Interview

Maxwell Finn is the co-founder and President of Unicorn Marketers, an ad agency killer he runs with his longtime partner Jeremy Adams.

Together they have spent roughly fifteen years inside every kind of agency, including Quantum Media, which they co-founded with original Shark Tank shark Kevin Harrington.

Finn has also built and sold e-commerce brands, taught over 10,000 marketers through his educational programs, and was one of the earliest advertisers on both Facebook and TikTok.

In this interview, Finn talks about why the traditional agency model is broken, how AI is letting a five-person team do the work that used to require entire production floors, and why the most valuable skill in marketing today has nothing to do with platforms or tools.

Q: Who are you, and what is Unicorn Marketers?

I run a company called Unicorn Marketers. We’ve built a talent pool of the best advertisers in the world and supercharged them with cutting-edge AI workflows, agents, and skills. My partner Jeremy and I have been in the agency space 15 years.

Our first agency was Quantum Media with Kevin Harrington. We’ve been on every side of it: mass-market, ultra-premium boutique, performance marketing. We’ve also owned a lot of brands, so we’ve hired agencies, which is how we know the model is completely broken.

It’s misaligned financially, structurally, and on talent.

Q: Why is the model broken?

The best advertisers in the world don’t work at agencies. Why would anyone talented take a $60K salary when they can get four or five clients at $5K a month, set their own hours, and control everything? We had to build this talent pool out of necessity for ourselves. We kept getting deals and putting people on them. Friends started asking if we could find somebody too.

Eventually we said, why don’t we turn this into a business?

Q: Back up. What’s your background?

I’ve always been an entrepreneur. My grandfather was a real estate developer. He came up with one of the original concepts of a planned community, where you build the shopping center and everything around the houses, not just houses. He started a commercial real estate network called NAI Global that my dad took over, and we sold it in 2012.

I knew I didn’t want to do commercial real estate, but while I was interning there I saw how behind they were on marketing. I was 18, 19, doing social media and SEO, and it was blowing their minds. I kept thinking, this is obvious, you should know this. I went to Emory, then to Babson for entrepreneurship.

While I was at Babson, a friend from Emory pitched me on a mobile app called Daily Hundred. We gave out $100 cash every day for the best, most creative photo taken at a local business. Started in Gainesville in 2011 and 2012.

Domino’s would say, come in and take the craziest photo with a slice of pizza. By the end of summer, 35% of the iOS users in the area had downloaded the app. I did the full venture route, raised money, and built a tech team.

The company failed after two years.

Q: Who’s your ideal client now?

A $5 to $50 million business already spending at least $10k a month on ads, ideally one that has worked with an agency or two before. We want people who’ve felt the pain. Otherwise they go to an event, see someone on Twitter claiming they can do it, jump over there, fail, jump again, fail again.

People who’ve been burned have realistic expectations.

Q: How does the revenue model work?

Most of our deals are custom, based on what works best for all parties involved. We typically structure partnerships in a way that aligns incentives across the business, the talent, and our team, ensuring a long-term relationship where everyone wins. Rather than charging large upfront headhunting fees, we focus on ongoing collaboration and performance-based structures that evolve as the partnership grows.

We also cap our billables. Perry Belcher told me this years ago at his house when we were running ads for him. He said, you guys are doing great, but at some point the check gets so big that our accounting asks whether we should just bring this in-house. So we put a cap in to prevent that moment.

We’ve been in this space long enough to have hit every pain point with the model, and we’ve systematically addressed them. Our goal isn’t to bleed a client for three months and churn. I want to work with you for two, three, five years.

Q: What does your team look like?

“We’re building very lean, and we’re building assets at the same time, including all the AI technology.”

Five people including Jeremy and me. The goal is 100 active clients by end of year, and we think we can get there with one or two more hires. The old agency model was great for cash flow but brutal to scale and exit, because costs keep going up and the moment you lose clients you’re upside down.

We’re building very lean, and we’re building assets at the same time, including all the AI technology.

Q: Talk about the AI side.

We’re building out the stuff that used to be massive bottlenecks but huge needle-movers: offers, landing pages, funnels, creative. We’re building skills, workflows, and agents that do all of it fast. We’re investors and advisors in a company called Reify, which gives our talent and clients unlimited enterprise access to tools like Nano Banana, Sora, Kling.

We’ve basically removed the cost of those tools from the equation. On top of that, our talent gets a mastermind. Two calls a week, Tuesday and Friday. You don’t just get one of the best advertisers in the world on your account, you get them plugged into 50 or 60 others sharing skills in real time.

Q: What’s the single most valuable skill right now?

The fundamentals of marketing. A lot of people who got into this space in the last five or six years became experts at the platform, Facebook, the technical side, and skipped marketing psychology, behavioral economics, neuromarketing. That’s what actually matters. If you understand how to speak to someone’s subconscious, which cognitive biases to trigger, loss aversion, scarcity, whatever it is, the channel doesn’t matter.

That’s what I want our people focused on.

Q: What are you watching right now in AI?

A lot of autonomous AI discussion. And more broadly, a widening gap. Wealth gap, but also a productivity and technology gap. People who have access to a $10,000 Mac Studio and the compute to run these models are going to pull ahead of people who don’t.

I’m optimistic and bullish, but there are worst-case scenarios that are scary.

Q: What are you hoping to get out of Board of Advisors?

The surface answer is deals. But the real answer is that Jeremy and I work seven days a week on this because we believe what we’re building is actually helpful. So many businesses are getting screwed by agencies right now. They’re paying a lot of money, getting mediocre results, and churning.

We want to get what we’ve built in front of as many of them as possible so they can take the product or service they actually care about and bring it to more people.