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Have you been hiring people and growing your team without a real plan, only to find yourself with a bigger payroll and a business that still runs through you?

Today's featured guest and his partner started out as graphic designers doing packaging work and then pivoted to web when the real estate crash wiped out their client base overnight. After years of taking on everything, they're still figuring out how to build the right team underneath them.

He walks through what it looked like to grow to 25 people without a plan, how the co-founder dynamic actually works after two decades, and why he's found that, in a partnership, the disagreements are actually the thing keeping the business alive.

Victor Huynh is the co-founder of Ready Artwork, a website-first industrial B2B digital marketing agency. He and his business partner Emily met in graphic design school and started freelancing together, with Victor handling sales and Emily anchoring production. Over 22 years, they pivoted from packaging design to web, grew to 25 people at peak, scaled back down, and have since committed fully to the industrial B2B niche.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

Learning that clarity outperforms craft in sales
The cost of growing without a plan
Still dealing with imposter syndrome? Most owners are

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M S olutio n s:Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

The Black and White Sign That Rewrote Their Positioning

Victor describes the Asian expo as a pivotal moment in his agency's story and one where he and his partner learned what clarity actually does in a sales situation.

Day one at the trade show was a day of fancy brochures, a computer with carousels running, and exactly zero sales. Nobody knew what the agency did, and Victor grew frustrated as he listened to people walk past saying they thought the booth was selling colored pencils. On day two, Emily did not come back. Victor taped a black and white letter-sized sheet of paper in the corner of the table that said "website design" in Chinese and sold five websites.

The lesson is that clarity outperforms craft in every sales environment. The brochures were beautiful. The carousels were impressive. Neither of those things told a prospective client what the agency did or why they should stop walking. A simple, specific statement of what you offer is not a failure of presentation. It is the presentation.

Growing to 25 People Without a Plan and What It Cost

After the trade show success, Victor's agency grew fast. The strategy, if it can be called that, was reactive: someone needed something, they hired for it. E-commerce, lead gen, social media: they said yes to all of it because the projects were coming in and the team needed to grow to fulfill them. At 25 people, Victor describes feeling like they were selling a specific number of projects every month just to make payroll, and the agency had become something neither of them had designed.

The peak headcount created a structure where Victor never fully stepped out of sales. He had a sales team, but it functioned more like a support team. The direction that would have made the department self-sustaining was not there, and without it the team defaulted to managing up.

When the direction is not clear and the founder is always available to fill the gap, the team learns to route everything upward rather than developing the capability to own outcomes independently.

What a 22-Year Co-Founder Partnership Actually Requires

In their agency partner dynamic, Victor's partner Emily is the efficient executor. She makes sure things get done quickly, decisions get made, and production hums. He is the visionary and the sales front, in charge of new ideas, new opportunities, and new directions. The gas and the brake.

Those complementary traits are also the source of real friction. Victor gets impatient when things do not move fast enough. Emily resists new directions until someone answers who is going to do the work. What keeps the partnership functional is the willingness to have the hard conversation rather than let resentment build. Partnerships where disagreement goes unspoken long enough become toxic. Two decades in, he and Emily still go at it. The difference is that they work through it instead of around it. For solo founders, that sounding board does not exist inside the business, which is one of the clearest arguments for finding a peer room where the same kind of honest conversation can happen without the stakes of a co-founder relationship.

Imposter Syndrome Does Not Disappear With Experience

Victor names imposter syndrome as one of the things he still works on 22 years in. Most agency owners do. You might feel it as you walk up on stage for a talk and wonder for a second if you should really be there. What we should all learn is that the feeling is not evidence of being unqualified. It is evidence of caring about doing the thing well.

What imposter syndrome and delegation have in common is that both require the same underlying move: trusting that the outcome will be acceptable even when you are not the one controlling every detail.

The practical principle that runs through this entire conversation is that agency owners should remove the things they should not be doing, one at a time, and do it before it feels urgent to. Victor's efficiency instinct is the same instinct that eventually produces real structural freedom. It does not come from working harder inside the current setup, but from spending the hour building the system that removes the five-minute task permanently.

Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?

Looking to dig deeper into your agency's potential? Check out our Agency Blueprint. Designed for agency owners like you, our Agency Blueprint helps you uncover growth opportunities, tackle obstacles, and craft a customized blueprint for your agency's success.

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