Filling the Gaps: Interview with Simplex Founders

The story behind Simplex Media Group: a conversation with the founders

Every company has an origin story, but the best ones start with a problem nobody else was solving. For Michael Marchese and Jayden Vernon, the founders of Simplex Media Group, that problem was hiding in plain sight, sitting in the exact industries most marketing agencies were happy to overlook.

When you ask Michael and Jayden why they built Simplex, the answer isn’t about wanting to run another agency. It’s about the gaps they kept seeing in the industries they cared about most: construction firms, homebuilders, steel-building and barndominium companies, contractors, and the local, service-based businesses that keep the trades running. The gap between how good they were and how well they were marketed had become impossible to ignore.

The gaps they couldn’t unsee

The first gap was expertise. Most agencies treat a steel-building manufacturer the same way they would treat a coffee shop, using the same generic playbook, the same recycled ad templates, and the same assumptions. But Michael and Jayden knew that marketing a $40,000 building or a custom home is nothing like marketing an impulse purchase. The sales cycles are longer. The decisions are bigger. The buyer spends weeks, sometimes months, researching before they ever pick up the phone. An agency that doesn’t understand that rhythm burns a client’s budget in all the wrong places.

The second gap was accountability. Too many builders and contractors had been sold metrics (impressions, likes, reach) that felt good in a report but never showed up in their bank account. They had been handed pretty dashboards with no connection to booked jobs. Michael and Jayden saw business owners who had been burned once and now believed, understandably, that marketing simply didn’t work for them.

“The work was never the problem. The problem was that the best builders in a market were invisible to the people trying to hire them.” — Michael Marchese

The third gap was trust, specifically the local trust that makes or breaks a business. In these industries, a buyer isn’t just choosing a product; they’re choosing who to trust with the biggest purchase of their life or the future of their property. Reviews, reputation, and visibility at the right moment aren’t nice-to-haves. They are the whole game. And yet the companies that deserved that trust were being out-marketed by competitors who simply understood how to get found first.

There was a fourth gap, and it was quieter than the rest: responsiveness. Builders and contractors move fast, and they had grown tired of agencies that took days to return a call or treated their account as an afterthought behind bigger clients. Michael and Jayden built an agency where the people running your campaigns actually knew your business and picked up the phone, where a client was a partner and not a ticket number in a queue.

Simplex was built to close all of these gaps at once. Not by being everything to everyone, but by doing the opposite: going deep in a defined set of industries and becoming genuinely fluent in how they win.

Why niching down was the point, not the compromise

It would have been easier, at least on paper, to take any client with a budget. Michael and Jayden deliberately chose not to. By concentrating on construction, steel buildings, roofing and landscaping, logistics, and a handful of other performance-driven verticals, they could stop guessing and start pattern-matching. When you run campaigns in the same industries every single day, you learn the seasons, the buyer’s real hesitations, the language that lands, and the exact moment demand starts to climb.

That focus is why Simplex is Canada’s performance-first digital agency, with a 100% Canadian team and no outsourcing. It isn’t a slogan for its own sake. It’s a direct answer to a gap the founders had watched hurt clients again and again: work getting shipped overseas, context getting lost, and the business owner left explaining their own industry to the very people who were supposed to be marketing it.

“We didn’t want to be another agency chasing every client. We wanted to be the team our clients actually trust.” — Jayden Vernon

The proof: results

If the gaps were the reason Simplex started, the results are the reason it kept growing. Michael and Jayden are the first to say that marketing should be measured in outcomes a business owner can actually feel: a fuller pipeline, a booked-out calendar, and a phone that rings with the right kind of lead. At a high level, that is exactly what the numbers reflect.

Across more than 100 campaigns, Simplex has generated over 30,000 leads for its clients and attributed more than $22 million in revenue to the campaigns it runs. On average, clients see roughly a 5x increase in leads within their first 90 days, the window where a skeptical owner finally starts to believe marketing can work for a business like theirs.

The individual stories behind those numbers follow a familiar pattern. A steel-building company that had relied entirely on referrals and word of mouth, with no predictable way to fill its schedule, moves to a steady flow of qualified inquiries and books months ahead. A contractor who had written off online advertising after a bad experience watches cost-per-lead drop while the quality of those leads climbs. A local service business that used to disappear in the slow season learns to stay visible year-round, so it is the first name buyers find the moment they are ready.

What ties those stories together isn’t a clever tactic. It is the willingness to treat each industry on its own terms. Michael and Jayden point out that the same ad budget can produce wildly different results depending on whether the agency understands when a buyer is actually in the market. Spend it in a builder’s dead season and it evaporates; spend it right before demand climbs and it compounds. Knowing that difference is precisely the expertise gap Simplex was built to close, and it is why clients stay.

Ask Michael and Jayden which result they’re proudest of, and the answer usually isn’t a statistic at all. It’s the owner who told them it was the first year he could take a real vacation without worrying where the next job would come from. That, they say, is what closing the gap actually looks like.

“We don’t measure success in clicks. We measure it in booked jobs, full calendars, and owners who can finally breathe.”

How they work

The philosophy underneath every campaign is simple: great marketing should make you the obvious choice before a buyer ever picks up the phone. In practice, that means meeting buyers everywhere they actually look, from Google Search, Display, Meta, TikTok, programmatic and social, and billboards and SEO content when the market calls for it, then tying all of it back to a CRM dashboard so the client can see exactly what is working. No fluff, no black boxes, and no pretending a new logo is a growth strategy.

Just as important is what Simplex refuses to do. Michael and Jayden don’t lock clients into commitments they can’t see results from, and they don’t dress up activity as achievement. Transparency isn’t a feature they added; it is a direct response to the accountability gap that sent so many builders to them in the first place.

Where Simplex is headed

The industries Simplex serves are changing quickly, with tighter margins, shifting buyer behaviour, new technology, and economic cycles that reward the companies who market smart through the slow times. Michael and Jayden see that not as a threat to their clients but as the opportunity that proves their whole reason for creating Simplex. The builders and contractors who stay visible when competitors go quiet are the ones who dominate when the market heats back up.

Michael and Jayden’s ambition for Simplex isn’t to be the biggest agency. It is to be the one the building and construction world trusts the most, the first name that comes to mind when a company in the trades decides it is finally ready to grow. The gaps that started the company are the same gaps still driving it: expertise where there was guesswork, accountability where there were none from competing marketing agencies, and visibility for the businesses that have always deserved it.

“The best time to build your marketing was five years ago. The second-best time is before your competitor does.”

Their advice to any builder or contractor still on the fence is the same one that started Simplex: don’t wait until the phone stops ringing to take your marketing seriously. The gap is real, and it is still there for whoever decides to close it first.