Welcome to Good Giant: A two-part primer on how we got here.

“Great advertising cannot happen without great strategy.”

I have been beating this drum for more than twenty years at our agency, but “great strategy” applies beyond the work of advertising itself. Whether it’s a chess move or a business idea, it’s smart to begin with the end in mind. What are we trying to accomplish, and what methods and means might we employ to get there?

For this inaugural post, I’d like to walk you through our thinking related to how we’ve positioned and built Good Giant. Consider this an introductory primer on our agency.

Here it goes.

Our firm traces its roots back nearly half a century. For now, I’ll spare you the origin story, the tales of partners past, accounts won and lost, legendary agency parties—there are enough of these anecdotes to fill a book, and maybe we’ll publish it for our 50th anniversary in a couple of years.

For the purposes of explaining how we made it this long in business and why we’re excited about what’s next, I want to point out that our most important strategic decision was what not to do. (After all, isn’t the essence of strategy deciding what not to do?)

Most agencies are generalists. They work across any number of industries, and they generally apply the art, craft and science of advertising to a wide variety of clients. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach to starting and running an advertising agency.

We have simply chosen not to be a generalist agency.

This decision happened over the course of several years (our agency began as a generalist) and accelerated over the last couple of decades. Our choice was based on the desire to build a world-class national agency, and I can trace that ambition directly to a single interaction that happened shortly after I graduated college.

I was less than a year out of school, and as young graduates do, I was at a party talking with a group of other newly minted professionals. We talked in turn, showing off which companies we each worked for (a big-name architectural firm here, a white shoe law firm there). When it came time for me to humblebrag on my job, I said that I worked at Sullivan-St. Clair-an ad agency in Mobile, Alabama–and I got a less-than-tepid response.

“Never heard of it,” one of my fellow Young Turks noted coldly.

From that moment on, I was absolutely hellbent on transforming our small advertising agency, in a town most people mispronounced, into a national player.

Deciding not to be a generalist has been the single most important strategic move in getting us there. For our firm, “being for everyone” was tantamount to being for no one. To achieve our goal of meaningful growth, we had to throw the proverbial stake in the ground.

We chose to focus on gaming, entertainment and hospitality.

You might ask, “How did you pick that?” The short, truthful answer is that we like casinos. And we like all the things that come with casinos. Food (and beverage), shows, hotel, spa, golf and retail. It’s like adult Disney World. What’s not to like?

There is a more rational, economics-based answer of course. In the early 2000s, when we first began working in the category, gaming was not nearly as widespread as it is today. But we felt confident that the category would explode. It is state-regulated, and through economic cycles, states have been inclined to issue more and more licenses. We knew this would lead to market saturation, which ultimately increases the value of advertising. It’s that simple. And over the past 20 years, that’s exactly what has happened. So, by choosing to focus on gaming, we placed our firm on the path of growth.

An ambitious team with something to prove focused on a concentrated market–that’s how we became Good Giant.