Exit Strategy: Ciceron Founder Andrew Eklund
Andrew Eklund did not retire. Earlier this summer, the career digital marketer shut down Ciceron, the St. Paul-based agency he started 30 years ago, at age 26. It’s not easy to step away from your life’s work—especially when the decision is prompted by mounting financial pressures. Eklund says 2019 was Ciceron’s best year ever, but the pandemic disrupted that momentum, and he found himself grappling with how to lead and innovate remotely.
In 2020, he bought a building in St. Anthony Park thinking he’d spend the lockdown getting ready for a return to office, but when that didn’t come, the investment became a burden. (He’s now evolved it into Space & Co., offering meeting and event rentals).
“Ciceron had been my nest egg. The mothership, Eklund says. “I was always protecting the mothership, but over the past few years, I was the only person who knew how to fly it. It gives you a false sense of control.” As he shifts to providing AI consulting for management teams “so they can avoid what happened at the dawn of digital, when they were so late to understanding how it would change their businesses,” Eklund reflects on a changing marketplace and not losing sight of what fuels you.
Reinvention is a constant. “I started Ciceron in 1995 at the dawn of the internet. In the early years, we had to make clients feel comfortable communicating over email and convince them to post their sales materials online. We went from building websites to digital strategy to a performance agency, which worked until 2022, when it became all about understanding AI. You’ve got to be willing to change.”
The price of remote work. “What I learned through the pandemic was that a change-oriented agency like mine requires the ability to sit around a table and work together. Zoom felt like we were sacrificing innovation. The before and after is often the most valuable part of the meeting.”
You can’t do it alone. When you’re the founder, it can be difficult to separate who you are from the business. “Don’t listen to voices that are telling you that you are your business,” Eklund says. “You start to believe you have control over things you don’t.”
Know your strengths. As your business grows, it’s also easy to get pulled away from the skills that brought you to it in the first place. “Don’t abandon the things you’re really good at,” he says. “I am best when I’m working directly with clients or on stage at a conference speaking about what tech is going to do for people.”
Harnessing the power of AI. “It’s going to take fewer people to do the same work, or [do] better [work]. The people who lean into that are going to cure diseases faster. There’s never been a better time to be an innovator. Any company trying to launch a new product should go in with an AI-native viewpoint: Train the AI so you can scale smarter and make decisions faster. It will cost less to get started.”
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Leaders should use AI themselves. “The only way AI is going to unlock your business is if you start using these tools personally. Too often, people want their staff doing it. But this is no different than the 1990s: How do you lead an internet revolution without a browser?”
