Brian Patterson co-founded Go Fish Digital in 2005 as a side project and, as chief executive, built it into a digital marketing agency of about 100 people that made its early name in online reputation management and later in SEO and paid media. An information technology graduate of George Mason University, he is now chief marketing officer of Aligned Dental Partners and lives in Tampa, Florida.
MangoCo and a Government Job
In college Patterson spent summers on a car rental company's management trainee track, working ten-hour shifts in a shirt and tie and cleaning cars outside in the heat. "Looking back, I realize this job taught me how to work long hours," he told Ideamensch.
"GFD started out when a non-profit organization I had volunteered for back in high school came to me for help with online marketing," he said in the same interview. "At the time, I had a full-time government job and took on the work as a small side project. It was just one little website, after all." Referrals followed. At his government consulting job he met another moonlighting marketer who shared his values, the two partnered up, and they went full time once they had the confidence and the runway to make it work.
He first called the business MangoCo, short for Mango Company. "I thought it was artsy and modern, and hey, I got the domain name for it," he said. People found the name confusing, so a few years later it became Go Fish Digital.
Online Reputation Management at Go Fish
Go Fish's early specialty was online reputation management, the work of pushing damaging results off the first pages of a search for a person or brand. "We succeeded in controlling the first two pages of Google search results for a few of our clients' brand names in 2010 before Online Reputation Management was even an industry," Patterson said in a 2012 announcement issued from Ashburn, Virginia. "It grew out of a need for our clients and we adapted quickly." He wrote the Online Reputation Management Playbook published on SEOmoz, and Ideamensch noted clients that included the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and an appearance on the Tech Tuesday segment of WAMU 88.5's Kojo Nnamdi Show.
Asked what every entrepreneur should do, he said to build thought leadership. "The Internet is the great equalizer. Anyone can write about their experiences and highlight their strengths," he said. He also floated an idea he and his partners had discussed: insurance for reputation, which would pay a business or person if someone damaged their name online.
Scaling and Selling Go Fish
As chief executive, Patterson grew Go Fish into a firm of about 100 marketers serving brands such as GEICO, Marriott, Amazon, and Airbnb, according to his Aligned Dental Partners biography, with four Inc. 5000 listings and several US Search Awards agency-of-the-year wins. The same biography says he led the company's sale to the private equity firm Trinity Hunt Partners in 2023, and in February 2024 Agital announced that it had acquired Go Fish. "Working with the team at Go Fish Digital has been the highlight of my professional career," he wrote on LinkedIn at the time.
Dental Marketing in Tampa
At Aligned Dental Partners he leads marketing and the digital systems behind patient growth across the group's practice locations, an approach his biography describes as treating marketing as a lever for profit and enterprise value.
He lives in Tampa with his wife and their four daughters. Years earlier, with three daughters at home, he told Ideamensch he would have to "mentally prepare for having four girls." In the same interview he admitted to a skill left over from a childhood interest in magic: he can make balloon animals, cartoon characters included.