For home service, medical, and legal owners who are tired of paying four vendors and still not knowing what a booked appointment costs. Brian Hong, Michael Merlino, and Dimitry Morgan founded Magister Digital because the agency model is broken for service businesses. They fixed the version they used to hire.
Magister Digital is a founder-operated marketing agency run by three operators who built and ran service businesses in the verticals they serve. They consolidated the SEO, paid media, AI automation, and CRM stack proven inside their own companies into one team that ties every dollar to a booked job, a scheduled consult, or a signed case.
Prefer to dial it yourself: (619) 330-0953
› Magister means master in Latin. The teaching license, the master craftsman’s right to open his own shop, the maestro who runs the whole orchestra. Earned authority by doing the work, not by talking about it.
The name we chose on purpose
Every agency the three founders ever watched pitch a contractor, a med spa, or a law firm had never actually run one. The owner ends up paying four vendors, reading four dashboards, and still cannot tell you what a booked appointment costs. The SEO agency blames the ads vendor. The ads vendor blames the website. Nobody owns the revenue number.
Brian, Michael, and Dimitry had sat on the operator side of that table. They had answered the after-hours phone, watched booking gaps form between an inquiry and an appointment, and paid for marketing fluff with money the business needed. So they built the agency they wished existed back then, and they limited it to the three verticals they had actually run inside.
You do not need another vendor. You need one team that owns the number and a founder whose name is on the brief.
“We started Magister Digital because the agency model is broken for service businesses. Owners are paying four vendors, getting four dashboards, and still cannot tell you what a booked appointment costs.”
Brian Hong · Co-Founder and CEO, Magister Digital
No outsourced strategy. No white-labeled deliverables. If a brief goes out on Magister letterhead, one of these three read it and signed it. Each of them built and ran companies before Magister, and each owns one layer of your account.
A working operator, not a career marketer. Brian co-owns TurnkeyRenovators, a multi-seven-figure construction company built on this exact stack, and was a partner in a 13-location med spa chain. He founded Infintech Designs in New Orleans in 2008, then launched Flowbots.ai and BigEasyData.ai, and is a partner in Stealth Code behind SEO Neo and Omega Indexer. Every channel he builds ties back to one number the business actually cares about.
Read Brian’s full story
Michael co-founded CTR Geeks and trained over 1,300 local SEO practitioners through it. He is a partner in Stealth Code with Brian, on the production side of SEO Neo and Omega Indexer, and a co-owner of SEO Rockstars with Brian Hong and Gregory Ortiz. At Magister he owns the AI systems and strategy layer, building and operating production AI agents inside service-business stacks, not demos. He is the person your AI stack reports to.
Read Michael’s full story
Dimitry came up as an HVAC technician before running ad accounts. He knows what a dispatched call is worth on a Saturday in July and what idle techs cost on a Wednesday in February. He has run paid-media operations inside home services for 15 years through Denver Digital Agency, and co-founded Green Hat Local SEO in Colorado with Kyle Sabraw. Cost-per-booked-appointment is his number, never cost-per-click.
Read Dimitry’s full storyBook a strategy call Fifty-plus years combined SEO and paid media experience.
These are load-bearing. They are how the engagement runs from week one. If any of them break, the engagement breaks. Each is owned by a named founder, not a pod.
No impressions, no clicks, no rankings as the headline. We report booked jobs, scheduled consults, and signed cases, reconciled inside your CRM. Rankings are a side effect of doing the work, never the deliverable.
Michael Merlino · Chief Strategist and AI Systems, Magister Digital
If the math does not work for your business, we tell you on the call and you keep your money. If a call shows your problem is operational, not marketing, we say so and we do not take the account. We would rather lose the deal than carry one we cannot grow.
Brian Hong · CEO, Magister Digital
Home services, medical and dental, and legal only. Outside those three we refer you to Infintech Designs ourselves. Operator empathy only holds when we have actually been in the room. We will not fake credibility we do not have.
Dimitry Morgan · Head of Paid Media, Magister Digital
We access ad accounts, analytics, CRM, calendar, and call recordings, then map your current cost per booked appointment by channel before we touch anything live.
We install the weekly BI dashboard and repair conversion tracking, GA4, Meta CAPI, and call attribution. Your CFO can audit this view by Friday.
Bid changes, negative keywords, landing-page fixes, AI follow-up agents, and creative refresh go live in market. No deck, no waiting on a quarterly review.
A written 90-day plan signed by a founder. Numbered budget targets per channel, a named owner per workstream, and the next twelve weeks in writing.
The Magister stack did not appear from nowhere. It is the consolidation of methodologies built and proven across founder-led ventures spanning 50+ years combined SEO and paid media experience.
A multi-seven-figure construction company co-owned by Brian Hong, and the proof-of-work site. Every Magister stack moves Turnkey’s needle first. It has grown revenue year over year on this exact stack.
Brian Hong
Brian Hong’s digital marketing agency, founded 2008 in New Orleans. The methodology Magister deploys was built and refined inside Infintech across home services, medical, and legal accounts.
Brian Hong
Brian Hong’s AI automation and visitor-identification platforms. Flowbots powers Magister’s AI receptionist, lead routing, and follow-up nurture. BigEasyData drives anonymous-to-known resolution and visitor-level attribution.
Brian Hong
Co-founded by Michael Merlino. Over 1,300 local SEO practitioners trained through the CTR Geeks program. The testing methodology and conversion architecture Michael brought to Magister came directly out of this work.
Michael Merlino
Commercial SEO tools co-owned by Brian Hong and Michael Merlino. SEO Neo and Omega Indexer are production tools in active use. Owning the tools you build campaigns on is not something most agencies can say.
Brian Hong & Michael Merlino
Dimitry Morgan’s paid-media agency out of Colorado, where his 15 years of operations were built and tested. Green Hat Local SEO, co-founded with Kyle Sabraw, complements the paid-media side he runs at Magister.
Dimitry Morgan
We limit who we work with because operator depth is the asset. The list we turn down is as important as the list we take.
Book a strategy call Outside the list? We refer you to Infintech Designs.
Answered honestly. If something below disqualifies us, we would rather you know now than three months in.
Three founders sign every weekly brief. Brian, Michael, and Dimitry, the same operators you meet on the consultation. No account directors presenting someone else’s spreadsheet, no pods, no junior strategists running your retainer while the founders pitch the next client.
Infintech is Brian’s broader-vertical SMB marketing agency, founded 2008 in New Orleans. Magister is the vertically-specialized $5M to $200M operator practice across home services, medical, and legal only. Outside those three verticals, or under $5M revenue, Infintech is the right fit and we refer you there ourselves.
Brian Hong co-owns TurnkeyRenovators, a multi-seven-figure construction company. The same SEO, paid media, AI automation, and CRM stack Magister builds was built inside Turnkey first and runs it today. Every methodology is proved against a live operating business before it ships to a client.
Operator empathy only holds when the founders have actually been in those rooms. Brian ran a med spa partnership and runs Turnkey. Dimitry came up doing HVAC field work. Michael trained 1,300 practitioners across the same verticals. We say no to brands outside home services, medical, and law to avoid faking credibility we do not have.
Not currently. Compliance, attribution, and CRM stacks vary too widely outside the US for our engagement model to scale cleanly. If you are a US-based operator with multi-location presence, we are a fit. If you are international, we say so and recommend a different team.
SEO and paid media are owned by Dimitry Morgan. AI automation and CRM are owned by Michael Merlino. Strategy is owned by Brian Hong. Three founders, three layers, one dashboard. The person who signs your Monday brief is the person who built that part of it.
A 45-minute working session with a founder. Not a sales rep. We review your channels, your CRM, and your numbers, and you leave with a written read on what is working, what is not, and what we would run first. No deck. No pitch.
Or dial it directly: (619) 330-0953
