Finance Executive Redefines Revenue Operations in Performance Marketing

The intersection of finance and marketing has produced an unlikely architect of change in Denver’s digital agency landscape. While most finance professionals stick to spreadsheets and forecasting models, one executive has carved out a specialty in something far more dynamic: revenue operations that bridge the gap between brand building and measurable performance.

Taylor Thomson’s Unconventional Path to Agency Leadership

The trajectory from political science and economics at Davidson College to directing business development at a performance branding agency doesn’t follow a traditional blueprint. Yet this interdisciplinary foundation proved essential for someone who would later champion the collapse of traditional marketing funnels.

After spending three years in financial services at a research firm covering multiple industries, the transition to MarTech represented a calculated pivot. Six months as a business development representative at a customer data platform company provided frontline experience in software sales before moving into mid-market and SMB sales leadership. But the real transformation came at WITHIN, where Taylor Thomson began building infrastructure around how agencies actually generate and sustain revenue.

“The biggest challenge will be standing out as a brand without relying on big-name artists,” Thomson explained during a Growth Marketing Camp podcast appearance, though he was speaking about brand differentiation rather than just celebrity endorsements. The principle applies broadly: how does any organization distinguish itself when traditional markers of success become commoditized?

Building Revenue Architecture at WITHIN

WITHIN’s approach to what it calls “performance branding” represents a fundamental rethinking of how brand marketing and performance marketing interact. Rather than operating as separate departments with different budgets and KPIs, the agency collapses these functions into unified campaigns where every brand touchpoint drives toward measurable business outcomes.

Thomson’s role evolved from Director of Revenue Operations and Business Development into Head of Revenue Strategy & Operations, and ultimately to Head of Finance. Each title shift reflected expanding responsibilities that now include P&L reporting, financial planning, accounting oversight, and technology management. He leads cross-functional projects with data science teams to develop internal databases using generative AI technologies, manages client satisfaction surveys that achieve over 50% response rates quarterly, and orchestrates annual compensation planning.

The work involves managing company-wide financial analytics that guide decisions at all organizational levels while simultaneously developing forecasting strategies that improve revenue projection accuracy. This dual focus on current performance and future planning mirrors the same philosophy Thomson brings to business development: you can’t optimize what you don’t measure, but measurement without action is just data collection.

The Morning Intelligence Ritual

One distinctive practice sets Thomson apart from typical finance executives: spending 15-20 minutes each morning curating industry intelligence for his team. He scans roughly 15 different newsletters covering retail, marketing, and technology, extracting the most relevant articles into a shared Google Sheet. This isn’t passive information consumption—it’s active intelligence gathering designed to help his team understand prospect challenges before conversations begin.

“You can pull so much interesting information from how people are thinking, what they’re doing, what their challenges and pain points are,” Thomson noted in an interview. When a startup announces an IPO, that signals not just one company’s influx of capital but also competitive responses across their entire sector. For someone responsible for business development strategy, these macro movements inform micro conversations.

The practice reflects broader thinking about how business development teams should operate. Rather than functioning solely under marketing or sales leadership, Thomson advocates for BD operating as an independent function that serves both without being beholden to either team’s specific metrics. Marketing cares about lead generation; sales cares about close rates. Business development should care about the quality and fit of opportunities across the entire revenue lifecycle.

Technology Stack and Operational Philosophy

Thomson lives and dies by Salesforce, self-describing as “the annoying person that’s like if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.” This insistence on systematic data capture isn’t bureaucratic—it’s foundational to understanding what actually drives results versus what just feels productive.

The technology stack at WITHIN includes Outreach for sales engagement, Pathmatics (now part of Sensor Tower) for tracking social media spend across channels, and OpenSense for signature marketing. But technology alone doesn’t create operational excellence. The real value comes from how these tools connect to create visibility across the entire revenue organization—from marketing through client success.

One area receiving particular focus involves optimizing client onboarding processes. For an agency that doesn’t just press buttons on advertising platforms but positions itself as a strategic thought partner, the transition from sale to active engagement is critical. How do you establish trust? How do you demonstrate strategic value beyond execution? These questions don’t have purely financial answers, but they have financial implications that someone needs to track.

From Publications to Pattern Recognition

Thomson’s background includes writing for SB Nation while at Davidson, which required synthesizing complex sports dynamics into accessible narratives. That skill translates directly to his current work: taking complicated financial and operational concepts and making them comprehensible to teams that need to act on the information.

The ability to spot patterns across disparate domains—cultivated through studying political economy in Latin America, analyzing fire investigation protocols for financial services clients, and understanding retail customer data platforms—enables a form of strategic thinking that rigid specialization often misses. When everything is connected, expertise in one area illuminates another.

This explains why someone with comprehensive revenue operations experience approaches problems differently than pure finance specialists. Revenue doesn’t exist in isolation from product, marketing, sales, or client success. Understanding the full commercial engine means understanding how each component affects the others.

The Future of Agency Revenue Models

The agency world faces a reckoning around how it generates and sustains revenue. Superclubs and massive events pull ticket sales away from mid-sized venues. Headliner costs have inflated beyond sustainability for regular club bookings. The parallel in marketing agencies involves top-tier talent becoming too expensive for anyone except the largest clients, while mid-market clients struggle to access senior strategic thinking.

Thomson’s solution involves building resident-driven capabilities—teams of people who understand how to deliver strategic value without relying on individual marquee names. It’s the difference between selling access to famous practitioners versus selling robust methodologies that work regardless of who’s executing them.

The approach requires different economics than traditional agency models. Instead of billing primarily for senior practitioner time, you’re billing for systematic excellence. Instead of selling credentials, you’re selling results. And instead of marketing your team’s pedigree, you’re marketing your firm’s track record.

What Marketing Actually Needs from Finance

In Thomson’s view, marketing teams waste resources when they lack clear feedback loops between spend and outcomes. The solution isn’t just better attribution modeling—it’s building operations that make the relationship between actions and results visible to everyone involved.

This means finance can’t just report what happened last quarter. Finance needs to illuminate what’s happening right now and what’s likely to happen next quarter based on current trajectories. It means building dashboards that client success teams actually use, not just ones that make executives feel informed. And it means asking uncomfortable questions about whether everyone’s optimizing for the same definition of success.

The role of a Head of Finance in a performance branding agency looks different than at traditional companies. You’re not just managing budgets—you’re actively shaping how the organization understands and optimizes its commercial engine. That requires fluency in marketing terminology, respect from creative teams, and the credibility to challenge conventional wisdom when data points elsewhere.

Building What Comes Next

Thomson’s current focus extends beyond WITHIN’s immediate operations. Through involvement with Pavilion’s Rising Executives Course and Revenue Operations programs, he’s part of conversations about how modern revenue organizations should function. The questions aren’t just tactical—they’re architectural: How should teams structure themselves? What metrics actually matter? How do you balance short-term revenue pressure with long-term relationship building?

These aren’t academic exercises. The answers have direct operational implications for how agencies build sustainable businesses. Get the structure wrong, and you end up with internal competition, misaligned incentives, and frustrated clients. Get it right, and you create conditions where strategic thinking and execution excellence reinforce each other.

The work happens at the intersection of finance, operations, marketing, and sales—a space where traditional organizational charts don’t provide much guidance. Someone has to connect these functions into a coherent system. That’s the job Thomson has built for himself, working with companies like WITHIN that are willing to question fundamental assumptions about how agencies create value.

For finance professionals who find themselves boxed into pure number-crunching roles, the example suggests alternative paths exist. Revenue operations represents one such path: combining financial rigor with operational excellence and strategic thinking. It requires understanding multiple disciplines well enough to spot connections that specialists miss. And it demands the credibility to influence decisions across departments that might prefer to remain siloed.

The question for the industry isn’t whether this integrated approach makes theoretical sense—it clearly does. The question is how many organizations will actually implement it, and how many will continue operating with fragmented functions that optimize locally while missing global opportunities. Based on where Thomson’s career has led, the integrated approach isn’t just possible—it’s increasingly necessary for agencies that want to compete on more than just access to famous practitioners.