The Full Story
KEEP At A Glance
Consulting firm
Grew to profitability in less than 90 days of launch
Focused on helping seven and eight-figure organizations grow through customer and employee retention and reputation management.
Seeks to enhance employee morale and improve customer journey through a humanistic approach to management and experience design.
The KEEP Principal: Kindness, Empathy, Engagement, and Patience.
GroHaus At A Glance
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Strategy Centric Marketing Agency
Serving the needs of six and seven-figure professionals and organizations in the knowledge and service industries.
Global Team of Rockstar Marketing Professional
Grew from $0 to six figures in only six months
Pioneered the "short cut" Marketing funnel
Drew At A Glance
Serial Entrepreneur, Fortune 500 Marketer.
He started his first businesses in grade school and got into marketing after struggling to grow his Commercial Production Company after college.
Marketer by choice, teacher at heart.
A frequent speaker on the topics of marketing strategy, offer creation, copywriting, leadership as well as client and employee retention.
Lives in Richland PA with his wife Kelly and daughter Molly.
KEEP At A Glance
GroHaus At At Glance
1988
Drew Donaldson grew up as the son of two entrepreneurs in a small farming town in central Pennsylvania. As a child, Drew watched his mother and father each build businesses and saw the hard work and dedication it took for them to accomplish their dreams. Growing up in the small business community gave Drew an insatiable appetite for starting his own business from a young age. He hustled stickers on the playground, sold bags of mulch made of shredded leaves in his front yard, and planned and schemed numerous business ideas, most of which never made it out of his school notebooks.
At the age of six, his father told him to get a job (jokingly, of course) after he asked if he could buy a new movie at the video store. The next day, Drew's father caught him talking on the phone at the video store, working out the details of how to apply for a job there so he could earn enough money to buy the movie. While this would have shocked most parents, Drew's mom and dad were more or less relieved. After all, last week he had planned an elaborate pool party for all of his friends, invited them, and only told them about it the night before when he handed them the menu he wanted to serve and requested they go to the grocery store to get supplies.
The entrepreneurial spirit never waned, and as Drew got older, he got in trouble for selling fireworks and lighters at school. He somehow graduated from high school and college without further incidents. He knew the only thing he wanted to do was work for himself. At the pleading of his mother, he did his best to go the traditional route and took some internships and jobs working for other people, which he hated. This only further pushed him into launching his own business.
Drew launched his first real, legal business when he was still a junior in high school and began producing music videos for an up-and-coming R&B star on the Universal Music Group label. He grew that business into a full production company, shooting commercials and online videos for both small businesses and Fortune 500 companies like Campbell's Soup and Thermo Fisher Scientific. But with the success also came failure. His business was constantly struggling to make ends meet, even though his clients were always happy with the work he had produced for them. Frustrated, he knew the only thing keeping him from success was his lack of marketing knowledge.
2010
By late 2019, nearly a dozen of his former colleagues, including his entire reporting chain, left the business due to poor morale, leadership, and a general consensus that the firm was being grossly mismanaged by the new leaders who had been recently installed by the firm’s new owners. Drew saw the writing on the wall and began planning his next move. His initial plan was to launch an agency that would take him back to his roots, helping the small business community improve their marketing, and in January 2020, he did just that.
But as the pandemic took hold, Drew soon realized he had no shot at launching the business that year. So instead of launching, Drew did the only thing he could think of. He started cold-calling businesses to see if they would be willing to talk to him about their marketing. Not to sell them a service they clearly didn't need and couldn't afford, but to understand why so many small businesses didn't hire marketing firms to help them grow their business. After hundreds of interviews, Drew began developing a clear picture of how agencies were missing the mark in serving the entrepreneurial community.
2019
Since then, GroHaus has served hundreds of small businesses of all kinds but found a focus in the knowledge and service industries, providing coaching for new and early-stage entrepreneurs and agency services for more established firms.
In 2024, Drew announced the formation of a new consulting firm, The KEEP Agency (KEEP for short). This new sister firm to GroHaus provides consulting services to established seven- and eight-figure organizations to help grow their business through a focus on customer and employee retention and reputation management. Drew engaged his first client at KEEP before they could even build the website. At the time of writing, KEEP is on track to profitability in its first year and has a bright future helping service organizations better serve and retain their customers and employees.
2024
2013
Around that time, St. John's University, one of Drew's freelance clients, decided to hire him full-time to run their video marketing operation and help them insource video production, saving the school nearly half a million dollars in his first year. During that time, Drew continued to produce commercials and web videos for St. John's and other clients while also absorbing all of the marketing knowledge he could from the highly skilled digital media team he found himself on. After three years or so, Drew left the warm and cozy confines of St. John's to launch his own consulting practice.
He figured out a way to automate prospect outreach on LinkedIn before that kind of automation was widely available, and used it to generate dozens of meetings and interviews before eventually landing an internal consulting role with ISS, a financial news publisher in Manhattan. During his time with ISS, he rehabbed a failing advertorial program and grew it into a $2.3 million line of business within his first year, working with financial industry heavyweights like JP Morgan, Oppenheimer Funds, Pacific Life, and Prudential. For the next few years, Drew's attention turned to data and automation, where he went on to develop custom software and automation solutions designed to generate real-time reporting dashboards that could be used across the company and shared with clients, providing industry-leading insights into their clients' advertorial sponsorships.
2020
In late 2020, Drew partnered with two seasoned marketers to relaunch the agency as Crackle Marketing, a marketing coaching service that also provided à la carte agency services, right-sized and right-priced for the entrepreneurial community. Drew quickly grew the business to six figures within the first six months of opening their doors, even as the team continued to tinker with the business model and how to scale the overnight success they were experiencing.
After a year and a quarter of working together, Drew's partners asked him to buy them out. They had come from the big agency world and were frustrated by the tight budgets of the smaller clients the firm was attracting. Drew, on the other hand, saw the potential and knew that once he had complete ownership of the firm, he could make it not only profitable but scalable without just becoming another big agency that could only serve the top 10% of the market. And he was right! Crackle (now rebranded as GroHaus) reached profitability in less than sixty days from the day Drew signed the paperwork buying out his former partners.
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Recent Presentations:
Recent Appearances:
#221: Knew Amsterdam Radio - Drew Donaldson
Discover how to transform your coaching business for better growth and client engagement with Drew Donaldson, CEO of Grow House. This insightful discussion explores the challenges and strategies of running a successful marketing agency while emphasizing the importance of value and support in client relationships.
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