Progress Group Inc

OVERVIEW

Progress Group Inc. is a Toronto-based financial services firm led by founder and CEO Jonid Hametaj, operating across nine service verticals: bookkeeping, corporate tax, personal tax, CFO advisory, insurance, wealth management, mortgage, real estate, and estate planning. SA Media has been embedded inside the business since November 2025, first as Fractional CMO and, from mid-2026, as CMO and CTO. In that time we built the firm's entire digital marketing and sales infrastructure from the ground up, scaled the founder into a recognisable global CEO brand with hundreds of creatives and more than a million impressions, took the brand onto the world stage at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, and led Progress Group's transformation into an AI-native firm, now running on live AI agents: mapping the whole business into 118 SOP workflows, specifying a ~140-agent operating model, selecting and managing the development partner, and completing a 5 TB+ data migration to prepare the company for it.

THE BRIEF

Progress Group delivered board-level financial work for mid-market and high-net-worth clients, but the market saw a tax shop. Nine service lines existed internally without a unified story, there was no marketing engine, no CRM discipline, and almost every new client came through the founder's personal network and time. Operationally, five years of human-run workflows lived in people's heads, spreadsheets, and a deeply nested on-premise file server that no AI system could reach. The mandate grew in two directions at once: build a go-to-market machine that wins new clients through digital channels without depending on the founder's calendar, and turn a collection of good service businesses into a platform, one financial home, run on documented processes and AI agents, that can absorb acquisitions without adding layers of managers.

OUR APPROACH

1. 01

   Audit, positioning, and a 90-day plan. We opened with a full digital audit, a 90-day proposal, and a go-to-market plan, repositioning Progress Group as the board of financial directors for mid-market and high-net-worth clients in the GTA: one connected team instead of a collection of disconnected advisors.

2. 02

   A digital sales engine, built from scratch in under 90 days. We stood up the entire acquisition stack: booking and calendar routing, LinkedIn outbound automation, a creative production pipeline, Meta lead campaigns, PR outreach, a lead-to-demo system, weekly performance reporting, and a budget and lead dashboard. In the first quarter the engine generated 62+ leads and 14 booked meetings, converted 4 new clients directly from ads at roughly $37 per lead, and lifted the firm's Google rating from 4.4 to 4.8.

3. 03

   Scaling the founder into a global CEO brand. We built Jonid Hametaj's personal brand as the firm's media engine: an Instagram launch strategy, a numbered carousel series approaching seventy editions, cinematic reels, and professional shoots in Toronto and Dubai. Hundreds of creatives across the founder and company channels drove more than a million impressions, including 152K Instagram views and 92.5K accounts reached in a single quarter, with individual reels passing 30K views.

4. 04

   Taking the brand onto the world stage. For Abu Dhabi Finance Week, Formula 1 Abu Dhabi, and Binance Week, we planned the trip strategy and content capture, produced 491 photos and clips on the ground with a multi-camera crew, captured 92 contacts, and ran a dedicated lead CRM and follow-up scripts for 22 tracked opportunities.

5. 05

   Sales collateral, content, and new brands. We designed eight two-page service brochures, a 19-article SEO series, the Progress Group AI investor deck, the PG Royalty Club sponsorship programme and its curated-room event format, the Progressiv AI sub-brand, a refreshed eagle mark, and a 20-page agentic go-to-market strategy built on one idea: nine wings, one operating layer.

6. 06

   Fixing the operating foundation first. As CTO we reviewed the firm's IT estate and identified 20.7% of annual licence spend as waste, reconciled 1,048 client records between the practice-management system and the accounting ledger, introduced a weekly operations cadence with zero overdue jobs as the target, and built accounts-receivable collections tooling.

7. 07

   Mapping the business for an agentic operating model. We documented how every wing actually runs: nine master SOPs of roughly 350 pages, broken into 118 numbered SOP workflows, each step with an owner, a tool, an SLA, failure modes, and the AI opportunity. That became a ~97,000-word Executive Build Specification for a ~140-agent estate under a single cross-wing orchestrator, with compliance built into the architecture: humans sign every CRA filing and licensed insurance action, every agent action is logged with its source and rationale, records are retained for seven years, and agents run in shadow mode before they act. The agentic operating model is now live, with agents running in production across the firm.

8. 08

   Programme leadership, vendor selection, and a 5 TB+ migration. Saim Abbasi led the programme as CTO. We scored six development proposals across strategic, technical, and financial criteria, selected Legace House as the build partner, and ran eight contract drafts to protect Progress Group's IP, data residency, and milestone-based payments. Because cloud agents can't reach an on-premise VPN server, we made the data layer the critical path: a 5 TB+ data migration and server reorganisation into Canadian-hosted SharePoint, with flat metadata libraries replacing folder trees seven to nine levels deep.

SERVICES DELIVERED

KEY RESULTS