx speaker. Her book, Reckless Kindness, is due out through Indigo River Publishing. Find her on LinkedIn and at creativeshizzle.com.