Tanner Shaffer is co-founder and managing partner of Directive, the B2B performance marketing agency he co-founded with his college roommate and best friend, Garrett Mehrguth. A marketing graduate of Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California, he set aside plans for law school to build the firm at 22 and has since run nearly every part of it, from SEO accounts to operations, finance, and recruiting.
A Plumbing Client at Azusa Pacific
Shaffer studied marketing at Azusa Pacific from 2010 to 2014, while Garrett Mehrguth taught himself web design and SEO in the apartment they shared. "I was young and saw an opportunity in a growing industry," he told Authority Magazine in 2020. "Back in 2014, small businesses were just recognizing the value of digital marketing." One of Mehrguth's first clients was Shaffer's father, who ran a small plumbing business. After Directive ranked it at the top of Google, Mehrguth told the California Business Journal, "His phone was ringing off the hook."
Mehrguth talked him out of law school, and Shaffer's LinkedIn dates his start at Directive to February 2014. Mehrguth's history of the firm describes the two of them learning SEO, paid search, and demand generation by running campaigns "that had to convert or we didn't eat."
Running Departments at Directive
"Growing and building Directive has been my entire career," Shaffer writes on LinkedIn. "In the beginning, I was in every role from sales to an SEO specialist." He adds that "as leaders transitioned in and out, I have led almost every department within the company." He spent years as chief operating officer, and his recent work has centered on systems that let each department see what the others are doing and on an onboarding program for every role.
Directive's team page says he moved to Austin, Texas, to build the agency's presence there. Austin is now one of six Directive offices, with Orange County, California; New York City; Mexico City; London, England; and Toronto, Canada.
In the 2020 Authority Magazine interview he said his main focus was attracting and training people. He described an internal program called the Skill Pyramid, which he said "is similar to the T-shaped marketer, but it goes through more areas outside of marketing."