AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Lisa Paasche (Verve Search) on Building a 40% Margin Agency
Guest: Lisa Paasche
Guest: Lisa Paasche
Lisa Paasche grew Verve Search’s profit margins from 10% to 40% before it became part of Omnicom. She didn’t do it by hiring experienced SEOs.
She did it by hiring graduates with “the stretch”, turning down unprofitable clients with a three-rule filter, and teaching her team to argue. Her advice to founders now is simple: get the right people first, build a basic forecast that tells you when to hire, and move faster on people who aren’t the right fit.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Lisa’s view is blunt: since Verve and other high-end creative agencies stepped back, much of the industry has “come back to like counting links”, doing the kind of work it did in 2010. Technical SEO has stayed fairly stable, she says, but creative campaigns and digital PR have slid backwards.
She doesn’t think the work has got harder. She thinks belief has dropped. She points to the four-minute mile: once Roger Bannister broke it in 1954, another runner did the same just 46 days later. “Your body didn’t change in those 46 days. The belief did.” She sees the SEO industry the same way: “They don’t believe it is possible anymore. And therefore, it isn’t.”
She has been making the case for authority-led SEO since her talks in 2007 and 2008, when she argued social engagement should be part of an SEO strategy. Her conclusion now: “We’re really at a point where trust equals authority.”
The idea that changed Verve came from a talk by advertising man Dave Trott. He showed a slide full of crosses with one circle, and everyone sees the circle. For Lisa, that was the moment she chose to stop doing what everyone else did. Verve’s rallying line became “think like a 50s ad exec and execute like a geek.”
The new direction didn’t land. “I couldn’t really convince the team,” Lisa says. They wanted to try it, but they didn’t believe it was possible. After trying for months, in January 2015 she made the decision to close down what was then the content team and recruit again with very different people.
She feels bad about it, because there were great people in that team. Looking back with her later study of neuroscience and psychology, she believes they were afraid of the change, and fear makes it hard for people to see the future.
The rebuild had one unusual rule: no experience. “Experience also teaches you things and beliefs that then might limit you.” Verve’s work was neither SEO nor digital PR but both, so she hired mostly graduates, people who were “excited and excitable”.
Above everything, she hired for what she calls the stretch. People are like a rubber band: the further life has stretched them, especially through diverse experiences, the more perspective they have and the less likely they are to fall apart when a journalist says no.
Actionable advice:
Josh opens with the numbers: margins of around 10% built up to 40% before Verve joined Omnicom. Lisa breaks down the levers.
Strategy and pricing. Creative campaigns take time, so Verve charged a lot more for them.
International by design. Lisa built Verve as an international agency, partly because cultural differences help creativity and partly for growth. Win a client in one country and they may be in eight more. Expedia became one of Verve’s biggest clients, with digital PR and creative campaigns in eight countries consistently and ten at one point.
The three-rule filter. Every new client had to:
“The only thing that is really not okay on its own is money,” she says. Without results you lose the client, and without learning and enjoyment morale drops.
People and how they’re developed. Instead of business books, Lisa went deep on psychology: DISC behavioural profiling, agency days about understanding each other, and teaching people how to argue.
The standout is Love Week. Every quarter, each person picked a colleague’s name and did something nice for them every day for a week without them knowing. After about three years, Lisa overlaid her link-scoring performance metrics for the biggest team against pay rises, bonuses and Love Week. “The only thing that saw peaks was Love Week.” Bonuses actually coincided with a dip, because, as she puts it, no one is ever happy with their bonus.
Actionable advice:
People avoid conflict because they don’t want others to think badly of them or for things to get awkward. But “it is really hard to progress if people don’t say what they actually think,” Lisa says. Without that, you end up with a race to the middle or lower.
Her first move was symbolic. She took everyone to the park, paired them up, gave each person the opposing point and told them to argue for 30 minutes. She uses “argue” deliberately: “you should be willing to fight for something, not just discuss it.”
When she hired several people at once, she’d hand them a printout of something random, with a line at the bottom asking: why did you read this? Did you ask any questions? Have you wasted your time? Harsh, she admits, but the point was to make asking questions normal: “questions is the thing that will lead to clarity and clarity will lead to efficiency and efficiency will lead to quality.”
She also teaches people to listen differently. If a normally quiet person says “I don’t like this,” that’s the equivalent of someone else shouting. She is honest that she finds criticism hard herself, but she always told her team: if you think I’m wrong, tell me. “It might not be that I will agree with you and do it, but I want to know it.”
Lisa first used DISC in recruitment and quickly stopped. Candidates answer to please you, which defeats the point. Instead, people took it after being hired, then went through it with Lisa or their manager. If someone didn’t recognise themselves at all, she’d ask whether they had answered honestly.
When two people clashed, she’d ask each to read the other’s profile and explain why the other person reacted the way they did. Once you see it from their side, “you don’t feel angry anymore”, because conflict is usually about intent, and very rarely is anyone trying to make your life hell. Once a year, everyone’s profiles went on a wheel so the whole team could see where everyone sat.
Opposites can work, she adds. Her COO was basically her opposite. What matters most, especially for your senior team, is shared values.
Actionable advice:
Lisa calls it the hardest hire she made. Her first head of operations didn’t pass probation, and some people left because of it. That hire was lovely and everyone liked her, but “head of operations shouldn’t necessarily make you feel good. That is not the job. The job is making sure things happen.”
Second time round, she listed everything she wasn’t good at or that drained her energy and turned it into the job description. “I didn’t think anyone would apply. I was like, this sounds like the worst job ever.” The person she hired read it and thought it was made for her. The last two interviews ran to nearly three hours each, because Lisa was so worried about getting it wrong again.
It paid off. “There is no way I would have been able to do what I did those last two years without her.” Things started happening on time and people knew what was going on. Her COO is now the executor of Lisa’s will, which says everything about the trust between them.
It wasn’t easy. The first three months were hard, and Lisa thought she’d made a mistake again. They sat down with their DISC profiles and asked each other what wasn’t working. Her COO’s emails were too long, so they switched to bullet points. Her COO needed more visibility, so Lisa shared her diary. “Once you actually become honest about what isn’t working, it becomes really easy.”
The roles took time to settle. They ended up with a split: the COO owned delivery and everything inside, Lisa owned everything outside. But Lisa missed the creative work, and her COO’s answer stuck: it’s your company, you decide your role. Being back in ideation gave Lisa the energy to do all the outward-facing work.
Actionable advice:
Lisa’s most expensive lesson: trust your gut. She started Verve without a co-founder because she knows she often just feels when something is right. But as the agency grew, and especially while preparing to sell, she trusted experts’ opinions over her own instinct. She wishes she had done more of the confrontation and the difficult bits herself. Instinct, she says, “is something that you know without knowing why you know it.”
Her second lesson is not to take everything so personally. Being a CEO takes its toll, and she wishes she’d had more protection around that.
As an adviser, the most common bottleneck she sees is people. Founders get hiring wrong, and they’re too slow to remove people who are toxic or not the right fit. “That has been the things that have put businesses back the most.” That doesn’t make those people bad. The fit just isn’t right. Founders also move too slowly when things aren’t working: “You can change your mind easily, but people tend to move a little bit too slow.”
What surprises Lisa most is how many agency founders run their business without a forecast. They make forward decisions from management accounts, which look backwards. “If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you be upset you’re not getting there?”
With new founders, she starts with personal work first, including a DISC profile and the story of the agency, because founders’ blind spots are often the real problem. She also warns about the stories founders tell themselves, like “everyone’s struggling to get clients” or “it’s hard to hire here”. That kind of talk creates the path you then walk down. “Don’t look at the trees. You will hit it.”
Her own forecast was something she “made up”, because the usual financial planning documents were too complicated to hold her attention, and it can be very simple:
The point is to know how likely you are to have money, and when. “When do we need to hire is one of the most important things for growth.” Everything else, like whether you’re overspending on tools (“Yes is the answer always”), is secondary to setting the goal, building the pipeline and knowing when to hire.
Actionable advice:
Lisa is Norwegian, where you can look up anyone’s earnings, so transparency comes naturally. She believes you should let everyone see the numbers, maybe not day to day, but with an offer to teach them how it works.
Her favourite example is the classic complaint: “You’re charging me out at £1,000 a day and I’m only being paid 300.” She walks through the maths. Nobody is 100% billable. She’d now say 75% at most. In a 20-day month, a digital PR might have around 15 billable days, an account manager about 50% and finance and support staff zero. “If you want a salary increase, tell me which of these people do you want to fire.” She also explains why profit matters: she kept at least six months of cash in the bank so she could keep paying people even if every client left.
Salaries at Verve were transparent too. Her COO built a competency framework showing what each role is expected to do, what it takes to reach the next level and the salary range for each position, open to everyone in the company.
That transparency was tested when Verve wanted to hire a Danish-speaking outreach person who wanted more than the bracket. Lisa couldn’t quietly say yes, so she asked everyone in that role. They told her to hire him. He later became Verve’s managing director after she left.
Fair doesn’t mean top of the market, she adds. Verve wasn’t in a trendy area and didn’t pay the most. What mattered was that pay was transparent and fair within the agency, and that people felt part of something. “They want to feel connected and like they’re part of something that actually means something.”
Josh adds his own experience from Search for Hire: A-players aren’t motivated by salary alone. When clients hire, he asks what growth the company can offer the person, covering company goals, who the person can become and who else is on the team. Those answers rarely make it into a job description, but after ten questions most companies have an employer value proposition they never knew they had.
Actionable advice:
Asked what she’d do first if she started again with everything she knows, Lisa doesn’t hesitate: get the right people. After more than 20 years in SEO she knows a lot of people. “Find your people and everything else will come together.”
Lisa ends the episode with news: she is starting again. Her new agency, No Carrot, focuses on AI visibility and AI authority, helping brands earn trust.
The name sums up the whole conversation. Everyone keeps dangling a carrot: do this and you’ll get the promotion, do that and you’ll get the result. No Carrot drops the carrot. After years of advising, she says founders seemed to prefer advice from people with far less experience, so she decided to go back in and “show them how it’s done a second time around.”
Lisa Paasche is the founder of Verve Search, a creative digital PR and SEO agency that became part of Omnicom. She now advises agency founders through EKTE Vision and has launched a new agency, No Carrot, focused on AI visibility. She has worked in SEO for over 20 years.
No Carrot is Lisa Paasche’s new agency, announced as an exclusive on the Agency Growth Club. It focuses on AI visibility and AI authority, helping brands build trust. The name comes from rejecting the “dangling carrot” promises she sees across the industry.
After someone is hired, not during recruitment. Lisa found candidates answer to please the employer when DISC is part of hiring. Used after hiring, profiles help people understand each other, resolve conflicts and communicate better. Verve shared everyone’s profiles on a wheel once a year.
“The stretch” is Lisa’s term for how far someone’s life experiences have stretched them, like a rubber band. People with more varied experiences have more perspective and are less likely to give up when things go wrong. She prioritised it over industry experience when rebuilding Verve’s team.
She believes experience teaches beliefs that can limit people. Verve’s work was a blend of SEO and digital PR, so she wanted people without fixed ideas from either field. She hired mostly graduates who were excited, open and had “the stretch”.
Lisa credits several levers: charging more for creative campaigns, building an international agency so clients could expand across countries, a three-rule filter for new business, and heavy investment in how people worked together. She treated profit, results and team enjoyment as equally important when choosing clients.
List incoming revenue from current clients, then add new business only once it reaches proposal stage, weighted at 50% and rising until it’s signed. Add outgoings, including current salaries and future hires. The forecast’s main job is showing when you can afford to hire.
Lisa believes yes, with context. Showing people how billability, overheads and cash reserves work helps them understand pricing, promotions and pay. She explains why a £1,000 day rate doesn’t mean someone is underpaid at £300 a day, because nobody is 100% billable.
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