Launchkit is a husband-and-wife operation out of Lynnwood, Washington. Josh runs the business. Karrie partners on every decision. The team we lead is small, careful, and accountable. This is the story of why we built it this way.
I spent a decade in aerospace operations at Boeing, working alongside R&D teams and executives on process innovation and large-scale automation. That’s the work that taught me how complex systems actually behave — how a small failure upstream becomes a big failure downstream, how
cross-functional teams either align or quietly sabotage each other, and how to scale a process without breaking it. Boeing also paid for my operations management degree while I worked there. Before Boeing I was an EMT, then an operations manager at another company, then I spent about a year at a marketing firm in Seattle. I’d been around real operations and real marketing for most of my adult life by the time I started Launchkit.
I left Boeing in 2020. Not because I had a better job lined up — I didn’t — but because I’d been asked to do something I morally couldn’t. I won’t lay out the details here, but the short version is that a decision came down that put me in a position of either signing off on something I didn’t believe in, or walking. I walked. Karrie and I had two kids at the time, a mortgage, and no plan. We figured it out.
After Boeing I took a job at a marketing firm based in Lake Stevens. I lasted about a month. The work I saw being done for that agency’s clients wasn’t work I could put my name on. Recurring billable hours for tasks that didn’t need doing. Reports padded with vanity metrics. Junior account managers making decisions on accounts they didn’t understand. I’d come from an industry where if your work was wrong, somebody could get hurt. That standard didn’t exist in the agency.
I went home one night after a meeting like that and told Karrie I couldn’t put my name on it. She asked me what I was going to do about it. I didn’t have a clean answer that night. But within a few weeks I’d left the agency, and within a few weeks after that I had my first client of my own. That was five years ago. We’ve been building Launchkit ever since.
I named it Launchkit because that’s how I think about marketing — every business needs a launch kit. The systems, the visibility, the operations underneath. The work that gets a business off the ground and keeps it climbing. My background is operations. Karrie has spent more than a decade as a
top-tier real estate broker — she knows what it looks like when marketing actually moves a business, and she knows what it looks like when it doesn’t, because she’s been the client on the other side of bad agency work more than once. Between us we’ve built a company that’s small on purpose, careful on purpose, and accountable to the clients we take on in a way that the agency I left never was.
The team I work with now is bigger than Karrie and me, and I want to be upfront about that because most agencies aren’t. My senior delivery leads — Robie, Deb, and Mohona — have been with me for years. They’re based in India, they lead a team of about fifteen specialists across SEO, paid media, content, web development, and design, and together they’re the reason Launchkit can deliver agency-grade work at prices a local small business owner can actually afford. That team is not a cost-cutting trick. It accounts for more than a third of what Launchkit spends every month. If I tried to rebuild it with five in-house hires in Seattle, my prices would be five times what they are, and the Snohomish County roofer who hired us last year wouldn’t have been able to afford the call, let alone the contract. The structure is deliberate, it’s expensive, and it works because the people running it have been running it with me for years. If you want the full picture of how the team is built, it’s here.
Most agencies put “integrity” on the About page like it’s a value they want credit for. I want to tell you what integrity actually looks like at Launchkit, in specific behaviors a client can verify.
It means we tell clients the truth about their business — including the parts the last agency was too busy billing them to mention. If your conversion tracking is broken, we tell you. If your phone is being answered in a way that’s costing you a job a week, we tell you. If your competitors are pulling ahead and we know why, we tell you. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable.
It means we don’t run tactics on a client account that we wouldn’t be proud to show another marketer. No black-hat SEO. No shady link schemes. No conversion tracking designed to look impressive. The work has to hold up under scrutiny, because eventually it always gets scrutinized.
It means we say no. About one in five conversations we have with a prospective client ends with us either recommending someone else or telling the prospect they’re not ready yet. Sometimes the right answer is “wait six months and fix your operation first.” Sometimes the right answer is “we’re not the right agency for what you need.” Saying no costs us revenue. Saying yes when we shouldn’t would cost the client more.
It means we keep promises. If we say we’ll have something done by Friday, it’s done by Friday. If we say a website transfers to the client at month twelve, it transfers. No hostage tactics. No surprise fees. No “let me check with my partner and circle back.”
That’s what integrity means here. It’s not a value statement. It’s a list of behaviors. The clients we’ve kept the longest are the ones who tested those behaviors early and found them real.
My faith shapes how I treat people. I’m not going to use this page to preach at you, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t matter. It matters because it’s the reason I left Boeing. It’s the reason I lasted one month at the agency in Seattle. It’s the reason Launchkit exists at all.
What it means in practice is simple. We treat clients the way we’d want to be treated if our family business was on the line. We tell the truth even when the truth costs us a sale. We don’t take on more clients than we can serve well. We pay the people who work with us fairly. We work hard, we keep our word, and we don’t make excuses when we get something wrong.
You don’t have to share my faith for us to work together. Plenty of our clients don’t, and we serve them with exactly the same standard of care. I’m telling you it shapes our day-to-day because I want you to know what’s underneath the work. You’re not hiring an agency. You’re hiring a
husband-and-wife operation that takes the trust you’re giving us seriously, because we believe we’ll answer for how we use it.
Breakthrough comes when fear leaves the chat. Most business owners we talk to are afraid before they even hire us. Afraid of being burned again. Afraid of looking stupid for hiring another agency. Afraid of spending more money on marketing that doesn’t work. Our first job is to make the fear go away — not by promising things we can’t deliver, but by telling the truth about what’s broken, showing the path to fix it, and then doing the work week after week until the fear is gone and the business is climbing.
If you’re successful, we’re successful. This sounds obvious. It almost never is in practice. Most agencies are paid the same whether your business grows or not — which means most agencies are quietly indifferent to whether your business grows or not. We’ve built Launchkit around the opposite premise. Our clients stay with us for years because we treat their growth as our growth.
We break walls down for the people who hire us. The walls are different for every client. Sometimes it’s a website that’s holding them back. Sometimes it’s a competitor who’s been outranking them for years. Sometimes it’s an operations gap their previous agency wasn’t equipped to find. Whatever the wall is, our job is to find it, name it, and bring it down.
Launchkit is a main supporter of Displaced Orphans International, and I serve on their board of directors as Director of Marketing. I’ve traveled to Thailand multiple times for that work. I’m not putting this on the About page to look good — I’m putting it here because if you’re going to trust me with your business, you should know what I do with the proceeds and the time. A portion of what Launchkit earns goes back into that work. A portion of my year goes into that work. It’s part of how we measure whether the business is being run the way it should be.
It also matters to how I think about the people who work for me. When Robie and Deb and Mohona have been with my company for years, when they lead a team I trust to work on client accounts I’m personally accountable for, it’s because I see them the way I see everyone else who works on a Launchkit account — as professionals with real careers, supporting real families, doing work I’m proud to put my name on. That orientation didn’t come from a marketing book. It came from spending a lot of years thinking carefully about how the work I do affects the people around me, near and far.
Karrie is a named member of Launchkit LLC and my partner in every decision the business makes. She doesn’t run campaigns or build websites — her day job is real estate, and she’s been a top- producing broker for more than ten years. What she brings to Launchkit is harder to put on a job description. She’s the person I talk to before I take on a new client. She’s the reason I had the support to walk away from Boeing in 2020. She’s the moral compass I check against when a decision gets complicated. And because she’s spent a decade on the client side of marketing — hiring agencies, firing agencies, watching what works and what doesn’t in her own business — she has a sharper read on whether the work we’re doing is actually moving the needle than most people in this industry do.
Every healthy business has someone like Karrie behind it. Most agency About pages don’t say so. I’m saying so because it’s true, and because I think the people who hire us deserve to know who’s actually behind the company they’re trusting with their marketing.
The fastest way to find out whether we’re the right fit is the same way every Launchkit engagement starts — with a conversation. Thirty minutes. No proposal, no slide deck, no follow-up sequence. Just an honest scoping conversation about where your business is, what’s working, what’s broken, and whether we’re the right people to fix it.
About one in five of those conversations ends with us recommending someone else or telling the prospect to wait. That’s a feature of how we work, not a bug. We’d rather lose a sale than take a client we can’t serve well.
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