A small practice for the work that matters.
We started Mintaka in 2022 because we wanted to do this work differently — with fewer clients, longer horizons, and the right people doing the actual work.
Why we exist.
The agency model is broken in ways that get harder to defend the longer you work inside it. A few senior people sell the work; a much larger group of less-experienced people does it. Hours are billed in increments. The incentive is to grow the engagement, not to finish it well.
We built Mintaka as the opposite of that. Senior practitioners do the work themselves. We turn down more work than we accept. The engagements that survive our intake tend to last years, not quarters. And the studio stays small on purpose — large enough to do real work across performance, brand, and editorial; small enough that everyone touching the work has been doing it for a decade or more.
None of this is novel. It’s how the best small studios have always worked. We are simply trying to be one of them.
Five things we hold to.
Fewer partners, longer horizons.
We work with a small number of clients at a time. Most engagements are measured in years.
Senior people do the work.
The person who sells the work is the person who does it. No leverage pyramid, no rotating juniors.
Output, not hours.
We don’t bill by the hour. We agree on what the engagement is for and what it should produce.
Owned compounds.
Paid media is a tool. Owned channels — editorial, lists, organic — are an asset. We build for both.
Decisions, not decks.
Strategy that doesn’t become a roadmap is decoration. Every engagement ends with shipped work.
Boring is a feature.
Most of marketing’s real upside comes from doing fundamentals consistently. We are not trying to be clever.
The arc of a typical engagement.
Brief. We start with a short written brief — what the company is, what it wants to be, and what the next twelve months need to look like for that to be true.
Diagnostic. Two to three weeks of structured listening: customer conversations, channel audits, competitive read, a hard look at the existing data. We come back with a written diagnosis, not a slide deck.
Plan. A practical roadmap with sequencing, ownership, and explicit trade-offs. If something cannot be done with the budget, we say so.
Execution. The studio embeds and ships the work. Where it makes sense, we hand pieces back to the in-house team. Where it doesn’t, we keep running it.
Compound. The best engagements don’t end — they reduce in intensity as the in-house team takes over. Several of our longest partners now run their own programs and call us in for the harder problems.
If any of this sounds like a fit, we’d like to hear from you.
Briefs of any length are welcome. We respond to every inquiry, usually within two business days.
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