Buckets. Mops. Eco-friendly spray cleaner. San Diego’s rapidly growing Power Digital Marketing has an unlikely origin story—and it all starts with a janitorial business.
After graduating college, SD native Grayson Lafrenz knew he wanted to become an entrepreneur but sought out real world training before venturing out on his own. After securing a job at Xerox, he met Jeff Mason, then the company’s VP of Sales and Marketing. “In three years he […] became one of the best salespeople that we’ve had,” says Mason, Power Digital’s CEO.
With his new skills, Lafrenz opened a janitorial business and hired an SEO marketing agency to help spread the word about its services. “What he got was a black box of results,” says Mason. “He was spending all this money, didn’t know what he was getting from a return perspective, and didn’t know if it was helping the business.”
Frustrated with the results, Lafrenz brought SEO in-house and the company began to see early success through its efforts. Eventually, this led to a new business plan—Lafrenz focused their efforts on launching their own SEO marketing agency. “What had happened as a result is that the SEO business became much bigger than the janitorial services company because that’s when online demand and search was evolving,” says Mason.
Soon, the brands that they worked with for SEO started asking for help with advertising on platforms like Facebook and Google. In 2012, Power Digital was born.
Today, with roughly 200 employees at its Mira Mesa headquarters, the agency has offices in San Diego, New York City, Atlanta, Medellìn, Colombia, and Argentina (a new acquisition). Yet despite the growth, it remains a uniquely San Diego company: With conference rooms named after local bars like the Lamplighter, Home & Away, and The Aero Club, Power Digital pays homage with an IYKYK wink and nod.
In the early years of Power Digital, while traditional agencies were measuring brand awareness, Lafrenz obsessed over metrics tied to revenue, measuring success in dollars and conversions, not just impressions. As the company grew, it expanded into social media advertising—and into a small studio in Old Town, where it went from four employees to 50. Then, Power Digital caught its first big break.
With a round of private funding from Periscope Equity, the company was able to make some strategic acquisitions and scale its capabilities.
Courtesy of Power Digital Marketing
“My remit was to build a scalable sales organization, build a scalable client services organization, and really be another strategic leader for this growing company,” says Mason. “As a result, we scaled the company very quickly in 2020 and 2021. We then took on our next round of private equity investment in 2022 by bringing in our current partner called Court Square Capital out of New York.”
With the infusion of cash, Power Digital became an acquisition machine, folding in six specialized agencies enabling the expansion of its public relations, paid media, and content marketing capabilities, as well as bridging new industries like healthcare through its acquisition of Cardinal.
By expanding its services and targeting specific industries, the company positioned itself as a full-service agency for brands seeking specialized expertise. “The reason why brands hire marketing agencies like Power Digital is that they want the best practitioners, but they also want somebody that knows their business, that knows their vertical,” Mason says.
The agency has also earned a reputation: It receives around 5,000 applicants every month. In January, Ad Age named Power Digital Marketing one of the Top 10 Best Places to Work—a signal that the company values its internal efforts as much as its external.
“As long as we’re doing great work for our clients, we’re fostering a great culture for our people, we’re getting better every day and every month, and if we’re beating ourselves every year—we’re going to get better and better, and we’re going to stay relevant in the market,” says Mason.
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Power Digital’s latest initiative includes an AI readiness assessment to help companies figure out which parts of their business AI can replace. “Many brands know that they need to adopt AI. They just don’t know how or where to get started,” Mason says. “We started doing AI assessments four months ago, and we already have massive demand for that. And so that’s a bet we’re making.”
The company’s philosophy today stays true to its origin story—it wasn’t built by Madison Avenue executives or fancy credentials but by a San Diego small business owner who started with a mop, a bucket, and a question: Is my marketing actually working?