A business rarely changes its name without a reason. In our case, becoming Boderia was less about changing direction and more about recognising the journey Adonis Media had already taken.
Over the years, our work gradually expanded beyond websites, marketing, and standalone tactical services. The name "Media" no longer reflected the work being delivered or the direction the business was heading.
This is the story behind that transition, from the early days of the business to the thinking that shaped Boderia, and why our focus now centres on helping organisations build connected Governed Revenue Systems instead of delivering isolated services.
Key Takeaways
- Adonis Media became Boderia after more than two decades of evolution beyond the traditional agency model.
- Working across marketing, technology and wider commercial operations exposed how fragmentation was making growth harder to manage and understand.
- Boderia was shaped by that experience, bringing previously isolated commercial functions together within a Governed Revenue System.
- The evolution builds on the expertise developed since 2004 while giving us a model designed around how modern B2B organisations actually operate.
Where the Story Began
The business behind Boderia dates back to 2004, although it didn't begin as Adonis Media.
At the time, businesses were only beginning to understand the commercial potential of the internet. Websites were becoming a necessity and digital marketing was still an emerging discipline.
Much of the focus was on visibility. Businesses wanted to be found, generate enquiries and establish credibility online.
What followed changed the way organisations operated.
Websites developed into sophisticated commercial platforms. Marketing became increasingly data-driven and software found its way into almost every area of business. Organisations gained access to more information, automation and technology than we could have imagined when Adonis Media began.
That progress also introduced greater complexity.
Customer information became distributed across multiple systems. Reporting became more sophisticated, yet leadership teams didn't necessarily trust it any more. Departments became increasingly specialised while maintaining visibility across the wider organisation became harder.
Businesses continued investing in software, automation and digital transformation, yet we repeatedly found leaders struggling to answer some fairly fundamental questions:
- Where is revenue actually coming from?
- Which activities are contributing to growth?
- How confident are we in the information being used to make decisions?
- Why are different systems telling us different stories?
More than two decades later, those questions had become central to many of the conversations we were having with clients.
They also played an important part in the transition from Adonis Media to Boderia.
The change reflected what we'd learned from years spent working alongside growing organisations and seeing their commercial challenges evolve. What began with websites and marketing gradually took us deeper into the systems, data and processes surrounding revenue.
As our understanding of those connections developed, so did the business.
Growing Alongside the Internet
The story of the business began before Adonis Media existed.
After leaving the British Army and studying Leisure Management, Derek started a car detailing business in Edinburgh with a friend called Perfect Polishing. It provided an early education in the realities of running a business and trying to grow it.
Around the same time, the internet was becoming increasingly accessible and businesses were beginning to explore what an online presence could do for them. Websites were still relatively uncommon, particularly among smaller businesses, and many owners were only starting to consider how the internet might change the way they attracted customers.
Rather than outsourcing the website for Perfect Polishing, Derek decided to learn how to build it himself.
Days were spent running the detailing business and evenings learning PHP, building websites and experimenting with a technology that was changing quickly.
What started as a way to build a website for one business soon created another opportunity.
Derek began building websites for other businesses and, in 2004, incorporated Perfect Designing. The name followed naturally from Perfect Polishing, but the new business was focused on web design and the growing opportunities surrounding the internet.
As the work developed, it became clear that building a website was only one part of the picture. People needed to find it, visitors needed a reason to make contact, and those enquiries needed to become customers. Understanding why some did and others didn't gradually became just as important as the website itself.
Perfect Designing evolved with those requirements. Website development expanded into search engine optimisation and digital marketing as clients increasingly looked for support beyond the website itself.
By 2010, the Perfect Designing name no longer reflected the breadth of the work being delivered.
The business became Adonis Media.
Over the years that followed, our capabilities continued to expand into software development, automation and a much broader part of the commercial operation.
Our clients were changing too. Being visible online was no longer enough. They needed consistent demand, better reporting, connected data and technology capable of supporting increasingly complex businesses.
By the early 2010s, the internet had become far more than somewhere businesses promoted themselves. Websites, software and digital systems were becoming part of the infrastructure through which businesses operated.
As our work moved further into that infrastructure, we started to see another problem taking shape.
The Problem We Kept Seeing
As Adonis Media expanded its capabilities, we began seeing the same pattern across client engagements.
The businesses themselves varied considerably. We worked across technology, healthcare, manufacturing and specialist B2B industries, with different products, customers and ways of operating. Yet many of the challenges we found inside them were surprisingly similar.
A business might approach us looking for more leads, but once we looked deeper, the larger issue was often somewhere else. Sales had limited visibility of opportunities, follow-up was inconsistent or the business couldn't clearly see what happened after an enquiry was generated.
Others came to us wanting a new website when disconnected systems or inconsistent customer data were creating much bigger problems.
We saw this repeatedly. The visible problem would appear in one area of the business while something elsewhere in the commercial operation was contributing to it.
These organisations weren't short of technology either. Many had invested heavily in CRM systems, marketing automation, reporting tools, project management software and customer success platforms. Most of those investments had been made for perfectly sensible reasons and solved a genuine problem at the time.
Over the years, however, those individual decisions accumulated.
A new system might be introduced to improve sales visibility. Another would automate communication or provide better reporting. Different teams adopted technology to support their own requirements, often without anyone designing how everything should eventually work together.
The result was an increasingly fragmented commercial environment.
Customer information became scattered across platforms. Reports produced different answers depending on where the data came from. Teams developed their own processes and workarounds, while leadership found it increasingly difficult to maintain visibility across the whole business.
Companies had invested in technology partly to gain greater control and visibility, yet the environment created by all those individual decisions could make the business harder to understand.
Eventually, we recognised exactly the same pattern inside Adonis Media.
Like many growing businesses, we'd added software whenever a new requirement emerged. Each platform had a purpose and delivered value, but over time our information became fragmented, reporting required reconciliation and parts of the business depended on systems that had been introduced years apart.
Experiencing the problem ourselves changed how we approached it with clients.
We began looking beyond the individual activity, platform or department and paying much closer attention to how the whole commercial environment worked together.
Building the Platform We Needed Ourselves
The fragmentation we were seeing in client businesses was also influencing how we thought about technology.
After years of working with open-source applications and third-party platforms, we had become increasingly conscious of the compromises involved. Software usually comes with its own assumptions about how a business should operate. You configure what you can, integrate something else when functionality is missing and gradually adapt processes around the limitations of the technology.
Around eight years ago, Derek began building an alternative for our own business.
It started as a CMS.
Having control over the underlying code meant we could develop the platform around the way the business needed to operate. If something needed changing, we could change it. If a capability was missing, we could build it. We weren't dependent on a software vendor's roadmap or forced to reshape an internal process because the platform expected it to work differently.
As our requirements grew, so did the platform.
What began with content and websites gradually expanded into the wider commercial operation. Capabilities that would normally require separate applications could increasingly be handled natively, reducing the number of integrations required to move information between systems and giving us greater control over how data flowed through the business.
We continued building it primarily for ourselves, using it to solve the same operational problems we were encountering every day.
Over time, it became increasingly relevant to the work we were doing with clients too.
The same principles applied. Rather than starting with a collection of software products and asking a business to adapt around them, we could start with how the organisation worked and develop the environment around those requirements.
That distinction became increasingly important as data governance, security and control became greater considerations for growing businesses.
The Boderia Platform is served within its own dedicated infrastructure, giving us greater control over the application environment and how commercial data is managed. Native capabilities also reduce the dependency on integrations between multiple third-party applications, although integrations remain available where there is a genuine reason to use them.
For most of those eight years, the Platform was developed directly by Derek. Only recently have we started expanding the development team as the Platform and its role within Boderia have grown.
Today, it supports far more than the CMS it started as. It provides the underlying technology for marketing, sales, customer success and operations, with automation, data and AI increasingly working across those functions.
The technology has evolved in much the same way as the business itself: one requirement at a time, shaped by problems we were trying to solve.
Looking at Growth Differently
For many years, growth was viewed through the performance of individual functions.
Marketing created awareness and demand. Sales converted opportunities. Customer Success managed the relationship after the sale, while Operations supported how the work was delivered. Each function developed its own processes, systems and measures of success.
As we became more involved in client environments, viewing those functions independently made less sense. A customer experiences one organisation, and the revenue that organisation generates is influenced by what happens across the entire commercial journey.
Our attention gradually shifted from individual activities towards the environment connecting them.
We started looking more closely at how information moved through the organisation, how systems interacted, where decisions were made and whether teams had access to the same commercial picture. We wanted to understand where accountability sat and what happened to a customer relationship long after the initial sale.
That broader view revealed important differences between organisations.
Those with stronger commercial environments tended to have better connections between their systems and teams. Information moved more reliably through the business, reporting gave leadership a clearer view of performance and decisions could be made with greater confidence.
It also became easier to see how decisions made in one area affected another. Strategy influenced the market a business pursued and how it positioned itself. Marketing influenced the opportunities entering Sales. Sales shaped the customers inherited by Customer Success, while Operations and technology affected how efficiently the entire journey could be managed.
This gradually changed the way we thought about revenue.
We began to see it as the output of a much broader commercial system, shaped by strategy, people, processes, technology, data and the decisions made across the organisation.
Once we started looking at businesses through that lens, many of the problems we'd been seeing for years began to make much more sense.
Introducing Boderia: The High Ground
By this stage, the work had already changed.
Clients still needed marketing, technology and automation, but those disciplines were increasingly part of a much broader commercial conversation. We were spending more time looking at visibility across the organisation, how systems worked together, how data was governed and where improvements could have the greatest impact on revenue.
The Adonis Media name had become increasingly difficult to reconcile with that work. It represented where the business had started, but after more than two decades, it no longer represented what the business had become.
We began looking for a new name.
Numerous options were considered, but the one that eventually became Boderia had actually been sitting much closer to home for years.
Back in 2020, Chloe Buntin, Derek's daughter and now Co-Founder of Boderia, was working weekends at a day spa in Mackay, Queensland. She spotted a gap in the market and bought the Boderia name with the intention of building a business around it.
That venture never came to fruition, and the name sat dormant.
Years later, when we were looking for an identity that could take Adonis Media into its next stage, Boderia resurfaced.
The connection was personal. Historically spelt Bodorria, the name is associated with the Firth of Forth, the stretch of water between the areas of Scotland where Derek and Chloe grew up. Derek was raised in West Lothian, while Chloe grew up across the Forth in Fife.
Two founders from different sides of Scotland, connected by the stretch of water associated with the name we would eventually give the business.
Boderia also gave us the idea of the ridge, or the high ground, which has since become part of the wider identity of the company.
For us, the high ground represents the perspective that comes from being able to see the whole commercial environment. When you're inside a growing business dealing with customers, teams, technology and the demands of day-to-day operations, that perspective can be difficult to maintain.
The ability to see how those parts connect gives leadership a clearer understanding of where revenue is being created, where it is being lost and where attention should go next.
That thinking eventually gave us a line that captures the idea simply:
Control above. Chaos below. Boderia is the ridge.
Becoming Boderia gave us an identity that could carry the history of the business while representing where the work was heading.
Today, that direction is expressed through the Governed Revenue System: a commercial operating environment that connects strategy, people, processes, technology, data and execution within a common governance framework.
It gives us a way to look across the whole commercial operation, understand how its different parts affect one another and continually improve how revenue is created, converted, expanded and understood.
How Boderia Works Today
For clients who knew us as Adonis Media, Boderia builds on the work we've already done together.
The relationships, knowledge and experience developed over the years remain an important part of the business. In fact, working closely with clients helped shape much of the thinking behind Boderia. Every project exposed another part of the commercial environment and gave us a better understanding of what happens as organisations grow and become more complex.
The difference is how we now bring that experience together.
A website, CRM, marketing campaign, sales process or automation can solve a specific problem, but its performance is also influenced by the wider environment around it. Boderia gives us a structure for looking across that environment and deciding where improvements are likely to have the greatest commercial impact.
For organisations discovering Boderia for the first time, this is also important context. Boderia may be a new name, but the business and experience behind it go back to 2004.
Today, we bring that experience together through three connected parts of the Boderia model.
Our Platform provides the technology and infrastructure that supports the Governed Revenue System and can be developed around the individual requirements of the business.
Our Revenue Team works across marketing, sales, customer success and operations, applying expertise where it is needed rather than treating each function as a separate engagement.
Our Leadership works with the organisation on strategy, priorities and governance, maintaining a clear view of the wider system and where attention should be focused.
Together, these give us a much more integrated way of working with clients than the traditional agency model Adonis Media began with.
The capabilities we've developed over more than two decades haven't disappeared. They now operate as connected parts of a Governed Revenue System, continually reviewed and improved around the commercial objectives of the organisation.
The Next Chapter
The transition from Adonis Media to Boderia continues a journey that began more than two decades ago.
The challenges facing businesses today are very different from those we encountered when Adonis Media was founded. Organisations now operate across more technology, more data and increasingly complex commercial environments, making visibility and informed decision-making increasingly important.
The businesses that perform well in the years ahead will need to understand how their commercial operation works as a whole. That requires leadership to see where revenue is being created, where performance is being restricted and where investment will have the greatest impact.
We've spent years working inside these environments, first through individual disciplines and increasingly across the connections between them. Those experiences shaped Boderia and ultimately led us to the Governed Revenue System.
They also explain why Adonis Media became Boderia.
The name has changed, and the scope of our work has grown considerably, but the underlying purpose has remained remarkably consistent: to build better businesses by improving the systems that drive their growth.
From Fragmented Growth to a Governed Revenue System
The journey from Adonis Media to Boderia was shaped by more than a change of name. It came from more than two decades spent working inside businesses and seeing how growth becomes harder to manage as teams, technology and commercial activity become more complex.
Those experiences eventually shaped the Governed Revenue System, the operating environment we use to connect how revenue is created, converted, expanded and understood.
For organisations experiencing fragmented systems, limited visibility or growing operational complexity, understanding the wider commercial environment is a useful place to start. Our Governed Revenue System explains how the different parts fit together and how Boderia works across them.
Explore the Boderia Governed Revenue System →
