Episode 64: She Had Near-100% Contractor Retention for 11 Years. Here's the Actual Method.

Mar 27

Episode 64 | Behind the Agency Podcast with Natasha Golinsky, Founder of On Purpose Projects

"My job is to make sure you have a job. Sales, biz dev, networking. Your job is to do the thing."

Prefer the highlights? Key takeaways and summary below.

TL;DR -- Key Takeaways

Near-100% contractor retention for 11 years. Only two people left Natasha's team. Both left because they got full-time job offers -- not because they wanted to leave.
The retention method is simpler than you think: know what each person wants from the arrangement and make sure working for you delivers it. Most agency owners never have this conversation.
"Know which knife in the drawer you are." Natasha avoided niching for six years. Once she got specific about what On Purpose Projects actually does (complex, custom, full-stack work -- not commodity dev), her marketing got dramatically easier.
During COVID, she made a hard pivot to custom-only work rather than compete on price. The right call for a North American shop with real overhead.
When she was diagnosed with aggressive stage 2 breast cancer in 2024, she had six weeks to set up ops coverage. The business kept moving. May 2025 was her second-biggest revenue month ever -- while she was still recovering.
Her SOP method: do a screen recording of everything you do for a week and hire someone to turn it into documentation. You do not have to write the SOPs yourself.

Does this sound familiar?

Your contractors show up, do good work, and clients are generally happy. But you quietly dread the day one of your key developers takes a full-time job somewhere. You have never had the conversation where you actually ask what they want from this arrangement. You assume the work and the paycheck is enough.

And if you had to step back tomorrow -- for any reason -- you are not sure the business keeps moving. The client relationships are in your head. The processes are undocumented. The DNS credentials live in your personal 1Password.

Natasha Golinsky started On Purpose Projects as a management consultant with zero dev experience, hiring a developer on Upwork for five dollars an hour. Over eleven years, she built a 14-person contractor team with near-perfect retention. Then she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer right when she was ready to scale past seven figures.

What happened over the next year became the real test of whether she had built a business or just a job.

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Meet the Guest

Natasha Golinsky is the founder of On Purpose Projects, a full-stack web development agency specializing in complex, custom work -- multi-five-figure ecommerce migrations, corporate builds, and technical projects that commodity dev shops cannot touch. She built the agency as a non-technical founder, starting with a single Upwork hire, and has led a remote contractor team for over a decade.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/natasha-golinsky

Episode Summary

1. The accidental agency

Natasha did not start an agency on purpose. She was a management consultant working in the nonprofit sector when a client asked her to find someone to fix a website. She went to Upwork, hired a developer for five dollars an hour, fixed the site, and then the same client asked if her developer could do another site. Then another.

"I am like the quintessential accidental agency owner," she said. A decade later, she leads a remote team of 14.

What stands out is how deliberately she has built it since those early days. The accident is the origin story. Everything after that was a series of conscious decisions.

2. Know which knife in the drawer you are

On Purpose Projects does full-stack, custom, complex web development. It does not do $500 Elementor landing pages. It is not the team you call for front-end polish. When a migration involves 50,000 SKUs or a multi-five-figure budget, that is the right fit.

Natasha avoided committing to that clarity for six years. She was worried about what niching meant for her pipeline. Once she committed, the marketing got easier.

"Know which knife in the drawer you are, and then find the people who need that problem solved." It is advice she gives every agency owner trying to get new clients outside their existing network.

During COVID, she made it official. When commodity dev flooded the market and rates collapsed, she made a hard pivot to custom-only work and stopped competing on price. For a North American team with real overhead, she says that was the only move that made sense.

3. Eleven years, near-zero contractor churn

In eleven years, two people have left On Purpose Projects. Both left to take full-time jobs. Neither left because they were unhappy.

Natasha attributes this to a practice most agency owners skip: she asks what her contractors actually want and then makes sure working with her delivers it.

Her operations manager wants to work 25 hours a week so she can be home with her young son. Natasha structures the role around that. One developer wants to build his React skills this year. Natasha assigns him to React projects. A new QA hire has two kids and specific schedule needs. Natasha and her ops manager track that, week to week.

"If people are getting what they want out of working with you, why would they leave?"

She also does not require weekends. No evenings. Above-market wages. Clear project management. These are not perks -- they are the standard.

The business case is straightforward: churn is expensive. Inconsistent team quality kills brands. A team that has worked together for years knows the systems, knows each other, and knows the clients. When she had to bring in two contractors during a slammed Q4, the contrast was immediate. The new people did not know the etiquette, the protocol, or the communication patterns. "Oh my god, thank God I do not have to do this all the time."

Retention is not just good ethics. It is a delivery strategy.

4. Leading a technical team without being technical

Natasha tried to set up a Bluetooth adapter in her car recently and nearly called her kids for help. She is not technical. She has never pretended to be.

Her approach to leading technical people is radical honesty about roles from day one: "My job is to make sure you have a job. Sales, biz dev, networking. Your job is to do the thing."

Early on, a developer got frustrated that she did not understand what he was trying to explain to her about a technical issue. She told him directly: "Do you want me to do your job or do you want me to do my job?" He said do your job.

That became the culture. Her team understands she is not the technical authority. They operate in a scrum-style setup where the client gets direct access to the project manager, the developer, and QA. The information does not have to flow through Natasha because she learned early that she was not the right conduit for it.

"You are here because I can't do it. I cannot have this conversation. I do not know how to explain any of this to a client. This is a technical team and my lane is this."

Clarity about lanes turned out to be a foundation for trust, not a confession of weakness.

5. The diagnosis, and the year the business ran without her

In late 2024, Natasha was diagnosed with aggressive stage 2 breast cancer. She had six weeks before a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction -- a major surgery followed by months of treatment.

For ten years, the whole business had been in her head. No succession plan. No exit documentation. Everything ran through her.

She brought in a friend who had been a client for four years -- someone who knew the team but had no technical background. She onboarded this person while on pain medication and going through chemotherapy. "Like, not even kidding, like, I was just high on pain medication, drugged out from chemo. And we were training her through it."

The team kept moving. Revenue kept moving. When Natasha returned to full-time work in May 2025, her operations manager told her she did not need her in the day-to-day anymore. May 2025 was the second-biggest revenue month in On Purpose Projects' history.

The team she had built over eleven years -- the one with near-zero churn -- held the business together while she recovered from cancer.

6. Getting ops out of your head before you need to

The advice Natasha gives now is simple: stop waiting for a reason to document things.

Her method: record everything you do for a week as a screen capture. Do not stop what you are doing -- just record it while you work. Then hire a freelancer or assistant to watch the recordings and turn them into SOPs. You do not have to write the documentation yourself. You just have to capture what you are already doing.

"I do not have the patience to actually sit down and write step one, step 1B. I cannot. But there are a lot of people in the world who think very systemically like that."

The point is not to have a perfect operations manual. It is to extract the business from your head before life forces you to do it in a harder way.

Notable Quotes

"Know which knife in the drawer you are, and then find the people who need that problem solved."

"If people are getting what they want out of working with you, why would they leave?"

"My job is to make sure you have a job. Sales, biz dev, networking. Your job is to do the thing."

"Churn is so expensive. Once you have someone who's really good and they keep up that quality of work, that creates your brand."

"I was just high on pain medication, drugged out from chemo, and we were training her through it. Team kept moving. Revenue kept moving."

Related Episodes

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Ep 62: Kevin Whelan on the deconstructed agency model and what it looks like to build a business that genuinely runs without the founder.
Ep 53: Chris at Dynamic Agency OS on the More, Better, New framework for hiring and building a team that can sustain delivery without you.
Ep 31: Ryan Watson on the financial hierarchy of needs and why most agencies do not build the financial resilience to survive a real disruption.