Slow & Steady Growth (with bonus Star Wars references…)

11 August 2025

A Digital Dispatch by Paul Galinsky, Director

Digital Strategy Open Source Wordpress

Sustainable growth for digital agencies Blog Post

Hi, I’m Paul Galinsky. I joined Pooka & Co in December 2019, just days before my daughter Beth was born.

Marcus, Pooka’s founder, knew full-well what he was getting himself into: I’d spend at least six months in a sleep deprived haze, often covered in dribble.

But I hopefully seemed a safe bet after 15 years supporting third sector organisations with web design, fundraising and project management.

Five and a half years later, Beth is now getting ready to start school and I’m Marcus’ Co-Director at Pooka. We’ve come a long way in that time, but we’ve been careful not to stretch ourselves too thinly.

There are all-too-common tales of web agencies growing too fast, struggling to manage income and workload, and then fading away. Our home city of Edinburgh has certainly seen plenty, and Pooka has always taken careful steps behind the scenes to mitigate that risk.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Leith.

Marcus founded Pooka in 2010. He was already a solid project manager and coder back then, but he didn’t quite have the chops that he has today. So he focussed on what he knew: Deeply understanding the organisations that he worked with, finding people with the technical skills that he lacked, and being the glue that got projects delivered on time and budget.

Over time, Pooka partnered with a good number of collaborators. Some onshore, some offshore, and many from Edinburgh. But all with the aim of building a long-term relationship: A team.

Five years ago our About Us page would have already introduced Andrei, Gaynor, Ivan, Sheree, Robin and Ali. It’s testament to the quality of their work, and the culture at Pooka & Co that we’re still together after all these years. (Though, note to self, most of them probably haven’t changed their profile photos since 2020!)

Having such a consistent core team and collaborators, has given our clients a very stable relationship with us. But like all organisations, we’ve had a few curve balls here and there. Covid was an extreme example, but it hit Pooka in the opposite way that you might expect: We got busier.

As physical doors closed, online shopfronts needed to open. Quickly. We had to support our clients, mostly charities and membership organisations, through a plethora of online change, to ensure that their vital work and their teams could survive.

But at Pooka, our team didn’t grow. We knuckled down. And when things quietened again as the world worked out what to do next, we were fine. We had the correct size team to maintain our workload.

In fact, we only expanded post-covid as things felt permanently busier again, by bringing in our next web developer, Lidia. Like anyone you invest in, you hope they’ll take you in new directions, and Lidia certainly has. She’s performing WordPress development in areas that Marcus and I simply wouldn’t have dared consider five years ago.

Attack Of The Clones

Of course, when AI hit, we looked in wonderment and trepidation. Initially it felt like a paradigm shift within our industry. Would the world need coders anymore? Would websites start building themselves? Would ChatGPT hit the big red button?

So far, the answers have been a resounding maybe… but we’ve already seen the web change massively:

Zero Click Search is making a huge difference to how website information is presented in search tools, and this has a huge impact on how online marketing needs to be planned.
It’s now simpler than ever to create keyword-stuffed articles for SEO purposes, rather than thinking about how an organisation should communicate online.
Nobody knows what the truth is anymore. That sounds unnecessarily profound, but it’s absolutely crucial to understanding the web today: It’s now utterly vital to be authentic, to earn your audience’s trust.

The Force Awakens

Today, we still think about websites as the centre-point of an organisations’ online communications portfolio. It’s still essential that a website performs with excellence (and our team have the skills to make that happen). But a website simply isn’t the be-all-and-end-all anymore.

So, over the past year we’ve added two experienced specialists to our team at Pooka:

Sian Jamieson
Digital Communications Specialist

Mads Mitchell
Data Privacy Specialist

Sian and Mads are working to support our clients in two key areas:

Ensuring that our clients have the skills and tools to represent their organisations effectively and authentically through social media, SEO and digital marketing.
Helping our clients develop confidence and understanding of privacy and data laws, and to implement change, so that their organisations are trusted and protected in the developing online landscape.

We’ve actually known both Sian and Mads for many years, so it’s been fantastic to see how quickly and positively their work has begun impacting Pooka & Co and our clients. It’s also wonderful to consider that as a (slightly) larger team than we were back in 2010 and 2019, our outlook and values are largely remained the same:

We still love open-source software, most specifically (but definitely not limited to!) WordPress and CiviCRM.
We still always ask why we’re working on a project, long before we dive into it.
We’re still here to be our clients’ digital partner for good.

Sadly, we also still have a team member that’s often sleep-deprived and covered in dribble. (and I can’t use my daughter as an excuse anymore…)