My wife Claire founded the business in 2008 as Click Click Boom, working from a home office in Kenthurst. Within a year, she’d built demand for much more than Google Ads, and the business needed more hands.

My background was in manufacturing, although I took a winding path through it. I trained as a toolmaker, became a CAD design contractor working on everything from medical devices onwards, and by 2009 was a production manager at Aussie Pumps. I could see where Australian manufacturing was heading, and I was ready for a new challenge. I joined Claire that year, brought that experience with me, and learned the industry properly through her training and by getting hands-on myself.

We rebranded as Click Click Media in 2010. Today, we’re a 31-person, fully private family business based in Norwest and a Google Premier Partner.

What makes us genuinely different is that the business has always been built around what our clients need. Claire said yes to work beyond Google Ads from the beginning, and that philosophy never stopped. Every service we offer today exists because clients asked for it and we chose to build the capability rather than send them elsewhere.

The same applies to technology. We build and own our own tools instead of simply reselling someone else’s because our clients’ problems rarely fit neatly inside another company’s product.

Part of that mindset comes from my manufacturing years, where you’re ultimately judged on whether what you built is still working years later. For us, the numbers are the by-product: 92% client retention, one client who has been with us for 15 years, and eight staff who have been here for more than a decade.

We have a very deliberate system: Click Click Media is a client of Click Click Media.

We issue ourselves the same jobs we would issue to any client on retainer, at base rate, and hold ourselves to exactly the same discipline. We do our own SEO, run our own ads and produce our own content. New business therefore arrives exactly the way we tell our clients it will: through rankings we’ve earned, campaigns we run and things we publish.

Where do I wish it came from? Nowhere else, honestly.

If I wished our customers came through a channel we don’t sell, that would be an admission that our own product doesn’t work. We have to be the first proof point. Every lead that lands in our inbox is a live demonstration of the service we’re about to sell them.

Family and friends first, like most businesses. From there, Claire went out and found customers the unscalable way: local chamber of commerce meetings, community events, showing up in person and being useful.

Then her previous workplace, Yodel, collapsed, and clients began seeking her out personally. That taught us something important very early on: relationships can outlive the company. Those clients weren’t loyal to the brand on the invoice; they were loyal to the person who had done right by them.

None of that scales. You can’t chamber-of-commerce your way to a 31-person agency. But the instinct underneath it, that clients stay because of people and results, became fundamental to how we built the business.

Some of those earliest clients are still with us today.

Cold outbound.

We thought direct approaches through email and LinkedIn could become a meaningful growth channel, and we didn’t do it half-heartedly. We spent more than $100,000 bringing in expert consultants to build it properly.

It failed terribly.

In hindsight, the lesson was obvious. What we sell is demand capture: being found by people who are already looking for what you do. Cold outreach is the opposite. You’re interrupting people who aren’t looking.

An agency that relies on cold email for its own growth is quietly telling you its inbound marketing isn’t working.

So we went back to the model that had built the business in the first place: being our own client and letting the quality of the work generate demand.

It was an expensive lesson, but a clarifying one.

First, pick a narrow niche and win three clients by doing unscalable work. Over-deliver to the point where the case study writes itself. Proof beats promises, and you can’t buy proof.

Second, publish everything — real strategy, real thinking and real numbers, in public. It’s the material most agencies hide behind a proposal. Publishing it costs nothing but discipline, and it means prospects can arrive already understanding and trusting how you work.

Third, engineer referrals instead of waiting for them. Retention is a growth channel. The cheapest new client is the one your existing client sends you, so when you’ve done great work, ask for the referral.

None of that is particularly fashionable. But it’s how Claire built this business from a home office in Kenthurst, and it still works today.