In this fireside chat, Kevin Gibbons, founder of the UK-based SEO and digital marketing agency Re-Signal, speaks candidly with host Robert Jacoby about what it actually takes to build and sustain a successful agency over two decades. The session title is deliberately provocative: there are no silver bullets, no shortcuts, no magic tactics that replace time, trust, and compounding effort.
Gibbons draws on his personal journey from a solo freelancer operating out of Australia in the mid-2000s to running a respected, deliberately paced agency serving international clients including Asics, Vivo Barefoot, and others in the sports retail and e- commerce space. He covers the real mechanics of winning clients, from building your first case study out of nothing, to the slow relationship-building that underpins the best new business wins, to the creative (and sometimes unconventional) approaches to getting in front of the right people.
The second half of the conversation turns to AI: how it is reshaping both the agency's internal workflows and the wider search landscape, and how Re-Signal is thinking about positioning itself for the next two to three years. Throughout, Gibbons returns to the same core message: act with urgency day-to-day, but have patience on the outcome.
Growth is slow, compounding, and built on trust.
Key takeaways
- 01There are no silver bullets. Client acquisition is a compounding, long-term process. The agencies that look like overnight successes have almost always built quietly for years before anyone noticed.
- 02Client retention is growth. Gibbons had a formative frustration: a year where strong new business activity produced no net growth because existing clients were churning. Keeping the clients you have is a prerequisite for expansion.
- 03Build your first case study yourself. Before you have clients, create your own project and use it as proof. Gibbons used an affiliate property website to demonstrate SEO capability before his agency had any real client history.
- 04Relationships win business, not pitches alone. The best client wins in Re-Signal's history came through trust built over years: a football kickabout that led to a major account, referrals from former client-side contacts who moved companies, awards events that opened introductions.
- 05Become their mate, not just their vendor. When Gibbons realised pitches were sometimes being handed to "someone's mate," his response was not frustration but strategy: invest in events, speak at conferences, host your own gatherings, so that you become a familiar, trusted face.
- 06Hosting your own events is a long-term brand investment, not a revenue line. Re-Signal runs a loss-making annual e-commerce conference in London purely for reputation and relationship building. It is not expected to be profitable.
- 07Thought leadership content still works, and may work better than ever. Blogging and high-quality LinkedIn content remain powerful. The gap for genuine, original thinking is wider in an AI-saturated content landscape.
- 08AI must now be part of every client conversation. If AI is absent from your pitch, clients read it as a sign you are not a forward-thinking agency. But the conversation requires realism, not hype.
- 09AI search is a new and growing acquisition channel for agencies themselves. Re-Signal is already receiving leads through AI-powered search tools as clients look for agencies.
- 10Resist the temptation to over-plan early on. Gibbons acknowledges that if he had fully understood what running an agency involved at age 24, he likely would not have started.
- 11Taking things step by step, iterating, and not being paralysed by the absence of a grand plan was essential.
The First Case Study: Manufacturing Proof from Nothing
One of the most immediately actionable points in the conversation is Gibbons's description of what he calls "level zero" in building client credibility: creating your own proof before you have any clients.
He built and optimised an affiliate property website, got it ranking well for competitive search terms, and then used it as a case study on his agency site. This generated inbound enquiries. From those enquiries came the first real clients, including a tax consultancy (IR35-related advice for UK freelancers) that he ranked for competitive terms, which in turn became the next case study.
The progression is deliberate: each case study earns the next client, each client earns the next case study. But the chain has to start somewhere, and for an agency with no track record, starting it yourself, with your own project, is a practical way to manufacture that first proof point.
Host Robert Jacoby flags this explicitly for the audience as a direct tactic: "build a service, build a product, and then case study yourself on it."
Gibbons is honest that this was not the result of strategic foresight. He did not have a 20- year plan in 2006. He had an affiliate site that was working and spotted that it could double as a marketing asset. The lesson he draws from this is that over-planning at the outset can be paralyzing. Taking the next obvious step with what you have is often more effective than waiting for a comprehensive strategy to crystallise.
Client Retention as the Hidden Growth Engine
Perhaps the most under-discussed insight in the session is Gibbons's account of a period roughly ten years into the agency's life when strong new business performance produced no actual growth. The agency was winning clients, but not growing. The reason: existing clients were not being retained at the same rate.
This experience was his inflection point on the relationship between retention and growth.
His conclusion: client retention is growth. If you are not retaining the clients you have, new business wins are running in place, not adding. The compounding effect of a stable and growing client base, where you are expanding relationships and upselling over time, is far more powerful than a high churn/high acquisition cycle.
He is clear that this does not mean abandoning new business activity. Pipeline matters. But the framing shifts: new business should be growth on top of what you already have, not a replacement for what you keep losing.
If you are not retaining the clients you have, new business wins are running in place, not adding.
Compounding Trust: How the Best Clients Actually Arrive
Gibbons gives a concrete chain of events that illustrates how trust and reputation compound over time in ways that cannot be manufactured on demand.
The sequence runs roughly as follows. Re-Signal won a client called Better Gyms and did strong SEO work for them, winning an industry award. He took the client to the awards ceremony. Partly as a result of the visibility this created, they were invited to pitch for Asics, the sports footwear and apparel brand. They won that pitch. Asics has been a client for eight years. The award-winning work with Asics has in turn attracted attention from others in the sports retail space. Some of those new relationships have come through people who moved from Asics to other companies, such as Vivo Barefoot, and brought Re-Signal with them.
This chain, Better Gyms to Asics to Vivo Barefoot, took years. None of it was plannable in advance. But each link was made possible by doing good work, building trust with the people in the room, and being visible in the places where relevant people gather.
The takeaway Gibbons draws is not that you should wait passively for this to happen, but that you should understand what you are actually building toward when you invest in relationships, events, content, and reputation. These investments have long payback periods, but the payoff, when it arrives, is qualitatively different from a cold-pitch win.
Getting in the Room: Unconventional Approaches to Relationship Building
Host Robert Jacoby pushes Gibbons away from generalities and into specifics. How, concretely, do you get in front of the right people?
Gibbons's answer is built on a key insight from early in his career. He had lost a pitch and been told, informally, that the business had gone to "someone's mate." His initial reaction was frustration, a sense that the game was rigged. His eventual response was more constructive: why not become their mate?
This reframe led to a sustained investment in the social and relational infrastructure around the industry. He describes three main channels: Speaking at conferences. Getting on stage changes your relationship with an audience.
People come to you rather than the other way around. The content of a strong talk is itself a form of thought leadership that creates credibility and inbound interest.
Hosting events. Re-Signal hosts a one-day e-commerce conference in London called Re-Commerce, with high-production-value keynote speakers, at a significant financial loss every year. This is not a revenue stream. It is a brand and relationship investment. The goal is to get the right people in a room and to demonstrate through the event itself the standard that Re-Signal holds itself to.
Building informal communities around shared interests. When Gibbons moved from Oxford to London, he missed his weekly five-a-side football game. He set up a digital marketing five-a-side group, inviting people from across the industry. The stated purpose was simple: play football, go for a drink. There was no pitch involved. One of those football regulars became a lead that turned into what he describes as Re-Signal's biggest client for three or four years, significantly accelerating the agency's growth. He is explicit that the outcome was not the intention. The intention was to do something enjoyable with like-minded people. The business relationship emerged from that genuine connection.
His point about post-COVID relationship building is worth noting: the drift toward remote and digital interaction has made this kind of in-person, informal relationship-building rarer and therefore more valuable. He sees it as something that can get lost and is worth deliberately investing in.
Content, LinkedIn, and What Still Works
When asked about the tactical toolkit for building awareness and pipeline, Gibbons lists several things that have worked for Re-Signal, while acknowledging that what works varies by agency and should be tested rather than assumed.
Blogging and written thought leadership. He started with this in the early days and is clear that it remains relevant. He pushes back slightly on the host's suggestion that its importance may have faded, arguing that the gap for genuine, original thinking in a landscape saturated with AI-generated content may actually be larger now than it was. A quick fifteen-minute post that captures a genuine observation can outperform a laboriously produced long-form piece. The lesson is to test and publish, not to over-engineer.
LinkedIn. He describes putting significant effort into LinkedIn, including high-production-value video content that stands out from the volume of standard posts. The platform remains a meaningful channel for professional visibility and relationship-building, but standing out requires quality and differentiation.
Awards and recognition. Being recognised in industry awards creates case study material, provides occasions to bring clients into your world (attending the ceremony together), and generates visibility with potential new clients. It also signals internal team achievement, which has its own value.
The meta-point across all of these is: try multiple things, find what works for you specifically, and do not overthink the starting point. Action and iteration beat perfect strategy.
AI and Its Impact on the Agency
The final section of the conversation addresses artificial intelligence from two angles: how it is changing Re-Signal's internal operations, and how it is reshaping the search landscape that the agency works within.
Internal AI adoption. Re-Signal is using AI across content strategy (briefing writers, planning content frameworks), e-commerce page creation (category and product pages, though Gibbons notes caution about overdoing AI-generated output in ways that might compromise long-term quality), project and account management, and call transcription. He emphasises efficiency rather than replacement: the goal is to make existing workflows faster without degrading the quality of work delivered to clients.
He makes an observation about the normalisation of AI tools: an AI note-taker failing on a call the previous day required manual catch-up that felt genuinely disruptive, a sign of how quickly these tools move from novel to expected infrastructure.
AI search as a new landscape. For Re-Signal's clients, the question of how to appear and be featured in AI-powered search results sits alongside traditional SEO. Gibbons acknowledges it is hard to assign precise commercial value to AI search visibility right now:
traffic from AI search is relatively low, but its influence on consideration and brand perception is harder to measure and potentially significant. The tooling for measuring and forecasting AI search performance is nascent compared to the mature SEO tool ecosystem built over twenty years. There is work to be done.
AI search as an inbound channel for the agency itself. Gibbons notes that Re-Signal is already receiving leads from people who have found them through AI-powered search tools when looking for agencies. This is a new and growing acquisition channel that agencies should be aware of and optimise for.
Pitching in an AI context. He is direct: if AI is not part of your pitch in 2025, you are likely to lose that pitch. Clients read its absence as a signal that you are not a forward-thinking partner. At the same time, the conversation should be grounded. Not every client needs to prioritise AI search today. Some may find it currently represents a small fraction of their total search value. The right approach is to address it with appropriate weight, neither ignoring it nor overhyping it.
Looking two years ahead. Gibbons frames the strategic question for the agency as: what does the competitor that could eat you alive look like, and how do you build that before they do? For Re-Signal, this means pushing further into AI-augmented workflows, exploring whether they can serve more clients or offer more to existing clients through AI, and continuing to build expertise in AI search optimisation. He is clear that agencies cannot remain what they were two or three years ago and expect the same results. The landscape has shifted materially.
Clients read its absence as a signal that you are not a forward-thinking partner.
How to Connect and What's Coming
Gibbons can be found on LinkedIn, where he is active and open to connection requests. Re-Signal's annual e-commerce conference, Re-Commerce, features high-profile keynote speakers (at the time of recording, Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy had been announced as the next keynote) and is held in London. The session was recorded in the context of the Web Agency Summit.
About the speaker
Kevin Gibbons
Founder of Re-Signal
Kevin Gibbons is founder of Re-Signal, an agency focused on organic growth and search. He works with agency owners on new business development and what actually wins client trust.