This week’s Founder Friday features Maria Kathopoulis, who built UNTMD Media from frustration after watching founders pour money into marketing that looked impressive but failed to drive revenue.
What’s happening: Maria Kathopoulis co-founded UNTMD Media after watching founders invest heavily in marketing that looked impressive but failed to move metrics that matter: revenue, margin, pipeline quality and retention.
Why this matters: UNTMD Media’s model shows how integrated systems and accountability transform marketing into measurable growth.
Build systems before you scale. Document decisions, processes, and assumptions while the business is still small. This creates leverage later.
This week’s Founder Friday features Maria Kathopoulis, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of UNTMD Media.
Maria didn’t start UNTMD from a long-held dream of entrepreneurship. She started it out of irritation. After years of watching capable founders pour serious money into marketing that looked impressive but failed to drive revenue, Maria reached a breaking point. Agencies blamed algorithms, timing or “the market,” whilst performance continued to disappoint. “I refused to accept ‘that’s just how marketing works,'” Kathopoulis says.
That frustration became the foundation of UNTMD Media, a growth business built on accountability, integrated systems and commercial outcomes rather than disconnected tactics.
She kept watching capable founders invest heavily in marketing where campaigns were visually strong, reports were full and activity was constant, yet commercial outcomes remained flat. When performance stalled, the explanation was often vague. “Marketing takes time. Brand awareness compounds. The market is soft,” Kathopoulis says.
What became clear was that the problem wasn’t a lack of creativity or ambition. It was a lack of accountability. “Marketing had shifted away from commercial discipline and toward performance theatre. Success was being measured by outputs rather than outcomes,” she says.
Instead of selling services, Maria made the deliberate decision to sell results, anchoring every strategy to metrics like Marketing Efficiency Ratio, pipeline velocity and revenue quality.
Since then, she has helped scale brands including EAORON and EZZ to 8-figure revenues and built UNTMD into a fractional growth engine that sits at the intersection of performance, earned media, data and operations.
The business optimises decisions, not just channels, and treats AI as infrastructure rather than a gimmick, using it to remove friction and accelerate insight whilst keeping strategy firmly human-led.
UNTMD Media operates as a fractional growth engine for scale-ups and established businesses, typically generating over one million dollars in annual revenue.
Clients are founders and leadership teams who want clarity around what is driving growth and what is not. They are often at a stage where marketing spend is meaningful, but decision making lacks confidence due to disconnected systems and unclear attribution.
Services span performance marketing, CRM and lifecycle strategy, earned media and PR, data infrastructure and commercial growth strategy. However, the business does not sell these as standalone services. Everything is anchored to outcomes.
Outcomes over outputs
One of the most important decisions made early on was to prioritise fit over volume. “We deliberately chose not to chase scale through high client volume. Instead, we focused on working with businesses willing to act on data and make decisions quickly. Saying no to misaligned opportunities protected the integrity of the model and allowed us to deliver deeper impact,” Kathopoulis says.
Another key strategy was refusing to sell services in isolation. “Services are interchangeable. Outcomes are not. By structuring engagements around commercial impact rather than activity, we aligned incentives properly,” she says.
The business was built around compounding systems rather than one-off campaigns. Growth came from incremental optimisation across performance, lifecycle and decision making, reviewed weekly rather than quarterly.
As UNTMD Media evolved, significant investment went into data infrastructure and operational clarity, ensuring that insights flowed across the entire growth system rather than sitting in silos.
Integration drives impact
Most agencies optimise channels. UNTMD Media optimises decisions. “Rather than asking how to increase impressions or traffic, we focus on identifying the decisions that will most directly improve revenue efficiency and growth velocity,” Kathopoulis says.
A key challenge in building this model was overcoming the industry norm of siloed thinking. Early on, many businesses were accustomed to treating marketing, sales and operations as disconnected functions, often managed by different vendors with different incentives.
The business addressed this by deliberately redesigning how growth decisions are made. Instead of reporting by channel, reporting was structured around commercial questions. “What is driving qualified demand? Where is revenue leaking in the funnel? Which inputs are improving margin and which are eroding it? By reframing conversations around decisions rather than activities, we were able to bring alignment across teams and significantly reduce noise,” she says.
Similar to approaches highlighted in Dynamic Business’s coverage of evolving marketing strategies, UNTMD Media made a conscious decision to invest early in data infrastructure and process. “This allowed us to build faster feedback loops and pressure test assumptions weekly rather than retrospectively,” Kathopoulis says.
The approach to AI reflects the same discipline. “AI is treated as infrastructure rather than a selling point. It reduces friction, accelerates insight and improves responsiveness, but strategic judgment remains human led,” she says.
Boundaries enable progress
One of the earliest challenges faced was learning that technical excellence alone does not guarantee progress.
“In the early stages of building UNTMD, I consistently over delivered for businesses that were not operationally or emotionally ready to make decisions. I believed that if the work was strong enough, momentum would follow. In reality, momentum only follows action,” Kathopoulis says.
That experience forced a confrontation with the importance of boundaries. “Without clear expectations, timelines and decision ownership, even the best strategy stalls. Over time, I learned to partner only with founders and leadership teams who were willing to engage actively with the process and take responsibility for execution,” she says.
Another challenge was navigating the constant tension between growth and stability. “I learned that growth does not simplify a business. It compounds complexity. Resilience, process and clear priorities became more important than confidence or speed alone,” Kathopoulis says.
There was also a personal challenge in letting go of the need to prove oneself. “Early on, I tied my sense of progress to external validation. Over time, I realised that sustainable businesses are built on repeatable frameworks, not individual effort. The turning point came when I focused less on being indispensable and more on building systems that could operate without constant intervention,” she says.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, advice is grounded in those lessons. “Start a business to solve a problem you are prepared to engage with long term, not to chase recognition or status. Get close to revenue early and understand how money actually moves through your business,” Kathopoulis says.
Build systems before scaling.
“Document decisions, processes and assumptions whilst the business is still small. This creates leverage later. Most importantly, accept that discomfort is part of growth,” she says. Reflecting broader themes explored in Dynamic Business’s analysis of business resilience strategies, Kathopoulis emphasises that success comes from continuous adaptation.
“The entrepreneurs who succeed are not those who avoid uncertainty, but those who continue making clear, informed decisions when conditions are imperfect,” she says.
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