Ship shape: with a Harvard pedigree--and without outside funding--Raleigh native Zach Clayton has built a $10 million digital-marketing business.

• Author: Pritchard, Catherine
• Position: Cover story

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Anyone aware of a meeting in 2009 between Bill George and Zach Clayton might have assumed Clayton was the one seeking business advice.

George, then in his mid-60s, had retired as CEO of medical-device giant Medtronic Inc. in 2002 before joining Harvard .Business School as a senior fellow. Clayton, 24 and with a brand-new Harvard MBA, had just started a digital-marketing company in Raleigh. It had few clients and three employees, including himself.

But George was the one looking to Clayton for help in marketing himself and his business leadership books in the fast-changing digital world. He was one of the first clients to sign with Three Ships LLC, the youthful entrepreneur's new company.

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"He's become my mentor," says George, who is now 74. "It goes both ways."

Over the last seven years, Three Ships has grown into three divisions with dozens of employees. The company owns the three-story building where it started in two rented cubicles on Oberlin Road near downtown Raleigh. Clients include Bassett Furniture Industries Inc., Southern Pines-based First Bancorp and private-equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC. Clayton, who owns 84% of Three Ships, expects revenue to reach $10 million this year. The company has been profitable since its first year while he and the other three owners, two Harvard friends and Washington, D.C., digital-marketing executive Jeff Giesea, have never taken a dividend.

This rapid growth prompted the judges of Business North Carolina's annual competition to recognize Three Ships as 2016 Small Business of the Year. "Three Ships is impressive in the sense that they had a vision and idea of what they wanted to do in an ever-changing marketplace," says Ben Kinney, publisher of BNC and one of the judges. "Knowing when to adapt yet sticking to that clear vision is a testament to their success."

Named for the ships that carried Christopher Columbus' first expedition to the New World, Three Ships is three businesses under one roof: CRISP, the digital-advertising agency that was its original enterprise; Demand Signals, a 2-year-old search engine optimization venture; and 3S Ventures, which kicked off in March building websites for other businesses.

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