Founding and scaling CraftConcepts

I was running lifecycle and web systems full-time at DTC/Pilothouse, with employer permission to take on local SMB work alongside it, and I kept meeting the same situation. Owners had lost whatever digital presence they’d built before the pandemic, and standard agency pricing put professional help out of reach.

The gap wasn’t expertise, it was access. Nobody was building a structure that could deliver strategy and execution at those budgets, and freelancing solo would only ever help one business at a time.

Serving more than one client properly meant building a team rather than taking clients one by one. I founded CraftConcepts with two co-founders, one on sales and one on creative, with one rule that never moved: nothing went out the door without me reviewing the strategy first, whoever had built it.

There was no capital to hire, so I built the team through referrals and treated every contributor relationship as mentorship rather than labor. People learned how to diagnose a client’s actual problem and build the system that fixed it, then left with live client work for their own portfolios.

Number of businesses served, since that showed whether the model scaled past me personally. And organic visibility, since that showed the work held up after we shipped it, not just that we shipped something.

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 ran founder interviews with every client to draw out their positioning before any build started, then wrote repeatable website and content playbooks so nobody started from zero on a new 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. No formal hierarchy, no full-time staff: just people rotating through real client work under my review.