Brunello turned twenty this year.
Here is the strange thing about the number. Twenty years is a respectable run in most industries. In this one, it is several lifetimes. The web reinvents itself every few years and considers that a feature. Agencies our age are rare. Agencies our age still run by the people who do the work, with a team that has largely stayed put, are rarer still.
So the question worth answering in public is not how the industry changed. It is the quieter one underneath: what, exactly, held?
2006, for perspective
When we opened, the iPhone did not exist. Neither did responsive design, because the screens it responds to did not exist. WordPress was a blogging tool you had to explain to clients. Social media was something college students did. ‘The cloud’ was weather.
A website in 2006 was a desktop experience you hoped people could find. Twenty years later, the phone won and content management became real infrastructure. Search became an industry. And the systems reading our clients’ websites now include AI that answers questions instead of sending visitors.
We adapted through all of it. New platforms, new disciplines, new services added as clients actually needed them. That part of the story is true, and it is also the least interesting part, because every agency that survived tells some version of it. The interesting part is what never moved.
What didn’t change
The way we work has stayed almost embarrassingly consistent.
Senior people do the work here. The people a client meets in the first conversation are the same people in the project channel in month six. We have largely avoided the usual handoff from the people who sell the work to the people who do it, because the same senior people stay involved.
We give practical recommendations rather than fashionable ones. We try to understand the business problem before anyone says a platform’s name out loud. We move between strategy and execution without a seam, because advice you cannot build is just speculation.
And we take ownership of the work rather than completing assigned tasks. That is the difference clients are describing when they call us an extension of their team, and it is the reason so many of them keep calling.
None of this was a strategy in 2006. It was just how two people thought the work should be done. It turned out to scale better than any trend we declined to chase.
The people were the continuity
If one fact explains the twenty years, it is this: the core of this team has worked together for a very long time.
Jason Fournier has led UX and design here for more than a decade. Kyle Langford has led development for about as long. Nicole Baltzer keeps operations, projects, and quality honest. Santiago and Christian Gonzalez build the things. Adam Hoyle co-founded the place and still answers for it. Some of the working relationships in this group are old enough to be in high school.
We are built this way on purpose. Not small as a limitation, but senior as a choice. A team that has shipped a hundred launches together does not spend the first month of your project learning to work with itself. And the institutional memory, like which client’s stack broke in 2019 and why, is the kind of asset you cannot hire quickly. You can only keep it patiently.
Platforms came and went on our services page. The people stayed.
Relationships compound
The measure of twenty years we actually value is not the founding date. It is the pattern in the client list.
People we built sites with a decade ago call us from new jobs at new organizations. Projects end and then resume years later in new forms. Universities refer us to other universities. A nonprofit’s marketing director becomes a clean-energy company’s VP and brings us along. A broadband client’s engineer eventually becomes a client himself.
Jobs change, organizations change, and the technology changes most of all. Strong working relationships carry across all three. After enough years they compound, and a meaningful share of the past decade’s work arrived through people we had already done right by.
There is no growth strategy in that. Which is exactly why it worked. We never tried to become a big agency. We tried to be worth calling twice.
What comes next
The timing of this anniversary is not lost on us. AI is changing how people find information, how websites are read, and how digital work gets done. We are already deep in that work with clients, from AI visibility and structured data to the newer questions about which machines should read what.
We will not predict where it lands. Twenty years has taught us the difference between knowing the direction and knowing the date. What we do know is that this is not the first time the ground has moved under this company. The response is the one that got us here. Understand it honestly. Adapt on purpose. Keep the people close to the work. And tell clients the truth about what is real and what is just a keynote.
We have spent twenty years getting comfortable with change.
Thank you
No toast to the next twenty, and no framed press release. Just this: thank you.
To the clients who trusted us with work that mattered and then trusted us again. To the partners and colleagues who made introductions we did not always deserve. To the team, past and present, that built two decades of shared history one launch at a time. And to everyone who has been reading since the web-standards argument that opened this blog.
Twenty years ago we thought doing careful work for people we liked would be enough to build a company on. It was. We will be at our desks tomorrow, doing the same thing.
