We Build A-Teams—and We Only Work With Them.

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October 28, 2025
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Behind the Scenes
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Personal Development
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Workplace Harmony

On one particularly frustrating day a few years ago, Courtney Turrin, our Chief Work Officer, turned to me and said, “I feel like I’m on the B-team, and I’m not a B-team player.” What she said hit me like a ton of bricks. She was right. We needed to change things.

Like everyone who came before us, we didn’t always have our shit together.

We’ve had unreliable team members who didn’t carry their weight. We’ve had people who weren’t yet prepared for the rigors of agency life. It can be unrelenting at times—a roller coaster always. I’ve never met an agency leader or employee who would say otherwise.

Anyone who’s worked on a team knows what it’s like when someone doesn’t meet the standard. It means more work for everyone else to fill the gaps, which leads to resentment and a loss of trust if the issue isn’t addressed.

We’ve also had clients who weren’t invested in their own marketing programs—not emotionally, not financially, and not with their attention or time. But when performance dipped, the questions were always the same: “What have you been doing to drive my sales and marketing performance?” Often, those same clients had unanswered emails, unapproved deliverables, and an incomplete task list on their side.

Anyone who’s ever worked on the Xponent21 team has either heard that dreaded question or anticipated it when working with disengaged clients. We all know it means more work—more effort to get clients on strategy calls, more time chasing approvals, and more pressure to course-correct when results inevitably dip.

And when it comes time to recommend new opportunities or deepen the relationship, forget it. These clients already feel they spend too much on marketing, and their satisfaction depends solely on good numbers, regardless of their own input or effort.

When we fought these challenges, there was little time to plan or to build systems, and we weren’t always afforded the opportunity to do our best work.

Performance Comes at a Cost

Here is the reality about marketing:

Mediocre marketing goes unnoticed for a surprisingly long time—and it’s expensive.
Good marketing delivers positive results—and it’s expensive.
Great marketing creates outsized opportunities for transformative growth—and it’s worth every penny.

No one wants mediocre marketing. No one should settle for “good” marketing. It may seem approachable or affordable, but it minimizes outcomes, delays success, and makes growth harder.

Great marketing demands high-performing teams on both sides of the relationship. It requires talent that’s wicked smart, proven, and driven by results. It also demands courageous client-side teams—people ready to think strategically, roll up their sleeves, and set their own performance standards that push ours higher.

Great marketing isn’t easy, but high-performers aren’t looking for easy. They want a challenge. They want to win. They want the glory of being on the winning team.

What Working With the A-Team Provides

Once I recognized that my primary responsibility was to cultivate the A-team at Xponent21, I was forced to make very tough decisions. I’ve handed over responsibilities I loved, pushed our team harder to innovate and evolve, and said goodbye to team members and clients who weren’t ready to leap into the future.

Winning in a competitive world leaves no space for underperformance. Mistakes happen, but they’re opportunities to learn, refine, and push further.

Working with the A-team means operating in a trusting environment where no one carries the weight alone. You talk about performance, define it, and push to achieve even greater heights.

When two A-teams sync, they share their goals, collaborate on solutions, and create something far greater than the sum of its parts. Everyone gets to share in the reward.

Why I Decided Xponent21 Deserves to Be #1

In my first career in IT, I was just as competitive as I am today. One of my goals was to be named “Best of Williamsburg” for IT sales and service so I could confidently tell people they were working with the best. I wanted my customers to believe in what we delivered—to never hesitate.

After winning “Best of Williamsburg” a few years in a row, I launched a Google ad with the headline “#1 Computer Repair.” It instantly became our best-performing ad, driving a 59% revenue increase that year.

Throughout my marketing career, one thing has been clear: no one goes out of their way to work with #2.

Our PPC Budget Calculator, for example, always ranks #2 in Google search. I’ve joked internally about calling it “the #2 PPC Budget Calculator,” but instead, I’m focused on building a better one—because it’s hardly gratifying to be #2.

Earlier in 2025 when we set out to become the leading AI SEO providers in the world, we did it because we were early, we built and proved our model, and we replicated it for ourselves and our clients. Then we built an A-team capable of delivering consistent, predictable results—and we’ve done it so reliably that we now walk the talk with confidence.

But to be a #1 agency, you have to work with leading companies.

Trade-Offs Are Everywhere; We Choose Wisely

Once we knew we could deliver predictable, outsized results, we asked ourselves: why chase clients who aren’t ready to adapt to the future? Why tolerate slow decision-making, underinvestment, or hesitation at every turn?

For us to be a high-performance team, we must work with high-performance clients. To prove we’re the best, we need partners ready to invest, ready to leap ahead of their competition, and ready to build a long-term relationship with a team that holds them accountable and drives A-level results.

That means saying no—a lot. To join our team, you need measurable experience and outcomes from your past work. To become a client, you need to be prepared to invest $100,000 or more to earn visibility and dominance in AI search. And you need to move fast—because AI is moving fast, and your competitors are right behind you.

Our Promise: Always Be Improving

As we’ve experimented, tested, and delivered results, we’ve learned how to perform in any industry and under any challenge. With a goal in sight, we can always find the strategy to reach it.

But AI is still evolving—and so must we. New tools emerge daily, and our clients’ competitors are racing to catch up. That’s why we’re building.

We’re building DiscoverAIO, a platform for professionals to learn and grow, and launching the AI SEO Leadership Blueprint, a 42-topic course originally created for our own team, soon to be open to the world.

We’re also building an unmatched AI SEO management platform that’s already cut our time-to-publish (how soon it takes us from starting a new relationship to having written content that is on-brand and on-strategy) by more than half—and we’re not even done with the MVP. Soon, we’ll complete foundational AI SEO work in just two weeks—down from two months. That speed is helping our A-team clients leap ahead, and we’re committed to continuing that momentum until we can confidently say we are the #1 AI SEO agency in the world.

See What It’s Like to Work With Us

Whether you live in Richmond or plan to move here, if you’re an A-team marketer, explore our career openings. We’ll push you hard, give you your time back (4-day work week), and ensure a rewarding career as we grow together.

And if you’re a CEO or marketer on an A-team looking for the right partner to help you dominate AI search, book a discovery call. We have the knowledge, the talent, and the expertise to make you the hero—and to push your brand beyond competitors, no matter how big, how old, or how established they are.

Will Melton
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