Selected Work — Portfolio
Selected works from a team that runs the details, not the pitch.
The Hive is a business growth agency — strategy and execution held by the same team, across marketing, operations, and everything a founder would otherwise have to hold alone. What follows is a record of what that's looked like in practice: real budgets, real deadlines, real numbers.
We run the details so you can run the dream.
Not a marketing firm. Not a VA bench. A managed team.
Every engagement in this portfolio was run the same way: one accountable team, custom-built for the client, holding both the strategy and the execution rather than handing off a deck and stepping back. That's why the work below spans further than most agency portfolios — quoting workflows and OSHA binders sit next to paid social and email calendars, because that's genuinely the scope of what gets handed to us.
The distinction matters enough that we keep score of it internally:
Case Studies
Seven engagements, two disciplines
Marketing & Growth
Paid social, email, and creative direction — built to move a specific number, not just "engagement."
Marketing & Growth
Paid social, email, and creative direction — built to move a specific number, not just "engagement."
Operations & Systems
The unglamorous infrastructure that lets a business scale without depending on any one person's memory.
Operations & Systems
The unglamorous infrastructure that lets a business scale without depending on any one person's memory.
Selected Works
A look at the work itself.
Brand systems, content direction, and design pulled straight from client accounts — the visual half of what sits behind the numbers above.
Three campaigns, one team, every channel.
A boutique apparel & lifestyle retailer, Midwest
The Brief
A warm, personality-driven boutique needed more than one-off graphics and scheduled sends — it needed a single team accountable for its voice across every launch, from milestone events to brand-new product lines, with reporting honest enough to actually plan around.
What We Ran
- Full creative systems — carousels, countdowns, launch graphics — built around the owner's real voice and on-location photography, not stock product shots
- Every campaign email planned, written, and sent in-house, paired with a coordinated social rollout across two channels
- A repeatable playbook proven across three different campaign types: a milestone event, a product launch, and a brand extension
Milestone events convert heavily in-store, so online attribution alone understated their real lift — the brand-extension launch alone captured 26.1% of total store revenue on day one, and open rates held in the high-60s regardless of campaign type.
Growing a newsletter, one audience at a time.
A direct-to-consumer wardrobe & storage brand
The Brief
Organic reach wasn't producing enough subscriber volume to support upcoming product drops. The mandate: grow the email list at a predictable cost, without diluting a style-conscious, aesthetic-driven brand with generic lead-gen messaging.
What We Ran
- Lead ads optimized for onsite conversion, with a simplified value prop and short form to cut friction
- Three audience segments tested head-to-head — warm retargeting, a newsletter-modeled lookalike, and a broad retargeting-based lookalike
- Clean, single-message creative over detailed lifestyle content, based on what the early data showed
The broad retargeting-based lookalike — cold, but heavily modeled — was the single most efficient segment tested, outperforming warm retargeting on both cost and volume. That gave the brand a validated audience framework to reuse ahead of every future launch.
From seasonal push to full-funnel growth engine.
A mid-size fitness equipment brand
The Brief
A bootstrapped founder, previously burned by outsourced marketing, needed full ownership of email through two of the year's highest-stakes moments — Black Friday/Cyber Monday and the New Year fitness surge — without losing an energetic, approachable brand voice.
What We Ran
- Two full-funnel seasonal campaigns built from scratch: separate new-vs-returning funnels for BFCM, and a 12-day daily-challenge arc into New Year, New You
- Customer avatars and tone-of-voice guidelines to keep every send unmistakably on-brand
- Long-term infrastructure layered in afterward — an automated welcome flow, a full annual email roadmap, and reusable templates
Building the voice, the inbox, and the migration.
A small-batch specialty food brand
The Brief
A humor-driven, loyal-following food brand needed a team that could hold one distinctive comedic voice everywhere it showed up — while quietly modernizing the technical backbone underneath it, migrating off a basic e-commerce platform's built-in email tool.
What We Ran
- Social content built around a bold, self-aware voice designed to be shared, not just seen
- A full email-platform migration to a dedicated DTC tool, run mid-engagement with zero gap in send cadence
- A documented subject-line playbook distinguishing what drives opens from what drives revenue
A single self-deprecating "we made a mistake" correction email outperformed nearly every planned campaign — the highest revenue send of the year. On social, one comedic post pulled 49,000+ views and nearly 1,300 shares, the strongest share count reviewed.
Building the systems, structure & foundation for scalable growth.
A premium windows & doors distributor, Mountain West
The Brief
Mid leadership transition, running on informal systems that hadn't scaled with the business: no centralized ERP, no OSHA documentation, no standardized hiring process, an outdated website, and a flagship showroom that needed a full remodel — all at once.
Seven Pillars, Run Simultaneously
- Led ERP discovery through implementation, partnering with a dev firm to build a system tailored to quoting, job tracking, and delivery
- Ran a full OSHA gap assessment and drafted ~30 compliance documents, from Emergency Action Plans to LOTO procedures
- Co-led hiring for GM and Sales Associate roles — ~250 candidates screened, 4 hires onboarded
- Launched a standardized bid-acceptance process and a weekly permit-review workflow
- Refreshed the website, recovered the Google Business Profile, and managed the flagship showroom remodel start to finish
The business entered 2026 on a centralized ERP, full OSHA compliance, a hired General Manager, and a modernized digital presence — every system documented so it no longer depends on any one person's institutional knowledge.
Two tracks, one deadline.
A non-toxic, plant-based paint & coatings brand
The Brief
A six-week, non-negotiable facility cutover — new equipment, staff training, a full carrier setup — had to run in parallel with launching a new plant-based product line imported from Europe, while both founders were traveling internationally and unreachable.
What We Ran
- Owned the full transition plan across program management, supply chain, and wind-down of the legacy facility
- Built and tested a backup fulfillment contingency, and documented every process into a centralized SOP guide
- Led a full US regulatory compliance review — VOC limits, Prop 65, right-to-know rules — for a product only certified to EU standards
- Kept leadership informed through weekly RAG-status reporting so risk was visible before it became a problem
All Track 1 milestones landed on schedule — the new facility was fully self-sufficient before the founders left the country, with no gap in customer fulfillment during the cutover.
Sponsorship outreach & account management, built to scale.
A sponsorship-driven events brand
The Brief
A clear set of goals — grow the sponsor base, tighten account management — but no structured process or dedicated execution behind them. Without a system, every missed follow-up was a slower sponsor pipeline.
What We Ran
- A structured, fully tracked outreach engine with daily and cumulative lead tracking, so nothing goes unattended
- An audit of existing account management workflows, rebuilt into a documented, repeatable framework
- A refreshed media kit and coordinated asset-sharing so sponsors can activate their features effectively
Automation setup for email and LinkedIn outreach is targeted for launch this quarter, alongside continued warm-lead follow-up as the pipeline builds toward confirmed sponsors.
Why founders choose us
You didn't build your business to run its operations.
Every founder in this portfolio arrived the same way: something real, already built, still running entirely through them. Here's what changes once The Hive is in place.
One Account Manager
A single point of contact who knows the business and owns delivery. No coordinating five specialists yourself.
Built by Founders
Our team runs The Hive as their own backend. We're not consulting from the sidelines — we live this.
Custom-Built, Always
No playbook applied to everyone. Strategy, KPIs, and team composition are built to the client.
Measured by Results
Revenue. Time back. Systems that run without you. Progress you can actually see — not vanity metrics.
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