Recently, Meghan, Garrett and I met to discuss what 2026 looks like for Formada — not for the business itself, but for them as leaders in the business.
After reflecting on all that we’ve accomplished in 2025, what do they personally want to focus more on in the coming year? Here’s a snapshot of that conversation.
What Are You Most Looking Forward To In 2026?
Garrett: I think the biggest thing that I’m looking at for 2026, is how we’re going to achieve our next level of growth.
There’s a concept of sorts that Meghan and I talked about early on in the business, where there are very specific, unavoidable levels of breakthrough you experience. There’s no skipping. You kind of have to go through each stage in order to get to the next level of growth.
Early on, it was just trying to get clients.
And then it was, “No, we can’t just have clients. We have to hire people to serve those clients.”
After that, we were making these bigger reaches — expanding our services, dialing in our operational engine, and bringing on even more staff — those things that just kind of happen naturally as you’re growing.
Now, I think we’ve reached the point where we’re at a certain revenue level that, for a lot of agencies our size, is where they can kind of just sit for a very long time.
It’s a comfortable place. It’s a good pace. I’m certainly not knocking it.
But we want to grow. We’re committed to taking the next steps — and beyond.
In order to do that, you have to make some investments or take some larger risks.
So what I’m looking at for 2026 are a lot of questions around, what do Meghan and I want as owners of the business, but also what do we want the team to achieve? What are our long term goals altogether? And then what is the right method for us to get to that next level of growth?
That might seem obvious to some, but we’re in a position where there are a lot of directions we can go in.
Diversification, Quality of Work, and Process
Garrett: I think the continual thing for us, for 2026 which was also a goal, 2025 is diversification.
Of course, we want to be working with more clients, but we also are after securing a larger variety of clients to work with. And part of why that makes so much sense for us, is that we’ve got a great team that’s ready to go. We’re designed for that sort of diversity.
And what I’ve realized is that we always do our best work with clients who want premium-level, high attention to detail-style work — the people who appreciate the quality of the work. They see the value in what we’re doing.
The fact of the matter is, we will never be a good fit for someone that’s happy with ChatGPT. That’s not our market. We value good work, and we value talented writers, designers, and strategists, so it’s a waste for us to work with someone who’s fine with something that’s…just fine.
And so when we’re talking to prospective clients, we’re trying to identify those folks who are going to be excited about having a talented, detailed team behind the work.
We’re not about just churning stuff out. This isn’t a production agency. We are people who care about the work that we do, and that sometimes comes with a higher premium, but we know that it’s worth it, and we want to work with people who share that belief.
And the last thing I’ll touch on is in regard to our templates and process documents. I’m really wanting to spend more time on making things as automatic as possible, so that everything’s on rails. We’ve been close to that for a while. We’ve got pretty dialed processes. But, essentially, I want us to get to a place where every time an action is required, there’s a guide to get to the end of that process that helps the team be successful.
That’s my personal vision for 2026: Strategic investments and diversification, working with a broader range of clients, maintaining high-quality work and aligning with clients who value our premium services, and process, process, process!
Each Stage of Growth Presents Challenges, Breakthroughs
Meghan: So, obviously Garrett and I have very different roles. He’s very focused on the operations of the business and ensuring that clients have a good experience with us in terms of performance and team engagement — the communication strategy, clarity around timelines — generally speaking, making sure that our operational process is efficient and reasonably intuitive.
But for me personally, one of the things that’s become really clear is in respect to those stages of growth Garrett mentioned earlier.
As partners, Garrett and I have been really successful at creating a thriving business, and I think it’s because both he and I are super scrappy. We’re both ready and willing to do whatever it takes, including making certain sacrifices, in order to get to that first million dollars in revenue.
But once you break through that, you quickly realize that the same process that got you there isn’t going to get you to three or ten or twenty million.
It’s going to require a totally different process. You need to follow a totally different path with an entirely different set of risks.
In addition, you need to align yourself with folks who have done the thing you’re setting out to do, and while I get a lot of value out of reading books on the subject, I’m someone who really values speaking to people directly.
Rather than reading theoretically, “This is how you move from two million to five million to ten million,” I get so much more out of those face-to-face, founder-to-founder conversations.
Staying Flexible as the Business Grows
What’s exciting to me is that I feel like I’m just starting to expand my network, so I’m having more and more conversations with business owners who are surpassing the three or five million in revenue mark, or they’ve sold their first business and are plotting their next steps.
Working directly with those people to understand their stories has been something I’ve really enjoyed this past quarter, and will be a big focus for me in 2026
Entrepreneurship, I’ve discovered, is just this massive personal development journey. If you want the business to grow, you have to grow, too. You can’t just do the same things over and over again. You need to constantly be aware of your blind spots.
You’re constantly doing uncomfortable things and taking risks, and it feels like it almost gets a little bit harder after you’ve been successful, because you’ve got so much more to lose.
Once you get to a place where you’re profitable and you’ve got an A-level team like we do, heading into the next phase of growth feels like you’re suddenly taking a much bigger risk.
And I want to travel more, because I’ve come to realize that one of the important things we haven’t done very much of is travel to see our core clients in person.
I think that’s something that can really help further solidify these relationships. There are so many things that you can learn from being in somebody’s environment and watching them engage directly with their teams in a way that you really can’t over a video call.
So if I had to boil it down, I’m really focusing on relationships in 2026. Our clients, our prospects, our business community here in Vancouver and Portland.
Real Relationships, Premium-Level Work
At the end of the day, that’s what has always made our business successful — our ability to forge a relationship that helps us do our best work. That will probably never change, but we’re at a different level now, so we need to serve this era in a different way.
If you’re looking for a different kind of marketing partner, one that provides the results, communication, and support your business needs to achieve its goals, then contact us today. We’d love to help your business thrive.