About Pertinacity

Boutique by choice.

 

Principal-led, marketers first, and technical enough to build the AI ourselves.

The name is deliberate — a relentless focus on what matters most, and the willingness to analyze, test, fail and keep going until the number moves.

The principal, not an account layer

The people who plan the work do the work.

No handoff

Michael is on every engagement personally.

An honest no

We turn down work that needs a bigger bench than ours — in the first call, not in month three.

How we hold ourselves

Five standards you can hold us to.

Problems before pretty things. These are the commitments, not the aspirations.
01

Problems before pretty things

Marketing is not pretty flyers. We name the problem — disconnected systems, no honest view of the funnel, nobody in-house who owns the number — before anyone talks about execution.

02

Plan, then confirm

Nothing goes live before we have walked you through it: what data it touches, what it is allowed to do, and how we will know it worked. Security is reviewed upfront, every engagement.

03

Reporting that tells the truth

TOFU to revenue, measured against pipeline rather than vanity metrics. If a channel is not working the report says so — including when the thing failing was our recommendation.
04

Stack-agnostic, always

Fluent in HubSpot and Salesforce both, so we never push you toward the platform we happen to know best. The differentiator is who builds the AI and why, not which CRM you already bought.

05

We say no to work we cannot do well

Being boutique means senior attention on every engagement — and turning down work that needs a bigger bench than ours. You hear that in the first call, not in month three.

How we got here

Marketers who went deep on the technology.

Everyone claims to be an AI company now — it takes an API key.

We are marketers first who went deep on the technology, not technologists reaching toward marketing. Think about why HubSpot resonated with operators: it was built by people who understood how marketers actually work. That is the sensibility we bring to AI for growth.

Three things stand behind it:

  • Decades of sales and marketing depth — we have owned the number, not just advised on it.
  • MIT-certified technical chops — formal training, which is what makes building the agents possible rather than reselling someone else's.
  • AI companies among our clients — the sharpest available test of whether the technical claims hold.

Meet the principal

People are the whole product.

Principal-led is not a positioning line. It is who shows up.
MichaelCarlson800x800
Michael Carlson
Founder & Principal

Decades in B2B sales and marketing leadership — running the funnel, owning the number, and answering for it. Then formal technical training, MIT-certified in AI, so the agents Pertinacity ships are built rather than resold.

He works every engagement personally. If you hire us, you get him — not a handoff.

Photocopy of the February 1, 1988 Time cover featuring school principal Joe Clark, signed in marker: Big Mike, Pertinacity is the essence of success! - Joe Clark

Where the name comes from

A word on a bad photocopy.

In March 1988, a month after Joe Clark made the cover of Time, Michael’s mother and her friend Phyllis Needham dragged him to Artemus Ham Hall on the UNLV campus to hear Clark speak. He was 14. Clark was the Paterson principal with the bullhorn and the baseball bat—controversial then, controversial now.

But the message was about staying fixed on what actually matters, solving the main problem, and refusing to be pulled off it by noise.

He was a very small kid looking up at a very large man, in both senses, holding a badly photocopied copy of that Time cover. Afterward he got a moment, and Clark signed it:

“Big Mike, Pertinacity is the essence of success!”
—Joe Clark

He still has it. Nearly 40 years on, staying fixed on the problem worth solving and keeping the noise out of the way turned out to be the job. That is what the agency is named for.