AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Building Verde Into a 4–5x Growth Agency in One Year
Guest: Joe Hale
Guest: Joe Hale
Joe Hale didn’t launch Verde with a client lined up. No safety net. No side project quietly becoming an agency. He went in fresh, and within three years, Verde was generating four to five times the revenue it was making the year before.
Here’s what actually drove that.
When Joe started Verde, he made a deliberate call: fashion, luxury, and sportswear e-commerce. Not because it was the obvious move, but because it was the intersection of his background and what he genuinely cared about.
He’d worked with Urban Outfitters, Net-A-Porter, Mr Porter, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein before founding Verde. That experience wasn’t an accident, it was leverage. When you already know the language, the buying cycles, and what good looks like inside a category, you stop being a generalist agency and start being the only credible option in the room.
The brief he gave himself: experience plus genuine interest. That’s it.
This is worth sitting with, given that Verde is an SEO agency.
Joe credits LinkedIn posting as the single most important thing that enabled Verde to grow. Without it, he says, they wouldn’t have landed some of their earliest big clients. Nobody had heard of them.
The strategy was straightforward but consistent: shout about the brands you work with because you’re a fan, not just because you’re proud. That personal enthusiasm lands differently. It sparked inbound curiosity. Then when Verde started developing case study results, that curiosity had somewhere to go.
The domino effect: interest → discovery call → case study walkthrough → closed client.
Once you’ve got the brands, the question becomes how to maximise them.
Josh raised an approach from his friend Andrew Peloso, who runs three agencies in Austin. Peloso hired a video production team to fly across the US to film testimonials with his best clients. The twist: the brief wasn’t “talk about us.” It was the opposite.
He told clients: talk about where you are. Talk about where you want to be in three years.
The inspiration was Nike. Nike doesn’t explain what the shoe does. They put the best athletes in the world in it, and let your brain do the rest. Peloso’s thesis: when a prospect sees a brand they admire talking openly about their growth ambitions, and they chose your agency to get there — the inference is automatic.
Joe’s reaction? He’d seen another agency do exactly this recently. It’s spreading.
Verde’s 4–5x revenue growth didn’t happen by keeping costs low. It happened because Joe hired senior people before it felt financially safe to do so.
Hiring junior looks cheaper on paper. In reality, you end up doing double the work, training someone while also running the business. In a fast-growing agency, that time doesn’t exist.
Hiring senior freed Joe to work on the business, not just in it. His team handled client communication, resolved issues without him in every conversation, and, critically, delivered work to a standard that retained clients and generated results. Results retained clients. Retained clients grew revenue. Revenue enabled the next hire.
There’s a warning inside that model though. Joe has been in the industry for over a decade and seen it clearly: senior doesn’t automatically mean capable. You can talk a great game about SEO and be a poor doer.
The logic: skills can be taught. Behaviour is considerably harder to change.
The conversation turned to AI search, the topic consuming every SEO agency right now.
Joe’s take is clear-eyed and probably unpopular in some corners of the industry: nobody has figured it out, and he doesn’t believe the people claiming otherwise.
The problem, as he sees it, is that some people are selling certainty that doesn’t exist. The honest position is that AI search is evolving, the data behind it is hard to track, and the right approach is transparency with clients, not manufactured confidence.
That said, Verde isn’t ignoring it. They’re tracking AI search visibility for clients across multiple platforms, and the work driving results is largely their existing SEO strategy. Good content architecture. Strong collection pages. The fundamentals.
Joe’s framing: AI search is a sandbox. You try things, you watch what moves, you stay honest about what you know and don’t know. What you don’t do is let the noise cause you to pull resource away from the organic search work that’s already generating seven and eight figure revenue growth for Verde’s clients.
The revenue is there. That’s where Verde’s attention stays.
Four to five times revenue in a year doesn’t come from one decision. For Joe, it came from several compounding choices made before the growth arrived: the right niche, consistent content, senior talent hired early, and a refusal to let AI hype distract from what was demonstrably working.
Verde started slowly. A thousand here, fifteen hundred there per month. It took six or seven months just to get back to the salary Joe was earning before he went out on his own. He stayed in it.
The brands followed the results. The results followed the people. The people followed the standards.
Joe Hale is the founder of Verde, an SEO agency working with fashion, luxury and sportswear brands including Pure Sport, Paul Smith, and Adenola. You can find him on LinkedIn at /in/joehale or on Instagram at verde.digital.
This episode of the Agency Growth Club is available now on YouTube and all major podcast platforms.
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