Everyone’s got a story. And everyone’s reverse-engineered it to make themselves sound clever.

So here’s mine, except I’ve kept the luck in because vulnerability makes me look good.

First, the raw materials

Building pipeline requires conditions outside your control. Demand for your services in the market, and the macroeconomic conditions that make people invest.

When we started our agency the internet was young and supplying all of that. There were enough leads. We didn’t create that, we just showed up at the right time. That matters.

So that’s the first thing that’s out of our control in place. Money was moving around and people wanted what we did.

SEO accident

Our agency was called Lighthouse. When we went to register the company, we found another Lighthouse Web Design already existed. We needed a different name.

I remembered what UK bands did when they broke America and found a US band had the same name. Suede became The London Suede. We were based in London. So: Lighthouse London.

We immediately started ranking for “London web design.” Totally by accident.

Traffic followed. Enquiries followed. We then invested into SEO deliberately, but finding the initial tactic was pure luck.

The hire we got lucky with

Getting out of delivery was about having people good enough to do the work without you, in addition to winning more work.

We made a hire, someone quite junior. Turned out to be one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with. Very good, but at start-of-career salary. And then, their best mate was a designer. Also exceptional. Both eventually made it onto the leadership team. The designer now runs his own agency and is likely reading (👋).

We didn’t find them through a brilliant recruitment process. We just got lucky.

All luck so far, Dan, why am I reading?

But the bit that wasn’t luck follows.

Double down on that channel

When you find a marketing channel that compounds, work it. We took the SEO accident and ran with it.

We also built a profile on a listing site and made sure clients left reviews. Put the effort in consistently, and that listing started paying back more and more, because the ratings boosted the visibility and increased the effectiveness. That led to better clients, which led to better reviews. A flywheel.

What does that channel look like today? I believe in extremely valuable content, whether that’s a newsletter, an event, or something more innovative.

Whatever it is, you don’t have a lot of time to do marketing. So the marketing you do has to compound.

Find something that gets better the more you add to it. Then add to it.

Knowing your numbers

We got on top of the financials. Properly on top. Accounts, forecasts, management reports, everything baked in and giving a true picture of the business.

We worked out what our rate needed to be. We worked out what the billable team could support. And when the numbers showed that the team could cover delivery without me, and we had the leads coming in, we just went for it.

That transition, stepping out of delivery and into full-time sales, only felt possible because we’d done the maths. You can’t make that call on instinct alone. You need to see it in the numbers first.

And then, having mouths to feed is a surprisingly good motivator to go and win the work.

The actual takeaways

The luck was real.

But here are the things we did that made the luck stick, and kept doing throughout our growth.

  • Do marketing that compounds. Things that grow the longer you invest in them.
  • Know your numbers. Not roughly. Completely. You need to see the path before you can walk it.
  • Find the right people. We didn’t plan for those people, but we recognised them when they arrived.
  • Right place, right time gives you the opening. What you do with it is up to you.