AGENCY GROWTH CLUB
Tom Jauncey (Nautilus) on the Hiring Filter That Actually Works
Guest: Tom Jauncey
Guest: Tom Jauncey
Tom Jauncey has grown Nautilus into a 27-person, fully remote agency over eight years without ever locking a client into a long-term contract.
On this episode of the Agency Growth Club, he breaks down why he hires for who someone actually is over what’s on their CV, the AI tools his team has quietly built in-house, and the “nerd vetting” process behind a genuinely strong remote culture.
Pulled from the transcript’s real per-line timestamps, matched to where each topic starts.
Asked what AI tool he can’t live without, Tom’s answer isn’t a commercial product, it’s tools Nautilus built itself. The team has put together four or five internal tools for different functions: one for sales prospecting, one that scrapes other businesses’ sites to identify leads, and an internal ops tool tracking sales performance across the team. Claude is the team’s daily driver for building and running most of these, alongside general use across the agency.
Tom is candid that this kind of in-house tooling is more accessible than most people assume, you don’t need millions in funding to build these anymore, provided you actually understand development fundamentals. Nautilus’s ops manager, a former developer, has been essential specifically for fixing things when AI-assisted builds break down, a distinction Tom draws directly: understanding the underlying logic still matters even when AI accelerates the build itself.
Nautilus only began serious cold outreach in the last couple of months, historically limited by time rather than interest. The tool the team built pulls data via the Google Places API, taking an industry and location as input and returning scraped Google My Business listings. Businesses without websites get routed to cold outreach directly; those with existing sites get a report the team can use to open a conversation.
Outreach itself runs primarily through cold email and LinkedIn, Tom notes LinkedIn specifically as “a massive one for us in terms of client acquisition,” with cold calling tested early on but not currently a core channel.
This section is Josh sharing his own discovery, not something Tom brought to the conversation. Josh explained that LinkedIn allows any user to request an export of their full “enriched data” (all connections and message history) through Settings and Privacy, typically delivered within about 48 hours. Once exported, that data can be fed into an AI tool and segmented against an ICP, in Josh’s own case, taking his roughly 20,000 connections down to about 4,000 matching contacts, then further split into tiers (“whales,” “tier one,” “tier two”) for personalized outreach. The same export can also be analyzed against post engagement history to help build a broader content strategy. Josh noted he’d only discovered this himself the week before recording.
Tom followed up by describing how Nautilus is applying a similar segmentation approach: roughly 224 “whale” contacts get fully personalized, founder-written outreach from Tom directly, while the remaining several thousand contacts are managed through HubSpot’s prospecting agent for semi-automated personalization at scale.
Tom credits Nautilus’s team culture directly: people who are self-sufficient and genuinely engaged rather than needing to be pushed to upskill. His broader framing is stark: agencies (and individuals within them) that don’t keep pace with how quickly SEO, GEO, and AEO are shifting risk both bad client outcomes and, eventually, the agency’s own survival.
His clearest example of the culture working as intended: a team member independently built a full audit tool in Visual Studio Code that takes a client URL, generates a full Nautilus-branded report with strategy recommendations drawn from prior client data, and produces a simplified, client-friendly summary version, all without being asked to, specifically to cut down time spent on SEO audits for leads and prospects.
Tom’s honest answer: nobody genuinely knows, and he considers that an honest position rather than a dodge. AI Overviews and LLMs are clearly capturing more search behavior, but he doesn’t expect Google to disappear, citing Google Maps specifically as a durable, unlikely-to-be-replaced piece of the search ecosystem.
He references conversations in his own private founder Slack group, where members estimate roughly 80% of people still aren’t actively using AI tools day to day, reinforcing his view that traditional SEO still has real remaining runway even as the industry shifts. His framing draws a direct parallel to COVID-era business adaptation: survival depends on staying genuinely adaptable, not on picking one permanent strategy and defending it.
This part of the conversation was Josh sharing a personal story, not Tom’s. Josh described living in a small fishing village in Portugal and once being unable to buy a coffee because the village only accepted cash, no card readers at all, a moment that snapped him out of a spiral of feeling like he needed to be building AI tools faster than everyone else. Tom’s response connected it back to the same underlying point: plenty of people and places genuinely aren’t using AI yet, and there’s real opportunity in traditional SEO work for as long as that gap persists.
Nautilus keeps its entry-level “starter” SEO package largely unchanged (on-page, some technical work, content), but has folded GEO-adjacent work directly into its more bespoke, higher-tier packages rather than selling it as a separate line item. Concretely, that includes Reddit mentions (which Tom says has shown strong results directly in the agency’s own data) and digital PR, a service Nautilus began offering a couple of years ago and has scaled steadily since.
Tom frames Nautilus’s broader packaging philosophy as deliberately non-standard: rather than one retainer that covers everything, the agency mixes and matches services (a base retainer plus, for example, a batch of Reddit mentions rolled out over a few months, or dedicated PR articles) based specifically on what each client actually needs.
Nautilus’s smallest starter package carries a 6-month minimum commitment, specifically because the low price point makes short-term churn genuinely costly relative to onboarding investment. Beyond that tier, the large majority of Nautilus clients operate on 30 days’ notice, no long-term lock-in at all (tender-based enterprise deals, which sometimes carry a mandated 12-month term, are the exception, not the norm).
“They obviously must like what we do and like the results we get for them. I don’t think there’s a need to lock them in.”
Tom is candid this is a philosophy, not just a policy: he personally dislikes being locked into contracts as a consumer, and considers the absence of a contractual safety net a deliberate forcing function, if the work and relationship are genuinely good, retention shouldn’t require legal enforcement to happen.
Tom’s clearest retention lever beyond results themselves is communication, specifically real conversations rather than hiding behind automated portals and reports. His reasoning ties directly to Nautilus’s multi-service structure: a client starting on an SEO retainer might later add paid media, digital PR, or website management, and that expansion only happens if the relationship itself is genuinely strong, not purely transactional.
He’s explicit that this has cost Nautilus real revenue over the years, deliberately not upselling services a client doesn’t actually need, even when he could have, because preserving trust matters more than a short-term sale.
“A lot of agencies hide behind portals and stuff. But I think people want to build a relationship with whoever they’re working with.”
Tom shares a direct personal experience that shaped his skepticism about full AI automation of client-facing communication: trying to call a restaurant to push a reservation back by 15 minutes, and getting stuck in a frustrating loop with an AI receptionist that kept misunderstanding the simple request, eventually hanging up out of frustration. He connects this directly to why Nautilus still runs client communication through real phone conversations and a human main office line, rather than chatbots or AI voice agents, reasoning that AI voice tools suit highly transactional businesses (his example: Tesla servicing) far better than a relationship-driven agency model.
Actionable advice:
Nautilus (27 people at the time of this recording, split across design, dev, marketing, and a dedicated sales team) restructured leadership at the start of the year: Tom’s co-founder and partner Jake now oversees operations exclusively, while Tom manages the sales team specifically, a split Tom credits to genuine differences in temperament, he’s more personally invested and emotional when things go wrong, while Jake handles conflict more dispassionately.
Account managers earn a 10% commission on any retainer upsell (paid in the first month), while the dedicated sales team earns based on monthly billables brought into the agency. Deliberately, Nautilus doesn’t set explicit upsell KPIs for account managers, Tom’s reasoning is that forcing upsell targets erodes the authenticity of the client relationship account managers have built, even though most upsells happen naturally anyway because clients genuinely need the additional services.
Tom is direct that Nautilus has made real hiring mistakes in the past by weighting CV data too heavily, since candidates are skilled at “elevating” both their CVs and interview answers without necessarily having verifiable proof behind them. His clearest admitted mistake: being too lenient with underperforming sales hires, giving more chances than the situation actually warranted once the mismatch was already evident.
His current filter leans heavily on “vibe” and genuine demonstrated output (case studies, real data, an authentic personal LinkedIn presence) over traditional credentials like university background. As a fully remote team spanning the UK and South Africa, Tom credits this approach directly with building a genuinely strong, non-corporate culture, reinforced by periodic in-person team trips.
“We’re not a boring corporate agency, so a boring corporate CV isn’t a good fit.”
Josh connected Tom’s “nerd vetting” language directly to a phrase used by Harry Sanders (founder of StudioHawk, a Nautilus client): “wholesome nerds”, people who are genuinely, visibly passionate about something (not necessarily SEO-related) and light up talking about it. Tom agreed this resonates directly, while adding an important nuance: that same nerdy intensity works best in more data-driven, individual-contributor roles, but account management specifically also requires charisma, energy, and the ability to navigate client conflict directly, a balance Tom considers essential rather than optional.
Tom’s onboarding philosophy centers on a direct, standing question to every new hire once they’re settled in: what would you change? He’s explicit about why: “I hire people because they’re smarter than me… tell me it doesn’t work, why doesn’t it work, what could we do better.”
His clearest example: a social media hire flagged within a couple of weeks that Nautilus’s client onboarding process was “absolutely awful,” specifically because it wasn’t front-loading content collection from new social media and LinkedIn ghostwriting clients, leaving the team chasing content gaps later. She rebuilt the onboarding questions and added workshops directly, a change Tom credits with making both the client experience and the internal content workflow meaningfully smoother.
Tom’s content history goes back years, starting as an audio-only podcast recorded while he was still living with his parents, before expanding into roughly 200 YouTube videos, a format he eventually stepped back from after feeling like he was repeating himself creatively. LinkedIn, by contrast, remains one of Nautilus’s biggest drivers of client acquisition and revenue.
He’s candid this required a real personal shift: he describes his earlier self as introverted specifically around competitors, deliberately avoiding any contact with other agency owners. Building genuine visibility and relationships in the space directly enabled Nautilus’s agency partnership network, which Tom credits with driving a meaningful share of the agency’s larger retainers.
Nautilus deliberately partners with other agencies, swapping mismatched leads for a lifetime referral commission rather than trying to serve every inbound inquiry internally. Tom’s concrete example: a 300-person, full-service US agency (working with major brands) routes smaller leads, roughly $20,000 website projects, to Nautilus, since their own pricing starts around $150,000 for a basic WordPress build given their size. In return, Nautilus routes mismatched leads back (his example: a client wanting TikTok Shop and TikTok Ads work with an on-site US team), earning a lifetime cut, in that case roughly $2,000/month on a $10,000/month retainer.
Tom is explicit this only works because Nautilus is selective about which agencies it partners with, avoiding relationships that would simply give away leads the team could service internally, while framing most partnerships less as formal business arrangements and more as genuine friendships and a mutual network built over years of consistent relationship investment (events, regular catch-up calls, a dedicated Slack presence).
Tom’s private Slack community for male agency founders (roughly 20 members, meeting monthly) grew out of a direct, personal observation: several agency owners in his broader network had gone through serious personal struggles in isolation, without reaching out for support beforehand. Tom is careful to frame the community’s value simply, having people to talk to, including about genuinely difficult business realities like cash flow problems, rather than treating isolation as an inevitable cost of ownership.
The community formed organically rather than as a deliberate business initiative, and now includes shared plans to attend industry events together, a natural extension of relationships that started as founder support and became genuine friendship.
Nautilus has built four or five internal tools, for sales prospecting, lead scraping via the Google Places API, and internal sales operations tracking, using Claude as the primary development tool, without external funding or a dedicated product team.
Founder Tom Jauncey runs the large majority of Nautilus’s client base on 30 days’ notice (only the smallest starter package requires a 6-month minimum), deliberately removing contractual lock-in so the agency has to continuously earn retention through results and relationship rather than legal obligation.
A hiring philosophy that prioritizes genuine passion, demonstrated real-world output (case studies, data, an authentic LinkedIn presence), and cultural “vibe” over traditional credentials like university background or a polished CV, directly inspired in part by client StudioHawk’s “wholesome nerds” hiring standard.
Nautilus routes mismatched leads to partner agencies and receives mismatched leads in return, earning a lifetime referral commission on any resulting business. A real example: a 300-person US agency sends Nautilus smaller website leads it’s too large to service profitably, while Nautilus sends specialized requests (like TikTok Shop work) to partners better suited to deliver them.
Being too lenient with underperforming sales hires, giving more chances than the situation warranted once a mismatch was already clear, a pattern he now actively works to correct by acting on hiring red flags earlier.
After observing that several agency owners in his network had struggled significantly in isolation without reaching out for help, he started a private Slack group for founders specifically to give agency owners people to talk to about genuine business and personal struggles, including cash flow issues.
With 95% of roles filled within 25 days, our approach is built for pace and backed by a 1 year guarantee. Get access to the systems and frameworks that power elite SFH teams.
