Twelve clients before I had a website.

I started this business two and a half years ago. In that time I became a HubSpot Solutions Partner, delivered for more than a dozen clients, and built exactly one thing for myself that I never launched: a website. Here's what that taught me about what actually wins work.

The focus, from day one, was the intersection I'd spent my career living in — golf, technology, and strategy. Not three separate things I dabble in, but one overlapping view of how a modern golf business actually runs. That was the bet: that the people in this industry didn't need another generalist agency, they needed someone who already understood the ecosystem from the inside.

The product underneath the work.

Becoming HubSpot certified as a Solutions Partner gave that bet a backbone. It turned a loose set of skills into something I could name and stand behind — a platform to underpin the work I was already doing around membership management, automation, and custom onboarding. The certification didn't change what I knew. It gave clients a recognized frame for trusting it.

That's the part worth being honest about. The badge mattered less as a credential and more as a way to package judgment I'd built over years into something a club or operator could actually buy.

The website that took two and a half years.

And then there was the site. The thing that, by every piece of conventional advice, should have come first.

I went down the rabbit hole properly. I looked hard at Framer, Webflow, and building with AI. I committed to Webflow — paid for two full years without launching a single page of it, and bought more templates than I'd like to admit. I learned an enormous amount about what those tools do well and where they quietly cost you. (That's a story for another time.)

For most of that stretch, the public face of the business was a holding page: a logo, and a link to a HubSpot meeting calendar. That was it. No portfolio, no services grid, no carefully worded hero section.

"The hard part was never the website. It was deciding who I am as a company — and that's the work no template hands you."

Should it have taken two and a half years to answer that? No. But the delay wasn't really about Webflow or templates. It was about identity — being able to say clearly who Stackory is and who it isn't. The tool was never the bottleneck. The clarity was.

So how did the work come in?

Twelve-plus clients, and not one of them found me through a homepage. They came through three things, in roughly equal measure:

• Trust. Relationships built over years, where people already knew how I work before they ever became clients.
• Inside knowledge of the ecosystem. Understanding the platforms, the politics, and the consumer behavior that make golf its own particular world.
• Proof — delivery. The simplest one. I did the work, it worked, and that became the pitch.

What made that possible wasn't a single specialty. It was being able to draw across all of it at once — technology, golf, consumer behavior, operations, strategy, and marketing — and connect them in a way that someone living in only one of those lanes can't. A club doesn't have a "tech problem" or a "marketing problem" in isolation. It has a business, and the answer usually sits in the seams between disciplines.

This isn't an argument against websites.

Let me be clear: a website is useful, and these days it's genuinely needed. The one you're reading exists for a reason — and the fact that I eventually built it by hand is part of the point. But for the first stretch of this business, it simply wasn't the thing that won the work. The relationships did. The delivery did.

If you're early and stuck on getting the site perfect before you'll let yourself sell, I'd gently suggest the order might be backwards. The site confirms your identity. It rarely creates it.

To the people who bet early.

Which leaves the part that matters most. To the clients who came on board in those first chapters — when there was no polished site to point to, no case-study page, no proof beyond my word and a calendar link: thank you.

You trusted me with real businesses on the strength of conversations and track record alone. Several of you chose me over agencies far more established and far better dressed than a holding page — even though I'm not an agency, and never claimed to be. That choice wasn't lost on me, and it isn't now. The early commitment you made is a large part of why there's a company here to write about at all.

The website finally caught up to the work. The work, thanks to you, never had to wait for it.

Gareth Londt — Founder & CEO