Aaron Nava
The
Full Arc
I’ve spent my career in two rooms that most organizations keep separate. The one where you win the business. And the one where you actually have to deliver it.
Most people are built for one thing. Not me.
Before a pitch begins, someone has to find the room. Not wait for an invitation. Go create the reason one exists. I’ve spent years making that first call, asking the hard questions, speaking to capability and vision before anyone asked us to. Nine out of ten of those conversations turned into a formal invitation to compete. That’s not luck. That’s preparation meeting conviction.
After the win comes the real work. Building the systems, the teams, the infrastructure that makes sure the promise you just sold gets delivered. Every time, at every scale. But delivery is just the beginning. The clients who stay, who expand, who bring you into the next brief, they do that because someone built a relationship worth staying in. That’s where the real growth lives. And that’s always been my job too. Six people to 1,200. $35M to $115M. Across 33 acquired agencies, one voice. One way of operating.
Then I build the people who carry it forward. Because the real measure of any leader isn’t what happens while they’re in the room. It’s what they leave behind when they’re not.
Fast enough to win. Structured enough to last. Here's what that looked like.
Building
Circus
The Situation
Six people. No US market reputation. Offices across LATAM but almost no footprint where the biggest clients lived. The odds weren’t in our favor. I didn’t care. I’d built from scratch before. I knew what it took. And I could see exactly where this was going.
The Build
It started with Spotify. I inherited the account and immediately saw what it could become. Not a project client. A partner. I grew it from a single relationship into a full Social AOR partnership. When the opportunity came to lead the launch of Viva Latino, we were ready. Not because we got lucky. Because we’d spent months earning the trust that made us the only logical choice.
That became the playbook. Win the room. Then build something worth staying for. California Lottery started as a cold pitch against agencies ten times our size. We won. Then I built the team, deepened the relationship, and retained that account for five years. Northgate Gonzales Markets followed the same arc. We won social, earned their trust, and expanded into a full 360 AOR adding media and influencer along the way. The relationship was the growth strategy.
Integrating
Monks
Bigger waters meant something specific. Thirty-three agencies. Four regions. One mandate: build a capability that could compete and win anywhere in the world.
The Situation
Each with their own identity, their own clients, their own way of winning. I was part of the team leading the integration, not managing it from a distance, but building from within. The mandate was simple to say and extraordinarily hard to do. Take a fragmented, multi-region capability and make it move like one organization.
The Build
I started by listening. Not presenting. Not forcing. Founders protect what they built. That’s not resistance, that’s integrity. So trust came before alignment. Relationships before systems. After a year of that work, the data did what conversation couldn’t. By qualifying opportunities more deliberately, we became focused in a way that changed everything. We stopped chasing every room and started owning the right ones. The business grew significantly. The math became the argument nobody could refuse.
What came next was the part most people never see. Across four regions, NAMER, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA, I helped build the go-to-market vision, made the earliest hires, brought in the first freelancers to deliver while the teams were still forming, and carried the pitch load until the offices and leadership were strong enough to stand on their own. From the first conversation to a fully operating regional capability.
Winning the business was only half the job. The other half was keeping it. I oversaw the full client portfolio across regions, managing AOR relationships that spanned social-first campaigns, influencer activations, and integrated marketing. Along the way I helped implement nimble production models and built creator networks that could serve multiple brands with mobile-first content, finding smarter ways to deliver more for less without compromising the work. We maintained an 85 to 90% retention rate, year over year, for four straight years. The clients stayed because the work was good and the relationships were real.
What People Say
150+ brands. Every category. Every scale. Every region. One standard.
15 Years
of
Building
- IntrapreneurConill
- Co-Founder & P&LJoe Agency
- 6 to 100 peopleCircus
- $115M RevenueMonks
Some people manage the business. Some people build it. I've never been able to stop at managing.
Four times I've walked into situations that had more potential than infrastructure, more vision than execution. And four times the answer was the same: find the intersection between the creative and the commercial, the win and the trust you build after it, and live there. That intersection isn't a balance I work to maintain. It's just where I think most clearly. From both sides of the table — what the agency needs to win, and what the client needs to grow.
The best work I've ever been part of didn't happen because everything was running smoothly. It happened because the trust was deep enough to be honest. To push back. To tell a client what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. That kind of trust starts with understanding who you're talking to — not theoretically, but lived. I've spent my entire career seeing the world through two cultural lenses simultaneously. I'm bilingual, bicultural, and I've built campaigns for Hispanic audiences at the highest level: Toyota, Dodge, Spotify, California Lottery. Not because I was briefed to. Because I am the market. And I've learned to build the tools that move it.
Those tools are changing fast. I've been deep in AI as a builder, not an observer. The credential matters less than the conviction: the pure specialist is shrinking. The next generation of high performers will direct, manage, and scale AI agents. That shift is already underway. I'm already building for it.
The machine that runs without you. That's always been the goal.
Let's Talk
The next build starts with a conversation. I don’t wait for the perfect brief. And the best partnerships I’ve built didn’t start with one either. Let’s talk.