Running a B2B brand agency with project-level financial clarity

Vertical: Art & Design

Mercury products: IO, Bill Pay, Invoicing

Founded in 2023 by Pete Baker and Jim Renaud and headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, FinalFinal Opens in new tabworks with B2B technology companies that need their story, design, and product to read at the same level of polish — Anthropic, Push Security, NWG, Memberful, and a roster that keeps growing through referral. Baker brings the brand framework that preceded Cisco's $2.35 billion acquisition of Duo Security. Renaud's product design credits include Facebook, Asana, and Coursera. Ruth Facer, partner and COO, ran production at scale through Trulia's IPO and Amazon's Automotive Brand Innovation Lab.

Together they sell the idea that credibility is the cumulative effect of every small choice visible on the surface — from the homepage to the sales deck to the conference badge.

That only works if the agency itself operates at the same standard. A brand firm whose own back office is held together with reimbursements and best guesses has a credibility problem before the first deliverable lands. So Baker and Renaud built FinalFinal's financial setup the way they build for clients: start from first principles, design for the long run, resist the urge to paper over operational complexity.

Running parallel engagements for enterprise clients creates a specific operational shape. At any given moment there's a brand workshop in week two for one client, a website build entering QA for another, a launch campaign with paid media live for a third — each with its own scope, its own cadence, its own AP queue at the client side. Project-based agency work doesn't allow for the "sort it out at month-end" approach.

The first thing to solve was attribution. When two parallel engagements both touch ad platforms, design tools, and freelance vendor seats, the question "what did this project actually cost" doesn't have a clean answer at the credit card statement level. Everything blurs.

FinalFinal addresses that at the moment of provisioning. Each active engagement gets its own virtual card, with a defined limit and merchant categories locked to that project's actual needs — ad platform access for a campaign build, design tool subscriptions tied to a specific deliverable, vendor seats provisioned for client work. When the engagement closes, the card closes with it. Spend rolls up by project automatically, with no retroactive matching and no gray-area reimbursements blurring the line between project cost and operating spend.

That clarity does its real work later, when Baker and Renaud are pricing the next engagement. A branding agency that can't tell a prospective client what a comparable engagement actually cost has the same credibility problem the agency exists to solve for others. The setup turns that conversation from a guess into a reference.

On top of card-level controls, FinalFinal layers payment approval rules that route anything above a defined amount for a second review before it leaves the account. Day-to-day spend on tools and subscriptions runs without friction. Vendor payments, ad spend top-ups, and anything else crossing the threshold pause for explicit sign-off.

The mechanic is simple, but the operational effect matters. Baker and Renaud don't need to babysit the AP queue, and the team doesn't need to remember a separate process for high-value transactions. The rule does what an operator would otherwise do manually.

Project-level spend visibility solves one half of project finance. The other half is project-level revenue — and that's where enterprise AP cycles meet milestone-based engagement structures.

Most FinalFinal engagements run on milestones across a multi-month arc. Brand workshops, identity systems, website builds, and launch support each trigger an invoice. If any one of those lands awkwardly in an enterprise AP queue — wrong PO format, missing reference number, hitting on a Friday before a 30-day cycle starts — the agency absorbs the float. At enterprise procurement scale, that float can mean six weeks.

Mercury Invoicing handles the billing front end without a separate workflow to maintain. Invoices go out at the right milestone, carry the detail enterprise AP teams expect, and stay visible without manual chase. Baker uses the Mercury API to pull invoice status into how the team already tracks project progress, so outstanding invoices show up where project work shows up — not in a separate tab nobody opens until month-end.

For longer agency-of-record relationships — like FinalFinal's ongoing work with NWG, where the team operates as an embedded marketing partner across strategy, campaigns, and content — the billing rhythm shifts to a retainer. The API still ties invoice status to engagement status whether the work is a one-time identity sprint or a year-long partnership.

FinalFinal isn't the only thing Baker is running. Lowertown GroupOpens in new tab and Lowertown Bar & CafeOpens in new tab sit alongside it on the same Mercury account, and the multi-org setup means switching between the two takes a click rather than a separate login. For an operation where the same operator's attention is split across more than one legal entity, that removes a category of friction that would otherwise compound across the week.

“For every one of these businesses, that would be a nightmare in the traditional sense,” says Baker. “Bouncing between those, keeping them separate enough that I’m not messing something up. I couldn’t do it otherwise.”

Baker and Renaud are adding clients faster than they're adding people. The financial setup they built on day one hasn't asked for a rebuild.