The Hard Decisions That Helped This Agency Scale Smarter

In this episode of E-Coffee with Experts, Ranmay speaks with Will Newland, Founder & Managing Director at SoBold, a London-based high-performance WordPress design & development agency.

Will walks us through his eleven-year journey from freelance marketer to leading a 25-person agency, and reveals the client-first playbook that built SoBold: outstanding communication, empowering handovers, bespoke delivery and a refusal to lock clients into short-sighted retainers.

We dive into practical retention strategies (how giving clients control actually increases long-term engagement), the hard lessons of shifting from high-volume small projects to fewer enterprise engagements, and how to qualify leads that are “enterprise ready.”

He also explains how SoBold baked SEO and LLM/AI visibility into design and development — including measuring presence across chat models, aligning technical builds with content strategy, and why quality remains the core signal for both search engines and LLMs.

If you’re a founder, product leader, marketer or digital agency owner wondering how to scale responsibly, improve client lifetime value, or future-proof your website for AI-driven discovery — this episode is for you.