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Blue Surge Marketing Agency: a small marketing and web design firm at $14K a month
Blue Surge Marketing Agency is a full-service marketing and website design firm selling digital marketing, website design, and consulting to businesses across the United States, especially e-commerce brands and nonprofits, and it was at $14K a month in revenue, founder-reported in May 2023.
How it started
The agency is the second act of its founder, Godson Michel, and it grew out of a sneaker reselling business called KickBackz. Michel started KickBackz while studying to be a physician assistant and working retail jobs at $7.25 an hour, reselling hyped sneaker releases on the secondary market. Over five years, he said, it grew from a side hustle into a marketplace website with streetwear upsells, an eponymous trade show, and a brick-and-mortar store, and it eventually reached over $1M in revenue with an organically built social following of over 255,000 followers and customers in more than thirty countries.
The pivot came from two directions at once. Local business owners who had watched KickBackz grow started asking Michel to do the same for their own social accounts, which told him the marketing skill itself was sellable. At roughly the same time, the secondary sneaker market was compressing his margins as manufacturers like Nike pushed toward direct-to-consumer sales, making retail distributors far less central. Michel moved into a shared office with high school friends working in creative photography and videography, started consuming founder content online, and launched Blue Surge Marketing Agency in May 2017 out of Lindenhurst, New York.
What it sells and how it charges
The official website, as fetched on 2026-09-30, describes the firm this way: "We are a full-service AI-powered advertising, website development, and marketing automation firm." The service list on the homepage is long — marketing consulting, content writing, email marketing, event marketing, influencer marketing, paid media buying, SEO, social media management, and social media marketing packages, alongside website design and development, hosting, Shopify and online stores, website audits and maintenance, a website cost calculator, branding, logos and graphic design, and photo and video production.
The site names four industries it serves: government, boutiques, e-commerce brands, and nonprofits. Its current headline pitch is narrower than the menu above: it says it builds paid traffic and automated follow-up systems for high-ticket service businesses that depend on calls, appointments, and installs, and it displays an average rating attributed to 220+ customers.
On pricing, there is nothing to quote. The official website does not publish a price list or package rates, and the founder did not give rates in the interview. What the site offers instead are entry points: a free quote, a "Book a 15-Min Revenue Audit" call, and a website cost calculator. Any actual fee would have to come from the firm directly.
How it got its first customers and what kept growth going
Early leads came from showing up in person. "During our early days, in-person networking was the primary source of new leads and led to our first 'real' client," Michel said. When COVID-19 ended networking events, the agency moved to inbound: content people actually want to consume, plus SEO and email automation.
The largest single wave was external. "Our most significant wave of growth happened during the 2020 summer of the Black Lives Matter movement," Michel said. Companies without prior diversity, equity, or inclusion policies began allocating budget to firms founded and run by people of color, and Black-owned businesses increasingly wanted to hire Black-owned agencies for cultural competency they could not find elsewhere. Michel describes that two-fold shift as coinciding with the largest number of new leads in the agency's CRM, with SEO as the primary traffic driver.
Retention ran on email. Scheduled marketing emails educate and convert leads into discovery appointments, and past clients who were good to work with receive automatic re-engagement emails reminding them the agency is available for more work.
The numbers
Revenue is the founder's own figure from the interview published 2023-05-06: $14K a month. That is what he said at that date, not a current number, and the interview is the only source for it.
At the time of that interview, Blue Surge had one founder and three employees. It had been running since May 2017. The interview does not state a start-up cost, so none is reported here. Michel described the business as profitable and said the agency had become more selective, shifting toward established brands and organizations rather than companies just starting out or without staff, and niching down toward nonprofits and professional services because fewer verticals make workflow automation and monthly revenue easier to predict.
How it compares
The comparison below uses 1M.chat's own analysis of founder-reported revenue cases, not a survey of all businesses. The dataset covers 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026 — a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed. Within it, 381 businesses fall in the Agencies & services category.
| Measure | Blue Surge (founder-reported, May 2023) | Agencies & services category (1M.chat analysis) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly revenue | $14K | $48K median |
| Employees | 3 | 5 median |
| Founders | 1 | 63% started by one founder |
| Share at $1M a year or more | — | 35% of the category |
| Growth channels cited | In-person networking, inbound content, SEO, email automation | Organic social media 61%, SEO & organic search 51%, word of mouth & referrals 51%, paid ads 28% (of the 272 businesses with channel information) |
On these measures Blue Surge sits below the category median for monthly revenue. Its channel mix also differs in emphasis: in-person networking produced its first client, and SEO became its main traffic driver, while organic social media is the most common channel across the category. One caveat is worth keeping in view — the category figures come from a self-selected pool of founders who agreed to be interviewed, so businesses that never gave an interview are not represented.
Category detail: 1M.chat agencies and services data. Method notes: 1M.chat method.
What a founder can take from this
- A skill you already use can be the product. Michel did not set out to sell marketing; he sold sneakers, and the requests from other business owners revealed the sellable skill. If people keep asking you how you did something, that is demand signal, not flattery.
- Pick clients as carefully as they pick you. Michel's clearest regret is taking every job early and quoting low rates to outbid competitors. It produced reviews and poor profitability, because those clients wanted extensive revisions and out-of-scope work. Low prices did not buy better clients.
- Set response times and keep them. In a product business, carriers handle status updates. In services, nobody does it for you, and silence is a common reason clients leave. A committed response window is cheap retention.
- Narrowing is a revenue decision, not just a positioning one. Fewer verticals made automation and monthly revenue easier to predict. Breadth feels safer and often is not.
- Hire before you need to, and get a mentor earlier than that. Michel lists both as fixes for the same problem: a business that cannot run without the founder, and mistakes — no bookkeeper, wrong business structure, unwillingness to pay for talent — that cost more later than advice would have.
None of this is a promise that a similar agency will reach $14K a month. It is one reported case with one reported number, at one date.
Sources
Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure