Welcome back to the Marketing Playground! It’s August.
The feed is quiet, half of you are reading this from a beach chair, and summer isn’t the season for frameworks. So this month, no charts. No statistics about marketing trend. Just a story — one I’ve never told all in one place — about fifteen summers, and what I’d say to the woman who started this company in her basement in 2011.
Summer One: The Basement
C&A Digital didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a last straw.
I had just become a mom. And the workplace I returned to made it very clear — in the way workplaces do, without ever quite saying it — that the ambitious version of me and the mother version of me were not both welcome. I’ve told that story in full elsewhere (see Founder Series introduction video on YouTube), and it still isn’t easy to tell. What matters here is what it did: it made my decision for me. I left. Sometimes the door to the rest of your life doesn’t open gently. Sometimes the door slams behind you — because you’re the one who closed it.
C&A Digital was legally born in May of 2011. But companies aren’t really born at the paperwork. That first summer, C&A was a name on a filing and a desk in my basement — I was consulting to keep us afloat, not an employee anywhere, not even getting paid under the company name yet. No office, no cushion, no safety net — just a non-negotiable reason to make it work: I wanted to build a place where I — and eventually, people like me — wouldn’t have to choose.
The Year I Cried in the Basement
Here’s the part of year one I’ve never put in a newsletter. For seven months, C&A was a company mostly in the legal sense. Then, in December, our first client landed — and it wasn’t a neighborhood account. It was Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a Johnson & Johnson company. The basement agency’s first client was part of one of the largest healthcare companies on earth.
I was two weeks from giving birth to my second child, my daughter. Two weeks. I took on the win that was supposed to prove this whole leap was sane, and then I had my daughter.
And then, shortly after — the win still warm —my business partner left the partnership.
Here’s something most people don’t know: C&A stands for Copy & Art. I was the Copy. My partner was the Art. And just like that, Copy & Art was down to Copy — with an ampersand pointing at nobody.
I cried. And then I did the math on everything that now had to get done — more than we had planned for two people, landing on one woman with a newborn and a toddler — and I started doing it. Alone. The Copy, the Art, and everything the ampersand was supposed to cover. Not because I was fearless, but because the client didn’t care about my org chart, and my life didn’t care about my excuses. You find out very quickly, in a basement, at midnight, that “figure it out” is a complete job description.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how many new businesses make it. Roughly half survive five years. About a third see year ten. Only about one in four are still standing after fifteen. I didn’t know those numbers then, and I’m glad I didn’t. The woman in the basement wasn’t reading survival tables. She was routing jobs.
The Yes Years
For most of our first decade, C&A said yes to almost everything. Yes to industries we’d never touched. Yes to services we’d have to learn on the fly. Yes to clients who were wrong for us, because “wrong for us” is a luxury category when you’re building something from nothing.
I don’t regret the Yes Years. They kept the lights on, and they taught us — sometimes expensively — exactly who we were by showing us everything we weren’t. But I can see now what I couldn’t see then: every yes that didn’t belong to us delayed the moment we became known for the thing that did. And it isn’t lost on me that our very first client was a healthcare giant — the universe was pointing at our niche a full decade before we claimed it. It took me the better part of fifteen years to understand that lesson well enough to say it out loud — and, eventually, an entire book (MICRO-MASTERY, if you missed last month’s issue) to work out why saying yes to everything is the most expensive habit in business.
Summer Ten: The Reinvention
If year one tested whether I could carry the company, 2020 tested whether the company could change. The pandemic put the entire ad industry in flux. Our clients — the human beings we’d built relationships with for years — were losing their jobs, and when they walked out the door, their accounts often walked out with them. We watched work we’d earned disappear for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the work.
What saved us wasn’t a pivot deck. It was the same muscle the basement built: figure it out. New ways of working, new ways of showing up for shell-shocked clients, new definitions of what an agency even was. The companies that survived that stretch weren’t the biggest ones. They were the ones willing to be beginners again.
What I’d Tell Her
So what would I actually say to 2011 Elena — the new mom in the basement who had just let the door slam behind her, who would land Janssen two weeks before delivering her second child, lose her business partner right after, and gain a fifteen-year education?
“You’re stronger than you think. But buckle up — because it’s going to be one hell of a ride.”
That’s it. Not “niche down sooner” (she wouldn’t have listened). Not “avoid the hard parts” (the hard parts were the education). Just the truth she couldn’t yet see: that the strength was already there, and every summer that followed — the crying ones, the yes-to-everything ones, the reinvention ones — would only prove it.
Fifteen summers later, the basement company has a book on the shelf, digital, health and publishing divisions, and a decade and a half of raving-fan clients. And the woman in the basement? She was right to jump.
Your Turn
Now I want to hear from you — consider this your permission slip to get personal on LinkedIn this August. What would you tell the earlier version of you? The one in your version of the basement: first job, first company, first leap. One sentence. Put it in the comments — I’ll be reading every single one, though not from a beach chair. Fifteen summers in, I’m still working on that part.
Thanks for fifteen summers of coming out to play.
Sources
“Survival Rates of Establishments, by Year Started and Number of Years Since Starting” (Entrepreneurship and the U.S. Economy), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics. https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/bdm_chart3.htm
“Introduction | C&A Digital’s Founder Series with Elena Rivera-Cheek, Founder & CEO,” C&A Digital, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glnnQhZWClM
