Our Story

Our company was founded on August 21st, 2013. We signed our first substantial client that year, Heat Transfer Warehouse, and also became recognized as the first Google Partner in North Dakota.

In our first full year of operation, there were many milestone moments that took place. In January of 2014, we hired our first (non-owner) employee, and by February of that year, we were on stage at 1 Million Cups speaking about our business. We also moved into the Meadowlark Building in Downtown Fargo & surpassed 25 clients.

AdShark turned 2 years old and celebrating by adding our 6th team member + had some milestone achievements for our clients. By September of that year, we had officially surpassed 40 clients served, whom we raised $7M in online sales for and drove over 11,000 leads for.

We were invited to speak at Cart Summit (an eCommerce Conference) on how to improve conversion rates + we hired 4 new team members by October of this year. In addition, we surpassed $25M in online sales and 16,000 leads driven for our clients.

In July of this year, AdShark moved into a larger office space in the Meadowlark Building to accommodate our growing team. We adjusted to the new space, made it our own, and held several client meetings and company gatherings in this new space.

In April of 2018, our team reached a size of 10 full-time employees. We also were recognized as Google's Featured Business in their 2018 economic report. To make things even more exciting, we celebrated our 5-year anniversary that August.

In 2019, we launched our intern program, helping our team rise up to 15 employees. In addition, our social media activity started to take off and we reached over 1,200 likes on our Facebook page thanks to our most successful “AdShark Week” ever!

What was one of the most memorable years in all of our lives (for a mix of reasons), 2020 brought an abundance of change to the AdShark team. As we added a lot of new clients to our team, we were recognized as a member of the Inc 5000 list of fastest-growing, privately-held companies.

Our space continued to expand to accommodate our growing team, and we adjusted back to being fully in our Fargo office. The staff size grew to 18, our social media following grew to 4,000+, and AdShark once again found itself on the list of fastest-growing, privately-held companies (Inc 5000).

In 2022 alone, our team had generated $248M in online client revenue from our ads, we serviced 198 clients with our marketing services, and gained recognition as a Google Premier Partner. On top of that, we were recognized as a “Best Place to Work” Finalist through our local Chamber of Commerce.

What a year it was! 2023 saw us grow our team size to 20, while we also added a new vertical: email & SMS marketing. Our client list surpassed 200 (all-time) and we won an incredibly special honor: being named as the winner of the “Best Place to Work” award at our local Chamber's award ceremony.

After launching our plan for email marketing in late 2023, we officially sign our first Email & SMS marketing client in 2024 – while our digital advertising, SEO, and web departments continue to flourish. 2024 becomes a record year of sales growth for AdShark (and many of our clients!).

This year saw us host our first ever “Shark Talk” event – to a local attendance of over 150 people! – and grow in our thought leadership through the development of our AdShark podcast. It also saw us gain a spot again on the Inc 5000 list for Fastest Growing, Privately Held businesses. Finally, we were also recognized as a Finalist/Runner-Up for the Small Business of the Year Award at our Chamber's award ceremony.

We were recognized by our local Chamber with the “Small Business of the Year” award, and also earned another spot on the Inc 5000 list for our 58% YoY revenue growth. It's also the year this website was launched, so if you're seeing this and it's after 2026: let our web team (marketing@adshark.com) know that they need to update their timeline.