Scaling Success: A 2x Inc. 5000 Company’s Story

Making the Inc. 5000 list once is no easy feat—it takes exceptional growth, leadership, and results. Earning a spot for the second year in a row? That’s a distinction fewer than half of honorees ever achieve. In 2024, WISE Digital Partners once again ranked among the fastest-growing private companies in America, placing us in the top tier of high-growth businesses nationwide.

Here’s how we did it, and how you can adapt similar strategies in your own business.

We Stayed Laser-Focused On Retention

Most digital marketing agencies retain 60–70% of their clients annually—a solid industry benchmark. At WISE, we aim higher. We’ve consistently achieved retention rates above 85%, with an average client relationship of 3.8 years—roughly 2.5 times longer than the industry norm.

The real payoff isn’t bragging rights. It’s the advantages that come with high retention:

• Predictable revenue: A solid client base lets you plan ahead, invest with confidence, and take smart risks.
• Lower churn costs: Keeping great clients is far less expensive—and far more profitable—than constantly replacing them.
• Compounding results: Each year you work with a client, the value and wins you deliver tend to grow.

Retention has been a deliberate focus, not an afterthought. And it’s one of the biggest reasons we made the Inc. 5000 list for a second year.

We Scaled Our Team Before We Needed To

Some businesses spend most of their time trying to bring in enough sales. We had the opposite problem—the work was coming in faster than our team could comfortably keep up with.

On paper, that sounds like a “good problem” to have. The reality? It’s risky.

If you can’t deliver as fast as you sell, you burn out your people, quality dips, and you end up losing your best clients.

That’s why we didn’t wait for cracks to show. This year, we added people to project management, paid media, SEO, and design before we hit a breaking point. Staying proactive allows us to say yes to the right opportunities without running our team into the ground.

We Innovated With Purpose

Being open to change is important—but chasing every shiny idea can be a huge distraction. The trick is figuring out what ideas are worth testing and how to test them.

Take our AI visibility service as an example. Before offering it to clients, we piloted it on our own business to see how a company like ours could show up in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.

The test worked—and not just on paper. That experiment brought in over $500,000 in new contracts in the first year. It also gave us the confidence to offer the service to clients, knowing we’d already ironed out the kinks. In just 18 months, it has driven close to eight figures in new business for our clients—making it possibly the fastest-growing and most successful service we’ve ever launched.

We Kept Refining the Processes That Drive Results

Last year, we set our sights on big growth in 2025—but we wanted to get there deliberately. That meant tapping the brakes for a moment so we could build the foundation to accelerate for years to come.

In 2024, we went all-in on fully integrating our team into our project management platform, ClickUp, and migrating every project into a streamlined, standardized workflow. It was a heavy lift, but the payoff is clear—helping us remain on the Inc. 5000 list and positioning us for a likely third appearance in 2026. We’re already tracking 38% growth year-over-year.

Now, stronger communication, tighter timelines, and a dramatically lower risk of missed deadlines are the norm. With operations running smoother than ever, our team is free to focus on what matters most—delivering exceptional results for our clients.

We Stuck to What Was Already Working

There’s a fine line between refining your approach and unnecessarily tinkering with what already works. If there’s one lesson the last five years have taught us, it’s this: protect what works and keep refining it.

For us, this means:

• Focusing on the right clients and walking away from the wrong opportunities.
• Growing a team you trust, then getting out of their way so they can do what they do best.
• Keeping our finances tight so we can move fast when it counts.
• Diversifying our client base to avoid overexposure to market shifts, while knowing which industries we serve best. For us, that often meant professional services like accounting and legal, and home services businesses.

Ready to Build Your Own Growth Story?

The strategies that earned us a second year on the Inc. 5000 list aren’t exclusive to WISE—they’re habits any growth-minded business can adopt. If you’re curious about how these approaches could work in your business, let’s talk.