Built in Spartanburg.
Built from ideas.

Learned on the floor, not in a boardroom.

Grady Davis didn’t start in a big agency or a venture fund. He started in 2016 as a shift lead at a Dollar General in Gaffney, South Carolina. He ran schedules, counted inventory, trained new hires and handled the customers nobody else wanted to. It was the kind of job where you learn quickly that every dollar and every hour counts.

Over the next several years he took on more each time. He supervised a team of 25 at a high-volume Circle K, then led 50 security officers at a busy distribution warehouse. He moved into auto finance at American Credit Acceptance, where he managed dealership partnerships and grew the dealer network by 10% in a year. In 2023 he became a general manager in Spartanburg, running a store from end to end. Along the way he earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Limestone University.

Every one of those roles taught the same lessons: how products actually sell, how teams actually perform, and how partners actually grow.

Syndicate starts. Then the world goes online.

Grady founded Syndicate in Spartanburg in 2019, while he was still running teams by day. The idea was simple: the way people discover and buy things was moving to social media, and the people who understood operations (inventory, people, margins and customers) were rarely the ones building for it.

Months later, COVID hit. Stores closed, shopping moved online almost overnight, and businesses that had never thought about social media suddenly needed it to survive. Short-form video, creators and, eventually, live shopping became the new shelf, the new endcap and the new salesperson. The shift Syndicate was built on happened years ahead of schedule.

TikTok Shop is still retail. It just moves faster, and the store never closes.— HOW SYNDICATE SEES IT

Betting early on TikTok Shop.

When TikTok Shop launched in the US, most brands didn’t know what to do with it. Creator Ops Media was built to run the whole machine for them: shop setup, creator and affiliate programs, live shopping, and the content that makes people stop scrolling and buy.

The results spoke for themselves. Creator Ops Media drove more than $10M in GMV on TikTok Shop, working with brands like Intake Breathing and Rap Snacks.

From running shops to teaching the field.

By 2024, Syndicate wasn’t just selling on TikTok Shop. Through 2024 and 2025, we worked closely with TikTok and ByteDance to help smaller, incubated agencies succeed on the platform.

That meant leading classes for newer agencies, coaching their teams through launches and creator programs, and being among the first to test new TikTok Shop features before they reached everyone else. Every lesson from our own shops went back out to the agencies coming up behind us.

By late 2026, that teaching became the business. Creator Ops Media stepped back from running shops day to day and became a consultancy. The playbook that drove $10M+ in GMV is now available one hour at a time, in 1:1 consultations with Grady at $150/hr.

We went from running shops to teaching others how to run them.— THE CREATOR OPS STORY

Owning the demand side.

Selling only works if people know who you are. So Grady built Syndicate Marketing, the group responsible for all social media and business marketing. It builds the audiences, brands and content calendars that keep demand flowing to every company Syndicate touches.

With Syndicate Marketing creating demand and Creator Ops Media turning it into sales, Syndicate had something bigger than two businesses. It had a flywheel.

Syndicate Holdings Group is born.

What began in 2019 became Syndicate Holdings Group LLC, the home for all of it: an independent holding studio that incubates startups from ideas. It’s deliberately not a fund, and it doesn’t offer capital. What it offers is harder to find: an operator who’s done it, playbooks that work, and a shared platform of talent and data that gives every new company a head start.

Every company Syndicate builds plugs into the same core, so each one launches faster, runs leaner and makes the rest of the portfolio stronger.

The next idea is already in the lab.

Syndicate is just getting started. The studio is always working on the next company, and it’s always looking for people with ideas worth building and operators ready to run them.

Bring us an idea