Between them, Sarah Newcomb and Veronica Dunn had seen the inside of enough marketing agencies to know exactly what they did not want to build.
That shared conviction led the two St. Pete marketing entrepreneurs to launch One Eleven Creatives in 2025, a boutique marketing agency built on a premise that has become something of a rallying cry in the small business community they serve: that small businesses deserve the same quality of marketing thinking that large budgets typically buy.
Six months in, the founders are candid about what went according to plan and what did not.
The frustration that started it
Newcomb spent years at a PR firm in St. Pete, pitching PR packages and building lead generation infrastructure for clients and before that spent years doing in-house marketing for restaurant chains. Dunn brought more than a decade of marketing experience across corporate teams, agency floors, and businesses she had run herself, including a retail operation in the Czech Republic and a CMO role at a Canadian consulting firm.
What both women had accumulated, independently and then together, was a clear picture of a recurring failure: small businesses were being sold marketing packages that looked identical regardless of industry, reported on metrics that sounded impressive and meant very little, and handed off to people who had never made the pitch.
‘We got tired of watching it happen,’ Dunn has said of the decision to start the agency. ‘And we decided to build the thing we always wished existed.’
What they built
One Eleven Creatives is deliberately structured to be small. Newcomb and Dunn work with a limited number of clients at a time, a model they describe not as a limitation but as a feature. Every engagement is led by one of the two founders, no account managers or junior staff running strategies they did not develop.
The agency offers SEO, Pinterest marketing, social media and LinkedIn content management, press and media placements, brand strategy, and web design. In its first six months, it secured more than forty media placements for clients across outlets including Business Insider and CEO Weekly, and helped clients achieve Page 1 Google rankings for their target search terms.
What surprised them about the first six months
Newcomb and Dunn are direct about what they underestimated. The sales cycle with small businesses who have been burned by previous agency relationships is longer than either founder anticipated. Trust, they have found, is rebuilt slowly, and they understand why. They had seen it first hand.
They also underestimated the administrative weight of running a business rather than working inside one. The infrastructure that makes a boutique agency scalable– contracts, onboarding systems, project management, reporting templates– had to be built while client work was simultaneously being executed.
‘You are doing the work and building the machine that does the work at the same time,’ Newcomb has said. ‘Nobody tells you that part.’
What year one proved
Despite the adjustments, the founders say year one confirmed the core premise. There is a substantial market of small businesses in Tampa Bay and the surrounding areas and beyond that are ready to invest in marketing led by experienced people who understand their specific business, and who are willing to be held accountable to real outcomes.
One Eleven Creatives has been named among the boutique agencies to watch in the Tampa Bay marketing community, and the founders say the pipeline for year two reflects a growing awareness that the boutique model, when executed correctly, can outperform larger agencies for the clients it is designed to serve.