15 years of agency building, condensed into four honest conversations
We work with hundreds of agencies at Kinsta. We see what happens when an agency outgrows its infrastructure, or when decisions made in year two start compounding in year five. We hear the 3 a.m. server crash stories, the scramble to explain downtime to a client, and the issues that bring agencies to us in the first place. We know the technical side of agency scaling.
What we don’t always see is the business side: How a founder decides which clients to take, when to hire, when to say no to clients, what to do when their biggest client gets acquired and a third of your revenue disappears overnight.
That side matters to us because the agencies that make smart business decisions are the ones we build long-term partnerships with. And they’re successful ventures that other agencies in our network and Partner Program can compare notes with and learn from.
We sat down with four agency founders and Kinsta Agency Partners to record long, unscripted, candid conversations about how they actually built their businesses. These conversations became They figured it out (mostly), a video series covering everything from the effectiveness of AI and its specific use cases, mistakes they wouldn’t make if they could do it all over again, finding a niche, and predictions for what’s ahead. Here’s a glimpse of what they told us:
Built Mighty: WooCommerce, 18 people, Seattle
Jonny Martin started Built Mighty in 2009 as a merchant selling products online. Then he realized he was more interested in building the stores than operating them, so he turned that business into an agency.
Sixteen years later, Built Mighty now specializes exclusively in WooCommerce: custom plugins, complex integrations, and projects other agencies hand off when they’re too technical. Martin is quick to name what makes his business work. “I think it’s the people,” he says. “I’ve met agencies running on Excel spreadsheets and they’re doing awesome work because they have people comfortable there.”
So when hiring their own team members, Built Mighty gives candidates paid test projects within days of receiving their resume. Candidates with successful project outcomes are then onboarded with fake clients before ever touching real work. If it’s not a fit, everyone knows fast.
“There used to be this concept of ‘hire slow, fire fast,’” Martin says. “I don’t think that works anymore. You’ve got to hire fast, fire fast. You’re going to learn so much that first week they’re working with you that you’re just not going to learn in an interview.”
Fixel: Cybersecurity design, 8 people, 15 years
Vin Thomas founded Fixel in 2010. The first 10 years saw a team of two: Thomas and one developer. That’s it. But the agency didn’t start intentionally scaling until about five years ago and, even now, the tight team of eight serves 33 ongoing retainer clients.
This restraint was strategic, though. When one of their early clients, a cybersecurity startup called Distil Networks, was acquired, the marketing team scattered across the industry and brought Fixel with them. Three or four projects grew into a full roster of referrals that defined the agency’s niche.
But restraint can come with risks: Fixel once lost a retainer client that represented a third of their revenue. When the client was acquired in a multi-billion-dollar deal, the engagement ended.
“It was a big hit,” Thomas says. One of our strategies as we recovered was maybe not having only a few eggs in the basket and really starting to build up that clientele so that we had a bit more cushion.”
The lesson reshaped how Fixel thinks about project scoping and client concentration — a lesson that only surfaces after something breaks.
Pronto Marketing: 1,000+ clients, Bangkok and the Philippines
Tim Kelsey’s path to running Pronto Marketing started with a college friend, Derek Brown, whose dad had moved to Thailand after leaving Microsoft. Brown liked Thailand and didn’t want to leave. So he started an agency from Bangkok instead. Fifteen years ago, Kelsey came out to help. “I told my parents, ‘This is going to be a little-one year adventure in Southeast Asia,’” Kelsey said. “And then I just never went home.”
Pronto now manages over 1,000 clients with a team of about 80, split between Thailand and the Philippines. They grew to 140 team members at one point until Kelsey stopped recognizing people in the elevator.
“There were times where I would get in the elevator and not realize someone worked at Pronto until they pressed the button for my floor,” he said. From there, they scaled back and focused on what they were good at. Kelsey’s take on agency size: You don’t know your limit until you’ve already surpassed it.
Another lesson Kelsey learned late: the case for raising prices. Pronto hadn’t increased monthly support pricing for existing clients in over a decade. They finally hit send on that email, expecting a wave of cancellations. Only two clients complained. “I look back at how long we waited and think, why didn’t we do this years ago?” he recalled.
40Q: Enterprise WordPress engineering, Buenos Aires
Eddie Wise runs Growth at 40Q, an agency founded in Buenos Aires that started as a white-label engineering shop for design agencies. They’ve since pivoted to serving enterprise clients directly: building custom DAM systems, LMS platforms, and complex WordPress integrations that can take a year to deliver. But Wise draws a sharp line between what 40Q does and what most WordPress agencies do.
“A WordPress developer versus a WordPress engineer in our eyes are very different things,” he said. “We’re engineering software in a lot of cases, taking application development concepts and building highly engineered WordPress solutions.”
That distinction matters when you’re competing against Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore, not against the agency down the street. And it changes the sales cycle entirely; enterprise deals don’t close in weeks. “Sometimes you’ll chase a project for up to a year before you close it,” he said.
Wise’s framework for agency owners looks like a triangle: a specific service offering, a specific client type, and a company culture that supports both. Without all three, he says, you won’t grow consistently.
What we noticed across all four conversations
These four agencies — radically different in size, model, geography, and clients — share a few common themes:
Saying no created more growth than saying yes: Every founder surfaces a version of this story. Martin turns away merchants who may be gambling their savings on a dream. Thomas protects capacity even when bigger projects come knocking. Wise skips projects that don’t contribute to the portfolio he envisions. Kelsey learned that chasing headcount for its own sake nearly cost them their identity.
Partnerships outperformed their other marketing strategies: Wise puts it plainly when he says strategic partnerships generate more leads for 40Q than their entire digital marketing pipeline. Martin built a referral network of agencies bigger and smaller than his, and when one of those agencies shut down, it handed over 50 clients because the relationship was built on years of trust. That kind of deal flow doesn’t come from Google Ads.
AI helps them accomplish more, but not faster: Every agency is integrating AI into workflows, but none of them are using it to replace thinking. Thomas builds custom Claude projects for content strategy; Wise is developing an AI-powered page builder; Kelsey’s team uses it to refine processes but iterates on everything it produces. The consensus: AI is a tool, not a strategy.
We could have written a white paper about infrastructure best practices for agencies; we have plenty of data and insights. But the agencies we work with need more than faster servers. They need to make better business decisions about when to scale, which clients to take, and how to build something durable, and we were curious about these stories holistically.
In fact, every founder in this series runs their client sites on Kinsta because, at a certain scale, hosting becomes infrastructure you depend on, not a line item you ignore. When Thomas lost his biggest client and had to rebuild, his hosting couldn’t be one more thing to worry about. When Built Mighty gets a notification that a client’s traffic has 10xed due to bot traffic, they need to be able to act within minutes, not hours.
The Kinsta Agency Partner Program exists for agencies at the stage where hosting decisions have real consequences, who need co-marketing support and lead referrals, and where the cost of downtime is measured in client relationships as well as dollars.
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