CraftConcepts / Founder and Growth Strategist / May 2022 - Jan 2025
Founding and Scaling CraftConcepts
Local businesses lost their digital presence after the pandemic and couldn't afford an agency to fix it. I built a collective to close that gap, and used it to mentor early-career marketers on real client work.
The read
I was running lifecycle and web systems full-time at DTC/Pilothouse, with employer permission to take on local SMB work outside of that, and I kept running into the same problem. Business owners had lost whatever digital presence they'd built before the pandemic, and standard agency pricing put real help out of reach for most of them.
The gap wasn't expertise. It was access. Nobody was building a structure that could deliver actual strategy and execution to businesses that couldn't pay agency rates, and freelancing solo wasn't going to fix that for more than one business at a time.
The decision
I decided the only way to serve more than one client properly was to build a team, not take on clients one at a time myself. I founded CraftConcepts with two co-founders, one on sales, one on creative, with one rule that never moved: nothing went out the door without me reviewing the strategy first, regardless of who built it.
There was no capital to hire, so I built the team through referrals and treated every contributor relationship as mentorship, not labor. People learned how to diagnose a client's actual problem and build the system that fixed it, then walked away with real client work for their own portfolios.
The metric I chose
Number of businesses served, since that was the only way to know whether the model scaled past me personally, and average organic visibility lift for clients, since that proved the work held up after we shipped it, not just that we shipped something.
The build
I built a commission-based compensation model scaled to each client's budget, paired with volunteer effort from contributors who wanted the portfolio experience more than the pay. I personally ran founder interviews with every client to extract their actual positioning before any build started, then built repeatable website and content playbooks so the team wasn't starting from zero on every engagement.
The team grew from 3 co-founders to 8 within the first year, then to a rotating collective of 20+ at peak in year two, including early-career marketers in both Vancouver and the Philippines. There was no formal hierarchy and no full-time staff, just people rotating through real client work under my review.
3 to 20+
Contributors at peak
26
Businesses served
+40%
Average organic visibility lift
The read held. The model scaled past what I could do alone, not because I hired in the traditional sense, but because the mentorship structure meant contributors could actually execute client work, not just shadow it. CraftConcepts served 26 businesses at its peak before I wound it down deliberately in January 2025, once the post-pandemic gap it was built for had closed and several contributors had moved into full-time roles of their own.
Tech
Webflow and WordPress, client website builds
Basic SEO and CRO, visibility and conversion work
Content and brand playbooks, repeatable founder-interview-to-launch process
Miguel N. Monzones
Vancouver, BC, Canada
