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TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 1 OF 8
It can price the platform. It can't grow it.
Introducing flat-fee marketing for private equity firms and their platform companies. From Tocobaga of Tampa, Florida.
CALL (813) 934-6605. OR SEND IN THE CARD ON PAGE 8.
TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 2 OF 8
Then the model meets the marketing.
Daggers resolved in the fine print on page 8.
Tocobaga is a flat-fee, ROI-focused marketing agency for private equity firms and their platform companies. No percentage of ad spend. No auto-renewing contracts. Every asset stays yours. Average reported client ROI: 9.7x gross, 7.8x after fees.*
Here is a thing that happens, politely, every day.
A private equity firm buys a platform company. The model says the platform will grow. The model is very confident.
Then the model meets the marketing.
The IC memo has a revenue-growth thesis. The platform has a marketing manager and a Mailchimp login.
This page is about the gap.
The spreadsheet problem.
A financial calculator can price a platform to two decimal places.
It cannot explain why the website hasn't been touched since the founder's nephew built it in 2011.
It cannot write the email that wakes six hundred dormant accounts.
It cannot rank the platform first in the seventeen cities where it actually sells.
Pricing, it turns out, is the easy part.
Growing is the part with the money in it.
This is not the calculator's fault.
It is a specialist. It does present values, future values, and the tidy fiction that the two are related by a formula.
Growth is not a formula. Growth is a Tuesday.
It is a rewritten landing page, a fixed intake form, a review answered before lunch.
Somebody has to do the Tuesday.
The agency problem.
So the firm hires an agency, and the agency does what agencies do.
It bills a percentage of ad spend - a polite way of saying it earns more when you spend more, whether or not the spending works.
It signs you to a twelve-month contract that renews itself while you're at dinner.
It builds you a website you don't own, on a platform you can't leave, with a "Site by" badge in the footer: a permanent advertisement, which you paid for, for someone else.
It reports monthly, in a language spoken nowhere on Earth.
And when the hold period ends and it is time to sell, the buyer's diligence team discovers that the platform's entire digital presence is, legally speaking, a rental.
Quality of earnings, meet quality of ownership.
This is not a scandal. It is simply the standard arrangement.
We would like a word about the standard arrangement.
None of this appears in the model, of course.
The model has a line for "marketing," and the line is a percentage, and the percentage is a hope.
Multiply it across nine platform companies and the hope becomes a strategy.
Diligence will price the machinery, the trucks, the software seats. It will not price the seventeen first-page rankings the platform doesn't have.
Someone should.
The flat-fee answer.
Tocobaga charges a flat fee. That is nearly the whole trick.
When the incentive to inflate your ad spend disappears, a remarkable thing happens: nobody inflates your ad spend.
The contract doesn't auto-renew, so March has to be earned in February.
The website, the copy, the data, the list, the rankings - every asset is titled to you from day one, like a car you actually bought.
If we ever stop being useful, you keep everything and walk.
Some agencies find this arrangement radical.
Owners find it obvious.
A flat fee also changes the meetings.
Nobody performs. Nobody pads. The agenda is the letter, and the letter is one page.
You will know what we did, what it cost, and what it returned, in that order, every month.
The fee shows up in the model as a line item, not a leak.
If that sounds ordinary, ask your current agency for the same sentence.
The next six pages explain how the work is done, what it costs, and what it returned to the people who tried it. Read on; it is your magazine.
*Resolved in the fine print on page 8. The advertisement continues on page 3.
TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 3 OF 8
First the macro. Then the micro. Then Tuesday.
Every engagement starts the same way, with a question so old-fashioned it feels avant-garde: where does the money actually come from?
We call the method macro-to-micro.
It fits inside a 100-day plan without asking the plan to move.
Macro is the market: who buys, what they pay, which three moves change enterprise value.
Micro is the Tuesday work: the page, the offer, the follow-up email, the review reply.
Most agencies sell the Tuesday work without ever asking the first question.
We decline to, on principle and on invoice.
First, the macro.
We audit the platform the way a buyer audits a target - traffic, rankings, list, funnel, reputation - and we price every gap in dollars.
The audit is free, it is specific, and it is occasionally embarrassing.
It ends with three levers, not thirty. A thesis does not need thirty.
It needs the three that move the multiple, done well, in order, by someone who will still answer the phone in month eleven.
That is the whole macro. It fits on one page.
The plan is signed by a person whose name you know.
Then the calendar starts.
Then we pick the three levers the thesis actually needs, and we ignore the rest.
No brand safari. No six-week discovery. No deck about your "why."
The audit lands on the partner's desk as a numbered list, and the numbers are dollars.
Lever one is usually the website, because the website is usually rented, slow, and invisible.
Lever two is usually the list, because six hundred dormant accounts are cheaper to wake than one stranger is to buy.
Lever three depends on the thesis, which is the point of having one.
Strategy is what we are judged on at the quarter. Execution is what we do before lunch.
Pages get rebuilt. Emails get written. Rankings get taken city by city, like a polite land war.
Reviews get answered the day they arrive, by a person, in English.
None of this is glamorous, which is why it compounds.
Glamour is a cost center.
Then, the micro.
Each month you receive a one-page letter in plain English: what moved, what it cost, what it returned.
No dashboard tour is required to understand it.
If a chart needs a legend, we rewrite the chart.
Month by month, the levers get pulled and the letter gets shorter.
Figure 1. The macro-to-micro method.
Shown actual attitude. Runs on daylight.
Three levers, priced, sequenced, owned. It is not a philosophy. It is a work order.
TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 4 OF 8
Solar assist. Prices the platform. Ten digits. Can't grow it. The calculator's face, straight-on and larger than life: keypad, display, solar strip.
It gets better when you read the fine print.
TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 5 OF 8
| Tocobaga | The Usual Agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | A flat fee. | A percentage of your ad spend. |
| Contracts | No auto-renew. | Twelve months; renews itself. |
| Ownership | You own every asset. | You rent your own website. |
| Footer badge | Never. | A "Site by" credit, in perpetuity. |
| Language | Plain English. | A jargon moat. |
| Exit | We refer you out. | A hostage negotiation. |
The table is unfair. It is also accurate.
TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 6 OF 8
Test drive Tocobaga.
In 2024 a Tampa firm bought a nine-location HVAC platform at a fair price and an unfair website.
The thesis said add-ons. The search results said nobody home.
We rebuilt the site in six weeks - owned outright, footer unbranded - and took the local rankings one metro at a time.
The dormant-list emails went out the first month. They read like letters, not coupons.
By month nine, organic leads were up 212 percent, and the platform had stopped buying its own brand name back from a search engine.
The add-ons inherited the machine on day one. That is the quiet advantage: marketing that transfers like an asset, because it is one.
Total fees for the year: flat, known in advance, and smaller than the February ad invoice they used to pay.
The audit that started it took eleven days and cost nothing.
“The model priced the platform. Tocobaga grew it into the price.”
[Illustrative composite - verified case study to come.]
TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 7 OF 8
How we work.
Every engagement begins with the free Platform Growth Audit: ten to fifteen days, no meeting longer than thirty minutes, no deck about your "why."
We audit the platform the way a buyer audits a target, and we price every gap in dollars.
You receive the findings whether or not you hire us. They are yours. That is the theme.
Then the plan: the three levers the thesis actually needs, sequenced, with a flat number attached.
Then the work, in monthly cycles, each closed by a one-page letter in plain English: what moved, what it cost, what it returned.
And then - the strange part - the ending. When the thesis is realized - recap, bolt-on roll-in, or sale - we package the marketing like the asset it is and hand it to the next owner, cleanly. Sell-side ready, because it was built that way.
We would rather be re-hired than renewed.
We aren't for everyone, and we will say so early. If the thesis is pure cost-out, or the platform needs a CFO more than a marketer, we will tell you and hand you the number of someone we trust. The referral is free. So is the audit.
Headquartered in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida. Clients across the USA.
Some straight answers about marketing for private equity.
Why a flat fee?
Because a percentage pays us to spend your money, and we would rather be paid to multiply it. The fee is quoted once, in writing, and it stays put for the year.
Who owns the work?
You do - website, copy, data, list, rankings. If we part ways, everything stays exactly where it always was: with you.
Do you serve the firm or the platform?
Both. The firm gets a growth machine it can repeat across the portfolio; each platform company gets an operator who does the Tuesday work.
Can marketing actually move EBITDA, or is that a stretch?
Top-line growth that converts at a healthy margin moves EBITDA; that is arithmetic, not controversy. The stretch is attribution, so we instrument the engine until the contribution shows up where your IC looks.
We run buy-and-build. Can you integrate brands across add-ons?
That is a core play. Platform-plus-add-ons is brand architecture done without vaporizing the local goodwill you underwrote. We have set 500+ brands in order; the messy part is the part we are good at.
Can you market the fund itself, not just the platforms?
Yes, and most sponsors should. Nearly every firm says brand drives proprietary deal flow, then runs a website that says otherwise. We build the presence that gets you the call before the banker launches a process.
Do you work under our value-creation team and sign the usual paper?
Of course. NDAs, MSAs, your reporting cadence, your operating partners. We are a bench, not a houseguest. The only paper we refuse is the auto-renewing kind.
What happens to the marketing assets when we exit?
They convey with the company. Site, creative, data, playbook - built to survive the data room and the next owner. A clean engine is a diligence asset, not a dependency.
Where does the 9.7x figure come from?
Client-reported gross return across engagements, unaudited and rounded down when in doubt. After fees it is 7.8x. The daggers are resolved in the fine print on page 8.
What does it cost?
A flat number, quoted after the free audit and good for twelve months. Call (813) 934-6605 and we will say it out loud, slowly, in English. ■
TOCOBAGA FOR PRIVATE EQUITY - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 8 OF 8
YES - send me the free Platform Growth Audit.
Or mail to: Tocobaga, 1327 E. 7th Ave, Suite 2, Ybor City, Tampa, FL 33605.
Soon there'll be just two kinds of platform companies. Those that grow, and those that renew.