By: Halden Reed – interviewer & journalist covering business, entrepreneurship, and finance
Royston G King has spent close to a decade in digital marketing, long enough to have built a practice around one set of methods and then watched the ground move beneath them. Here he reflects on what it costs a founder to change what their business does, and why he thinks most wait too long.
There is a clean version of the story in which a founder identifies an emerging shift, builds for it early, and is proved right. Royston G King has been consistent that his version was not that one. The changes he made came late, arrived under pressure from clients, and cost him a period of being noticeably worse at his work than the year before.
King began working in digital marketing while studying business administration at the University of Southern California, running campaigns for small businesses before starting his own company. He founded his own firm in 2018, built around what he understood best at the time: acquiring customers through paid channels and search. The model worked well enough that changing it required an argument he did not initially want to have with himself.
“Clients kept asking about something I had not set out to sell,” said Royston G King. “Somebody comes in wanting one thing and two calls later the actual conversation is about a completely different problem. That happened enough times that I was either going to solve it or keep watching people take it somewhere else.”
King described discovering that this adjacent problem was a fundamentally different discipline as the point at which the company he had started stopped being the company he was running. He has also been unusually direct about how that felt from the inside.
“The uncomfortable part is that you are worse at the new thing than you were at the old thing, for a while,” said Royston G King. “You are trading a business you had figured out for one you have not. Nobody tells you how long that gap lasts, and while you are in it every reasonable person around you thinks you have made a mistake.”
“You are trading a business you had figured out for one you have not. Nobody tells you how long that gap lasts.” Royston G King
The transition was not costless in practical terms either. A firm changing what it sells has to rebuild its delivery capability, retrain people who were competent at something else, and explain itself again to a market that already held a fixed idea of what it did. King has acknowledged turning down work he would previously have accepted, on the reasoning that continuing to take it would have kept the old capability alive at the expense of the new one.
King says he now advises founders to attend to the timing question rather than the direction question, on the grounds that most of them eventually see the shift correctly and simply act on it late.
“Almost nobody I talk to is wrong about where things are going,” said Royston G King. “They are wrong about when they should start. They wait for the evidence to become overwhelming, and by the time it is overwhelming, everyone else has it too. The whole advantage was in acting while it was still arguable.”
King has advised more than 1,000 clients across over 100 industries in his career, a range he says gives an earlier read on shifts than working within a single sector allows, since the same change tends to arrive at different speeds in different markets. His work spans clients in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia.
He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco list, a recognition he tends to move past quickly in conversation. Asked about it, he has typically redirected toward the operating systems underneath his work, which he considers the harder and considerably less visible achievement.
“That was a nice marker along the way,” said Royston G King. “But if you are deciding whether to work with someone, it is not the information you actually need. The systems underneath are what let you do serious work at a scale a small team otherwise cannot reach. That took years, and none of it shows up on a list.”
King’s work has been covered in publications including Entrepreneur, Inc., USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and LA Weekly. He has also written on business growth and audience building, and has built audiences across his own channels that he reports have more than 15 million followers and over a billion views.
The firm he runs today would be difficult to explain to the person who founded it in 2018. King has said that it is generally a sign of a business that responded to its market rather than its original plan, and that founders who never have that experience are usually the ones who stopped paying attention.
