Hampton member Sarah Lukemire is the founder of Brindle Digital, a seven-figure agency + SaaS that specializes in marketing multifamily properties.
She’s a first-time founder, totally bootstrapped, profitable from day one, and growing over 30% YoY for more than half a decade now.
In this piece, she breaks down:
Hello, howdy – let me introduce myself, my name is Sarah Lukemire and I’m the founder of Brindle Digital Marketing, a marketing agency based out of Loveland, Colorado.
At Brindle we partner with multifamily apartment communities to increase their online presence through website design and development, social media marketing, and branding.
Last year we also launched Rent Fetch – a Wordpress plugin that integrates with third party property management software to display properties, floor plans, and availability data on property and apartment websites.
In the coming months, we’re spinning off a new brand, Blueprint by Brindle, that will be a productized agency allowing us to market our apartment template sites separately from Brindle, which will continue to focus on the bespoke side of things.
We’re a small (but mighty) team of 9 people as of August 2023.
We just celebrated year 7 at Brindle Digital Marketing. If you would’ve asked my college self where I saw myself in the future, it likely wasn’t here.
At one point in my life, I wanted to drop out of college to start a tanning salon.
Quickly realized maybe that wasn’t for me (thanks, dad). I waited tables for nearly 15 years – from the age of 15 through ~28 (working two jobs after graduating). 10/10 recommend everyone hold a service job at some point in their life.
Graduated with a bachelor’s in marketing. Still didn’t know what I wanted to do.
Attended a job fair 1/2 mile from my apartment. In 4 feet of snow (👋 any Minnesota peeps?). Which I had to walk to because my Honda Accord wouldn’t make it down the street.
And that's the dot that connected where my marketing career started.
I landed a job with Log House Foods. I learned how to create a WordPress site. Dove headfirst into the world of blogging. And Facebook. And Pinterest. And the list goes on. I was a one person marketing department who wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty.
Shortly thereafter, I started a dog blog (Lola the Pitty). Marketed the heck out of that during my evenings. Wrote a blog post that took off and in turn, took down the entire site. Generated millions of views.
Fast forward to a move back to Colorado… still wanting to start a business, but this time I had a vision. I was going to start a marketing agency – one that operated like a company I’d like to hire.
That’s how Brindle started. Two years in, we niched down into the real estate and multifamily industry after working with several development companies (I wish there was a more sexy story about the shift, but that’s how it went down).
Today we partner with hundreds of clients – ranging from property management companies to multifamily investors and owners – and are excited about what the future holds.
In 2016, Brindle consisted of myself and a freelance team I strung together for support. It was a lot of fail fast, learn fast, and improve fast(er).
One thing we’ve held onto since the beginning was the level of transparency, quick communication, and approachable marketing services. Three months in, I hired our first full-time team member. We grew quickly, 330% in our second year of business.
As a fully bootstrapped company, we’ve run lean and invested most earnings back into the company. I take virtually nothing from the company and live on a conservative salary to this day.
Fast forward to choosing a niche – multifamily. We stumbled into this industry. It all started after partnering with a local real estate development company. One branding project and website turned into two, turned into 10, and so forth.
Quickly realized that we should develop a plugin – so it could be decoupled from the websites and sold separately – to integrate with third party property management software systems, such as Yardi RentCafe among others. That’s where Rent Fetch was born.
A few channels and efforts have contributed.
First, retaining customers is much cheaper than acquiring a new customer. Our client retention rate is insane at over 90 percent.
Second, SEO. Practice what you preach, right? We produce content that targets high-intent keywords surrounding the services and industry we’re targeting.
Third, networking through LinkedIn, in-person events, and conferences. The multifamily industry is truly about who you know. Initially, the industry has seemed to be a ‘sea of the same,’ so disrupting the norm and offering a fresh approach has been successful.
Fourth, partnerships – we’re just beginning to break into this growth strategy.
We’ve been fortunate to have steady growth each year (~30% YoY) and have always been profitable – even through COVID. Most of my worst moments of doubt occurred very early in the business. We never over-hired or had to do mass layoffs. We never ran out of cash and to this day operate very lean.
Did I know every step to take and the right path to take? Nope. (Still don’t.)
But every single day is focused on continuous improvement and, as our team knows, finding a better way.
While the startup costs for an agency are virtually nothing, your biggest expense is labor.
With diverse talent needed to properly execute on services and support clients, this can be a challenge and why so many agencies rely on FTE + contractors in their wings. As somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades and having been in the agency world before starting Brindle, I had a leg up and in the early days was able to deliver on much of the work myself with little support, but in order to stand out and scale, our team and the talent was the key differentiator to standing out.
The biggest challenges I see myself and other agency owners face include:
We are continuously looking for ways to improve and reduce complexity, ensure our team members are happy and we’re delivering on client expectations, while staying on budget. It’s no easy feat and as we’ve grown, profit margins have rode a wave as we work through these headwinds.
Ah, we have quite the tech stack and I’m admittedly a bit of a software junkie.
Tools we can’t live without:
The list goes on, but those are the major players.
Since the early days, the My First Million podcast has been on the top of my list. Also a fan of the podcast, The Futur with Chris Do.
Book recommendations:
This came up recently with our team….
Finding a simple solution for sharing ad previews across multiple platforms to clients for approval (i.e. preview of Facebook/Instagram/Google ad creative and how it will look when being served on those platforms).
We’ve researched options, came up short, and this seems like low hanging fruit.
I believe a number of qualities make a good leader that I’ve outlined below. Not coming from a leadership background, this has been a huge area of growth for me personally, and like everything, continually improving.
More information about Brindle:
Ways to connect with me: