Ep. 77 The Truth About Scaling a Web Design Agency w/ Natasha Golinsky

Natasha Golinsky is a mom of three teenagers, a breast cancer survivor, a three-time Canada Women of Influence nominee, and the founder of On Purpose Projects, a custom web and e-commerce development agency based in Vancouver, Canada.

She also does not know how to build a website.

That is not a typo. Natasha has been running a full-stack web development agency for eleven years without being a designer or developer. She started by accident, built a remote contractor team of eight people, and stepped fully into the CEO role while navigating cancer treatment. Her business not only survived, it had one of its biggest sales months ever while she was in recovery.

In this conversation, we got into what it actually looks like to grow from solopreneur to agency owner: how to make your first hire, how to handle it when a hire goes sideways, and how to let go of the work that is keeping you from growing into the leader your business needs you to be.

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How Natasha Built an Agency Without Knowing How to Do the Work

Natasha's background is in nonprofit management consulting. She became an agency owner when a client asked her to find someone to fix their website, she found a developer on Upwork, and one project turned into two, then three, then a whole business. She never planned it. She just kept saying yes.

What she brings to her agency is not technical skill. It is the ability to run a team, manage client relationships, understand the business of a project, and build systems that do not depend entirely on her. That is its own form of expertise, and it is arguably more valuable for long-term growth than being the best designer or developer in the room.

She now has a project manager who essentially runs the agency for her. Her role is business development: networking, relationships, and growth. She has not worked directly with a client in over a year.

Your First Hire Should Solve Your Biggest Bottleneck

One of the most common misconceptions about building a team is that a virtual assistant should be the first hire. Natasha pushes back on this, and so do I, though we come at it from slightly different angles.

Her point is simple: hire for wherever you are most bottlenecked. If you are a graphic designer who cannot keep up with client work, your first hire is probably another graphic designer, not an admin. If you are drowning in invoicing, onboarding, and client communication, then yes, an assistant makes sense. But the decision should come from an honest look at where the work is actually piling up, not from what everyone online says you are supposed to do first.

I would add that the ROI on different types of hires can feel different depending on whether the role is billable or not. Bringing on another designer means every hour they work is billed to a client. Bringing on an operations manager or a bookkeeper frees up your time, but you are absorbing that cost rather than passing it through. Both are worthwhile. They just require a different way of thinking about value.

For the non-billable roles, Natasha looks at the full picture: how many hours a week would you spend doing that task yourself, what else could you do with that time, and what is the cost not just financially but to your relationships, your health, and your mental energy? She has been divorced. She knows what it costs when everything piles onto the person trying to hold it all together.

Her framing: "How much does a divorce cost? More than a bookkeeper."

Outsourcing in Your Personal Life Counts Too

This came up organically and I think it is worth highlighting because it often goes unspoken.

Building a business while also being a parent, a partner, and a human being with a body that needs things sometimes requires outsourcing parts of your personal life. For Natasha in the early years, that was a live-out nanny who came during work hours and handled cleaning. For me, it has been a house cleaner, a robot vacuum, and grocery delivery.

None of these things feel especially glamorous to talk about. There is often a voice in the back of your head that says you have not earned this yet or this is only for wealthy people or it is your house, you should clean it. That voice is wrong.

If you can pay someone to clean your bathroom for two hours and spend those two hours doing work that brings in more than the cost of the cleaning, it is a smart financial decision. And even if the math is closer to even, buying yourself two hours of mental and physical energy is still worth something.

The point is not to outsource everything. The point is to be honest about where your time and energy are actually going, and whether someone else could handle some of it so that you can do the things only you can do.

The Three-Strike System for Hiring and Firing

Letting someone go is one of the things that holds people back most from building a team in the first place. Natasha has a system for this that she sets up before anyone is ever hired, and it makes the process significantly less painful for everyone.

At the end of the interview process, after a candidate has passed both the technical and soft skills evaluations, she lays out the three-strike system directly. She explains the team's non-negotiables, whatever they are for that role, and tells the candidate clearly: if I have to address this with you once, that is okay, we are still learning. If I have to address it a second time, that is your second warning. If it happens a third time, we are going to end the relationship.

Then she asks if that feels fair. The candidate says yes. Now the agreement is in place before anyone starts working.

When someone does hit three strikes, the conversation is not a surprise. It is not contentious. Natasha is not the bad guy. The person did it to themselves and they know it. She has fired multiple people over eleven years and has never had it turn into a conflict. She has even received five-star reviews on Upwork from people she let go.

The reason this works is that the standard was clear from the beginning. When you skip that setup and try to address problems as they arise, you end up in a much murkier position where the person can reasonably argue they did not know the rules. The framing has to happen on the front end.

Why Firing Matters for Your Whole Team

There is a cultural reason to follow through on your standards that goes beyond the individual situation.

When you allow someone to miss deadlines or skip meetings without consequence, you are sending a message to every other person on your team: the rules are flexible and some people get special treatment. The people who are showing up and doing their jobs will notice. They will either quietly resent it or quietly start assuming the same flexibility applies to them.

Natasha puts it plainly: the moment you let standards slide for one person, you erode the culture you have been building for everyone else.

The same logic applies at a personal level. If you would not allow a friend or a family member, people you genuinely love and give enormous amounts of grace, to treat you the way a difficult contractor is treating you, why would you allow it from someone in a business relationship? That reframe helped me a lot when I was wrestling with this early on.

What Natasha's Cancer Diagnosis Revealed About Her Business

In September of last year, Natasha was diagnosed with stage two aggressive breast cancer. She was a single parent to three teenagers. She was the one running day-to-day operations for her agency. And her oncologist told her most people do not work during treatment and she should plan to be off for six to seven months.

She had no employees. She had no paid leave. She had a team of contractors who counted on her for their income and a roster of clients she was mid-project with. Shutting down was not an option.

She called a friend who had been a client four years earlier and asked her to come in and help. This person was not a technical project manager. She had no industry-specific knowledge. But she knew the team, she knew the business, and she was not a stranger. They did four weeks of onboarding while Natasha was on pain medication and exhausted from early treatment. Then Natasha stepped back as much as she could.

What she came back to, months later, was a business that had not just survived but was running better than before. Her first full month back was the second-biggest sales month in the company's history.

The person she brought in was different from Natasha in almost every way: more formal with clients, stricter about contracts and scope, more direct with the team. Natasha's instinct was to helicopter parent the whole thing. At one point her operations manager said directly: "I need you to stop helicopter parenting me. I need you to let me fail and let me learn."

Natasha listened. There were stumbles. Some clients were lost in the process. But her operations manager learned, the team stabilized, and the business grew.

The lesson is not that you should go through a health crisis to find out your business can run without you. The lesson is that giving someone the space to do things their way, even when it is not your way, is how you build a team that is genuinely capable of holding things together when you cannot.

You Do Not Have to Build a Team to Have a Real Business

Before we wrap up, Natasha made a point worth emphasizing: building a team is not the only path. There are people who intentionally stay solo and build excellent businesses. There are people who build teams and regret it. The question is not which model is correct, it is which one fits what you actually want your work and life to look like.

For Natasha, the idea of a business that depended entirely on her was terrifying. For others, the responsibility of managing other people and holding them accountable is the part that sounds exhausting. Neither answer is wrong.

What is worth avoiding is making this decision based on pressure, whether that is pressure to grow faster, to build something that looks impressive from the outside, or to do what the most popular voice in your industry is saying everyone should do. Build slowly if that is what makes sense. Try things. See what works. Let your role evolve as your business does.

Natasha went from doing everything to doing only the thing she loves most. That did not happen overnight, and it required a period of letting go that was genuinely uncomfortable. But she got there.

🔗 Links & Resources Mentioned In The Episode:

➡️ Grab Natasha's Hiring Course
➡️ Connect with Natasha on LinkedIn
➡️ Follow Morgan on Instagram @spechtand.co
➡️ Book Your Stand Out Brand Strategy Session(use code SFBPOD for $100 off)
➡️ Book A Brand Chat

🎧 Listen to episode 77 of The Six Figure Brand Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube