Episode 69: The Agency That Grew Revenue Without Adding Clients

May 1

"We focus 99.9% of our energies on doing the work for our clients. We spend literally zero time on biz dev -- and our revenue has grown quite a bit this year through upselling alone."

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TL;DR — Key Takeaways

Kreativa Group grew revenue significantly in 2026 by upselling existing clients, not by landing new ones -- they signed just one new client all year
Selling outcomes (projected revenue, ROAS, CAC) instead of services (Google ads management) lets you charge a premium and reduces churn because the client sees you as a strategic partner, not a vendor
"AI forward" is their positioning: AI handles middle-layer efficiency (sitemapping, content frameworks, meeting summaries), while humans own judgment, taste, and final output
A tool called Noted AI ingests Zoom transcripts, Slack messages, emails, and reports to surface client health, churn risk, and task lists -- saving an estimated 8+ hours per week
Thoughtful constrained growth beats aggressive scaling: at ~25-30 clients and approaching $1M gross, they run a tighter, more profitable operation than comparable agencies managing 200+ local clients at $1K/month each
Not niching by vertical keeps the team engaged and prevents internal boredom -- context switching costs are real, but so is the competitive advantage of working across consumer electronics, property tech, AI SaaS, and luxury watches
Try this: audit your last 90 days of client conversations and count how many upsell requests came inbound from clients you were already doing great work for -- that number is your growth floor

Does This Sound Familiar?

You've been told to niche down. Pick a vertical. Own a category. And there's real logic to that -- economies of scale, deep expertise, faster delivery.

But maybe you tried it, or you're considering it, and something feels off. You're already doing great work across a handful of different industries. Your clients stay. They refer others. They keep asking for more. And the idea of turning away a $100K client because they're in the "wrong" vertical feels absurd.

Or maybe you're looking at your agency and wondering why revenue feels flat when you haven't actually lost clients. You've been heads-down, doing the work -- but you haven't built a sales machine, and the thought of one exhausts you.

Tommy Chang built Kreativa Group exactly in that space. No cold outreach system. No vertical niche. No relentless biz dev motion. Just obsessive client focus, outcome-oriented positioning, and a deliberate choice to grow thoughtfully rather than at all costs.

The results speak for themselves: three client losses in three years, one of the longest-tenured clients still on the roster from month two, and revenue growth this year driven almost entirely by clients asking for more.

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Meet the Guest

Tommy Chang is the co-founder of Kreativa Group, a generalist digital agency he runs alongside creative partner Karina. Together they bring 20+ years each from the marketing and creative industries into a boutique operation of eight people serving mid-market companies and VC-backed startups. What makes Tommy's perspective worth hearing is the deliberate tension he lives in: a co-founder who wants to grow fast, held in productive balance by a partner who champions thoughtful restraint -- and the proof that the slower path is actually working.

Visit kreativagroup.com →

Episode Summary

1. How a real estate niche became a generalist agency in six weeks

Kreativa Group launched with a clear premise: real estate agents needed websites and nobody was serving them well. They signed their first client in that niche and felt good about the direction.

Then Tommy and Karina started talking publicly about what they were building on LinkedIn. The DMs flooded in. A former boss of Tommy's, now a CEO at a non-real estate company, reached out about paid media. Prior colleagues and contacts surfaced with completely different needs. Within four to six weeks, the original niche had dissolved and Kreativa became a generalist agency.

What emerged over time wasn't chaos -- it was a natural sorting process. They kept doing work they were good at, cut services that didn't fit (logo packages and brand kits are now an off-menu exception, not a promoted offering), and gradually identified the verticals where they'd built the deepest work: consumer electronics, property tech, luxury watches, and AI SaaS.

2. The "AI forward" operating model

Rather than describing themselves as an AI agency or an anti-AI agency, Kreativa landed on a term Karina coined: AI forward. The phrase captures something specific -- they use AI to improve efficiency and output quality, not to eliminate the human layer.

In practice, that means AI shows up in the middle of workflows, not at the edges. They use Relume to generate sitemaps and wireframe structures before handing off to Figma for final design. They use AI to create content outlines and frameworks, which a human content strategist then edits heavily -- sometimes to the point where the final output barely resembles what Claude produced. They tested AI design generation tools like Cloth Design and found the output repetitive and generic: "It produces the same stuff because it has access to the same free libraries. That day may come, but it's not now."

The human judgment layer isn't a formality. It's the core of what they're selling.

3. Noted AI and the 8-hour-per-week recovery

One tool stood out in Tommy's rundown of their stack: Noted AI, which also happens to be a Kreativa client. The platform ingests all client touchpoints -- Zoom transcripts, Slack threads, emails, Google Drive files, reporting -- and synthesizes them into actionable client overviews.

Before a client call, Tommy no longer needs to spend time catching up on where things stand. Noted surfaces what was discussed last time, what tasks are outstanding, who's at risk of churning, and what the upsell opportunities are. Post-call, it converts the transcript directly into a task list that can be copied into Monday for follow-up.

"That has saved us literally a good eight hours a week, if not more." That's a full workday per person per week -- recovered by removing the coordination overhead that accumulates invisibly across an agency.

"You're not just taking $100K and throwing it into Google ads hoping and praying it does something. There's thinking, planning, and strategy behind all of it."

4. Outcomes over outputs -- and why it lets you charge more

Tommy's pitch to clients doesn't lead with services. It leads with a media plan that projects traffic, conversion rate, order count, revenue, ROAS, and CAC. The deliverable is the outcome model; the execution is downstream from that.

This framing comes from his time as a head of marketing before the agency, where building and defending media plans was his job. He brought that same discipline into Kreativa's client relationships -- positioning himself and his team as something closer to a fractional head of marketing than a vendor executing tasks.

The business impact is concrete: clients who see you as a strategic partner churn less, escalate conflict less, and are willing to pay a premium. "There are 10,000 agencies in the US that do Google ads. And probably 100,000 freelancers. When you focus on outcomes instead of the service, you can charge what you charge -- not $100 a month."

5. Why horizontal beats vertical (for them)

The conventional agency growth advice is to niche by industry. Tommy is aware of the argument and has a considered response to it.

First, the economics at their ICP level don't favor a local-services model. A lawn care PPC agency managing 200 clients at $1K/month can generate similar gross revenue to Kreativa's 25-30 clients averaging $50K/month in Google spend -- but the operational complexity and staff requirements are incomparable. "I can't fathom dealing with 200 clients."

Second, there's a non-compete dynamic at their client size. When you're working with companies that know each other, working for direct competitors creates relationship risk. In the luxury watch space, three clients know each other well enough that they referred Tommy between them -- and gave explicit permission for him to work with all three. That's an exception that required trust, not a scalable vertical play.

Third, and Tommy is candid about this: variety keeps the team engaged. Context switching has real costs, but so does doing the same thing every day. "No one can complain about being bored."

6. Thoughtful constrained growth

Kreativa is approaching $1M gross revenue. They could push harder -- Tommy acknowledges that more biz dev energy would probably get them to $2-3M. But that's not the current choice.

Karina is the primary driver of what she calls thoughtful growth. The premise is that the agency exists to do great work for clients, and scaling beyond what the team can manage well undermines the reason it was built in the first place. That commitment to quality is also their main retention engine: in three years, they've lost three clients total. One didn't pay. One was let go after becoming abusive. One left for a cheaper freelancer.

Their largest client signed in month two and is still with them -- and the account has grown. This year's revenue growth came almost entirely from existing clients expanding their scope. "A lot of times we're not even the ones doing the upsell. They're asking."

Tommy holds a counterpoint internally: he wants to grow, and thinks there's more to capture. But he's also seen what the alternative looks like. Right now, the bet is on depth over breadth, retention over acquisition, and sustainable pace over maximum scale.

Notable Quotes

"We use AI to supplement what we do -- not in such a way where I let AI do all the work and sit here and collect the check."
"Our deliverables are like, here's the media plan. But the outcome is: here's how much traffic we're going to drive, the conversion rate, your projected order count, your revenue, ROAS, CAC."
"We've grown our revenue by quite a bit this year, and we've landed just one new client. It was all through upselling existing clients."
"You want to do great work for a smaller subset of clients -- not have a massive company with 200 clients making the same amount of money at the end of the day."