How I Built Australia's #1 SEO Agency From Scratch
A cold-calling SEO agency scammed my dad when I was 13. I taught myself SEO to fix it. Then I thought: I should probably do this for other people. That was the plan. It was not a very detailed plan.
A cold-calling SEO agency scammed my dad when I was 13. I taught myself SEO to fix it. Then I thought: I should probably do this for other people. That was the plan. It was not a very detailed plan.
My dad ran a boat licensing company. When I was 13, a cold-calling SEO agency got to him. Big promises. Lock-in contract. Talk of doubling traffic and transforming the business. What actually happened: the traffic didn't come, the revenue dropped, and he was stuck. I watched the whole thing play out from the computer in the corner of the room.
I was angry. So I taught myself SEO. Not through a course or a qualification. I went online, read everything I could find, applied it to his site, and it worked. New business started coming in. The damage got undone. Dad still thinks computers are suspicious, but he was at least quieter about it after that.
That is the actual origin of StudioHawk. Not an inspiring vision board moment. Pure irritation at watching someone get conned. Every decision I've made since - no lock-in contracts, no sales team, SEO specialists only - traces directly back to watching that agency operate.
I founded StudioHawk in 2015. I was 17. I had no office and no team. Life was complicated at the time, but I had a laptop, I had knowledge, and I had enough stubbornness to keep going.
I found my first clients by physically showing up to things. Chamber of commerce meetings. SEO meetups around Melbourne. Any networking event where someone might conceivably need a website to perform better. I did not have a polished pitch deck. I had energy, I had genuine knowledge, and I showed up every single time. The first client came through those rooms - not through referrals, not through inbound marketing, but through being present and being useful over and over until someone took a chance.
Things stabilised for me personally when I got connected with a social worker named Carly through St. Vincent's. She helped me get back on my feet and enrol in a government business program. That program is where I met Graham - a 76-year-old, grey-haired, deeply grumpy ex-CEO with a heart of gold who decided, for reasons I'm still not entirely sure about, to mentor me. He smiled once. I have a photo of it. Graham taught me how to build a business and network properly, and eventually helped me land my first real client. A lot of what StudioHawk became, I owe to him.
StudioHawk's growth wasn't linear. It was built one right decision at a time, from 2015 to today.
StudioHawk has never had lock-in contracts. We don't offer generalised "digital marketing." Every person who talks to clients is an SEO specialist.
None of that is clever positioning. It's a direct response to what I watched happen to my dad's business. The agency that got him: locked him in so he couldn't leave when things went wrong, sent generalists who didn't actually know SEO, and had a sales team whose job was to close, not to deliver. I built the opposite of that company. On purpose. From day one.
When I coach agency owners now, I always ask the same question: "Nobody sets out to start a shit agency, so why are there so many?" The answer I give them is this - because most agencies prioritise winning clients over serving them. They hire generalists instead of specialists. They scale their promises faster than their capability. That's how you end up with an agency that looks great in a pitch deck and quietly destroys businesses in the background.
"Nobody sets out to start a shit agency, so why are there so many?"
Internally, we have a name for the kind of person we hire: wholesome nerds. Curious. Humble. Competitive in the way where a client's problem becomes their personal problem and they genuinely cannot let it go. They'll stay late not because someone told them to, but because they can't stand the idea of leaving something unresolved.
I've always hired for attitude and trained for skill. That sounds like it belongs on a coffee mug, but it's a real operating decision that changes everything about who you end up with. A technically skilled person who doesn't care will always underperform a curious person who does. Skills you can teach. Caring, you cannot. And when you build a team of people who actually care, they hold each other to a standard no manager would dare set from the top down.
Also, "wholesome nerds" is a better description of most great SEOs than anything else I've come across, so the name stuck.
I joined YPO (Young Presidents' Organization) at 23, one of the youngest members in the Australia and New Zealand chapter at the time. YPO gets described as a networking organisation a lot, which is technically accurate and also completely undersells it. What it actually is: a room full of founders who are willing to be honest about what's really happening in their businesses. Not the LinkedIn version. The actual version.
Before YPO, I was making a lot of decisions in isolation. After it, I had access to people who'd already hit the problems I hadn't reached yet, who'd ask hard questions I wasn't asking myself, and who'd tell me directly when I was thinking about something wrong. That's genuinely rare and genuinely valuable. I was 23 and running a fast-growing agency. Having a room like that around me accelerated things in ways that are hard to overstate.
Over 100 specialists across Melbourne, Sydney, London, and Atlanta. Revenue around $20 million. Best APAC SEO Agency three years running. US office opened in 2025. None of that was planned in a spreadsheet in 2015. There was no spreadsheet. There was barely a plan.
What was there from the start: a reason to build something better than what scammed my dad, a willingness to show up to networking events before anyone knew who I was, and a small number of people who made it possible to keep going when it probably should have stopped. Graham. The people who took a chance on an unknown 17-year-old at a Melbourne networking event. The early team members who bought into something that had no proof yet.
Building StudioHawk didn't feel like building something, most of the time. It felt like surviving, then stabilising, then growing, then occasionally looking up and doing a double-take at how far the start line was. That's the honest version. It's also more interesting than the clean story, which didn't actually happen.
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