In Pacvue’s new interview series, The Exit, Pacvue President Melissa Burdick talks with founders, executives, and agency leaders about their journey to partnering or merging with another company to take their business to the next level. Viewers will learn valuable tips on building and scaling companies directly from today’s top voices in retail media.
In this first episode, Melissa talks to Adam Ortega, the co-founder of Ortega Group, an account management and performance marketing firm that was acquired by Tinuiti in 2021.
When Adam Ortega decided to start Ortega Group in 2013, he knew that there were a lot of brands that needed expertise when it came to optimizing their strategies on Amazon. He had helped grow the Amazon business since 2010 as a vendor manager and had seen that need firsthand.
Eight years later, the Ortega Group, a Pacvue client, was acquired by Tinuiti. Recently, Melissa sat down with Adam to talk about his journey with Ortega Group and what he learned along the way.
What inspired you to start the Ortega Group?
I started at Amazon in 2010 as a vendor manager, where I helped brands optimize their presence on Amazon to drive more sales. This was an era where Amazon had self-service tools, but they were much less robust and intuitive than the solutions that Amazon provides vendors today.
At the time, a lot of people getting hired had a finance background. I had worked as a buyer at another company, so the way I approached vendors was slightly different. I realized there was a big need for more expertise on the brand side to make the most of Amazon’s offerings. So I left Amazon to start offering that kind of expertise.
At first, the goal was not to build a business – I just wanted to not work for anybody else.
How did you scale the business in the early days?
At Amazon, I was in electronics as a vendor manager. The early customers were part of the clients that I had been working with back at Amazon. A couple of friends I had made in the company left around the same time and we decided to join forces. Phil Stolt and myself focused on business development and Darren Alfonso, our other co-founder, focused on analytics and processes.
We decided to go down this road together and that turned out to be critical to our success. For the first few years, it was just the three of us. We didn’t really know what product we were delivering. We were focused on how we could help clients, but we were delivering products that weren’t sticky. Clients would work with us and move on.
So we knew we had to develop a sustainable, long-term product to really get to the next stage of growth.
What would you tell yourself if you were starting a business today?
First: don’t skimp on talent. We made a few mistakes in the early days just because every hire is critical and, sometimes, companies make choices based on employee cost rather than talent. Second: an investment in technology and process is something I wish we had done sooner.
We built the business on specialization and kept our scope narrow, so we knew we needed a best-in-class technology partner to help us scale. We signed key clients and wanted to scale our people around those clients. We chose Pacvue as a way to keep offering unique expertise that would be hard to find anywhere else. We’ve had a really, really great relationship with Pacvue from the beginning and the work we did with Pacvue in those years became a tipping point for our company.
This was an important decision for us and a big lesson I would tell any entrepreneur: once you think you’ve figured out a product that’s going to work, start thinking about what it looks like down the road.
How did you get acquired?
We weren’t building the business to sell it, but we started getting interest from investors right away. As Ortega Group grew, the offers started to get meaningful. So we knew we had to decide whether to go down the path to acquisition and what that meant.
We started talking with a couple potential buyers. Those conversations started ramping up in early 2020, but the pandemic hit the brakes on everything. We had to keep working while wondering if the world was ending. Things were scary. But as things started to stabilize, we ended up in an even better position than before.
How did you choose Tinuiti as a partner?
We really explored a lot of options before choosing Tinuiti, just to understand the opportunities. We talked to at least twenty or thirty potential investors, but we had really good options in terms of partners as well.
Because we had established such a loyal client base, we ultimately wanted to do what would be best for them and continue to drive their success. We knew that Tinuiti would offer our clients other services that they needed and we could become part of that mission.
Tinuiti, a performance marketing firm, announced the acquisition of Ortega Group in March 2021 as a way to build out full-funnel offerings across the Amazon market.
As Tinuiti’s CEO Zach Morrison put it: “Tinuiti with Ortega is where full-service meets full-funnel… Commerce brands of the future require a new model that goes deeper than just media and that’s what this acquisition achieves.”
Want to tell your story about your Exit plan or acquisition or learn more about how Pacvue can help drive success for your business? Send Melissa Burdick a message on LinkedIn. And be sure to subscribe to her newsletter!
