The agency world is full of good intentions and bad execution. Most start with big dreams but trip over the basics – chasing the wrong clients, falling in love with shiny tools instead of real solutions, or treating maintenance like a necessary evil instead of a chance to build something lasting.
Karim Marucchi has seen it all. As CEO of Crowd Favorite, he’s built his fifth agency into something that works with major organizations – Emmy Awards, big media companies, you name it. But this didn’t happen overnight. It came from getting burned, learning hard lessons, and figuring out what actually matters.
We talked with Karim about breaking out of the feast-or-famine cycle, why open source is about ownership rather than saving money, and how the right maintenance approach can turn client relationships from one-off projects into real partnerships.
Learning From Failure: How Crowd Favorite Really Started
Karim’s path to Crowd Favorite was messy. By the time he teamed up with founder Alex King in 2014, he’d already worked on four other agencies.
“Crowd Favorite was actually my fifth agency. I had started four agencies before that and probably made just about every mistake you can make.”
The merger made sense. Alex knew WordPress inside and out, and Karim understood business and enterprise clients. They wanted to prove WordPress could handle serious enterprise work, not just blogs and brochure sites.
“Alex had created a very well-respected agency at Crowd Favorite around working with WordPress and the enterprise. Together we were gonna take it even further, where he could really focus more on the technology because he was a very deep engineer. One of the first people to work on the WordPress code when Matt and Mike forked it.”
Then everything went wrong. Alex got sick again and died within two years, leaving Karim to figure out how to keep going without his technical co-founder.
“The best plans don’t always work out because we did not have a chance to really realize where he had a vision to take the next generation of the advancements of WordPress core. But the team persisted and we worked hard and today we still carry out the same mission within the WordPress world and beyond in open source.”
Technology Serves Business, Not the Other Way Around
The biggest mistake agencies make is falling in love with their tools instead of their clients’ problems. Karim learned this the hard way.
“The approach – everything we do as we’re trying to solve a business need with technology, we’re not trying to figure out how to apply a specific technology. And that’s the trap that most agencies fall into – they’re like, how do I fix everything with my favorite tools?”
This thinking extends to WordPress itself, even though Crowd Favorite built its reputation in the WordPress world. When clients’ needs require different tools, they use them.
“While Crowd Favorite was founded on WordPress, even before I joined forces with Alex, he was working on PHP projects that had nothing to do with WordPress, where WordPress quite literally wouldn’t solve the application need. There are limits to WordPress still today.”
It’s led to projects that would make WordPress purists uncomfortable, like building the entire Emmy Awards voting system using Laravel, with WordPress only handling the admin interface, where it made sense.
“They approached us a few years ago and said, ‘We need to do an entire system that helps us with the entire process of running the award voting submissions, all of that.’ We’re lucky enough to have spent the last few years building a complete bespoke system from the ground up. You can’t do that with WordPress.”
Open Source as Strategy, Not Budget Choice
Too many agencies see open source as the cheap option – free software for clients who won’t pay for enterprise licenses. Karim thinks about it completely differently.
“We’ve chosen open source solutions, not as a technology, but as a cultural approach to business. We feel that our clients should own their own data. They should own their own roadmap, and in today’s world dominated by SaaS platforms, it’s the only true way to own that roadmap.”
This ownership mindset clicks with enterprise clients who’ve been burned by vendor lock-in or sudden platform changes.
“Why does the enterprise choose open source? They choose it because they want to own their own roadmap. They want to own their own data. They want to understand where they’re going and not have to be beholden to any one SaaS platform.”
But open source has risks. More formerly open projects are becoming restrictive, which worries Karim.
“More and more projects are talking about the privatization of open source. Over the last decade, there have been a lot of open-source platforms that started to, whether they publicly say it or not, and they’re less and less open source.”
His answer focuses on securing the supply chain and building backup plans into open-source dependencies.
“It’s a mindset. It’s not about the weakness of open source, it’s about the weakness of how you set up open source.”
The Composable Advantage: Best Tools Win Over Swiss Army Knives
Enterprise software buyers face an impossible choice: big platforms that do everything badly, or specialized tools that create integration hell. Crowd Favorite’s “composable” approach offers a third option.
The idea came from watching enterprise buyers choose digital experience platforms.
“Adobe Experience Manager went to Gartner and said, we are more than just a content management system. When you think about personalization, when you think about large data models, when you think about integrations, really that is a digital experience manager.”
The problem? As these platforms tried to check every box, they got shallow across the board.
“They got wider and wider. And as you can imagine, not everybody can go vertically as deep as everybody else. So you ended up with procurement in the enterprise saying there are 10 choices and all of them check all the boxes, but how deep are their good solutions?”
Crowd Favorite’s answer: use the best tool for each job, with open source connecting everything.
“If you use open source as a hub like WordPress to say, I’m gonna have a central place that everything else hooks up to, and while they’re their own independent sources of truth, I’m gonna collate all my information in one place.”
This lets clients swap out individual pieces without rebuilding everything.
“Then the day that you want to choose to move from platform A to platform B just for one of the verticals, you’re in control of that and you don’t have that churn anxiety of going from one platform to the other.”
Global Work, Local Understanding
Working with international enterprise clients requires more than Google Translate; it needs cultural fluency. Karim’s background, growing up in Italy but working worldwide, shaped how Crowd Favorite handles global projects.
“Whenever you want to deliver a project, you have to think locally, yet you want to take advantage of global concepts and what other countries and other cultures are doing well.”
This isn’t about time zones or email styles. It’s about understanding how business actually works in different places.
“We make sure that we pair them up with a very local presence to get that done. Through partnership, we even have project managers in MENA, in the Middle East. We have local presence in Western Europe and Eastern Europe. We have local presence in the United States.”
They’ll even set up a temporary local presence for specific projects.
“When we have a client that says we have a delivery in Argentina, we will become local down in Argentina, even if we don’t have permanent presence down there for that project, because it makes a difference.”
Making Creativity Systematic
One of Crowd Favorite’s most interesting claims is that they’ve turned “creativity and execution into a standard operating procedure.” Sounds like corporate BS for killing innovation, right?
“Honestly, the way you do that is by constantly questioning if you’re on the right path.”
The trick is building experimentation into normal development work.
“Even in our development process, we are constantly prototyping at least one or two phases or sprints ahead of where the main team is going. We’re constantly running into things. We’re saying, can this be done better? Is there something coming out that is new?”
This keeps enterprise clients happy while maintaining technical innovation.
“In the enterprise, they don’t want to be cutting edge. They want to be secure in knowing that it’s not gonna crash. Even if they want the creativity, they need it to be secure.”
The important part is making exploration normal, not some separate R&D budget.
“If you run your culture, your sprints, your planning around always checking in to see if there’s a way to be done better, if you make that part of the lifecycle of each sprint, you end up with the opportunity to stay creative and work with new tools.”
From Maintenance to Real Partnership
Most agencies treat maintenance like a necessary evil: low-margin work to fill gaps between real projects. Karim learned this doesn’t work.
“I made the same mistake early on in my career that a lot of agencies do. I had a team, and that team moved from project to project. Most agencies will basically say, alright, between the big projects, I’ll have the staff work on maintenance.”
The breakthrough was treating maintenance as its own business with separate P&L, staff, and strategic focus.
“A while back, we realized that the best thing to do is actually to separate into two separate departments with their own P&L, their own books, their own staff, their own process, and everything.”
This separation lets them be proactive instead of just putting out fires.
“You’re no longer just making sure that you are up to date and doing maintenance on the project and maintenance on the client, but you can actually bring in a process where you are getting ahead of the curve.”
The result changes client relationships from vendor-customer transactions into real partnerships.
“We have to stay ahead of that maintenance. We need to stay ahead of that next release, do release planning, understand what’s coming down the roadmap, understand what their needs are from their partners, and that’s how you create something that goes from maintenance to long-term strategy.”
Security: Easy Sell to Enterprises
While many agencies struggle to get clients to pay for security, Karim finds the opposite with enterprise clients.
“With the enterprise, it’s the easiest thing in the world. You have to be careful not to oversell it, because they’re already wanting to make sure that it’s secure.”
Enterprise security requirements create chances for comprehensive partnerships. Crowd Favorite works with hosting companies and security platforms like Patchstack to build layered defense systems, as visible in the case study where Crowd Favorite, Pagely, and Patchstack collaborated to secure one of the world’s largest media brands.
“Through the partnership between Patchstack, the hosting company, and us, we really maintain that top level of service where we don’t have to think of what’s going on the server. We don’t have to think about some of the vulnerabilities that might come from third-party libraries because that’s where you come in, you’re already tracking that.”
This proactive approach fits perfectly with enterprise expectations.
“In the enterprise, we’re usually a build behind on some of the main features, but we’re absolutely up to date on the security patches before it ever gets into production. Your team is usually telling us where the problems may lie, and that is what the enterprise wants to pay for.”
The Composable Agency Model
Crowd Favorite practices what they preach about composable architecture. They’re a composable agency, too. Instead of trying to do everything, they focus on their strengths and partner for everything else.
“We are very verticalized. We are technology and project management only. We don’t do marketing. We don’t do SEO, we don’t do all the advertising things. Therefore, we pride ourselves on working very well with other agencies.”
This specialization creates deeper expertise and better partnerships.
“We work with dozens and dozens of agencies. Even the ones that are very broad are working with Crowd Favorite because we’re very well known for something that’s very vertical, and we go deep on that where we have deep expertise.”
Building for Keeps
Karim’s biggest regret from his earlier agencies teaches a crucial lesson for growing firms.
“Worst decision I ever made was probably reacting to momentary fluctuations in the market in making decisions about my team.”
Building a stable team means resisting the urge to make panicked cuts during rough patches.
“One of the core principles at Crowd Favorite is that a lot of our staff have been here for many years, and they’re very invested in our future, and we’re very invested in theirs. With every agency, there’s always some difficult moments, and if you panic and deal with those moments without looking at the long-term future, you will cut off your nose to spite your face.”
The agency’s retention numbers prove it works – team members stick around seven to ten years on average, with some going back to 2008.
Starting an Agency Today
For people launching agencies in 2025, Karim’s advice is simple: specialize, don’t generalize.
“If I were to start an agency today, I really would focus on what I wanted my vertical to be. Everybody’s default idea is that when you start an agency or a digital agency, it has to be all things. I’ve always bucked against that assumption, and I’ve always thought that the best agencies are the most vertical, the most specialized.”
The logic is simple: you can’t be the best at everything, but you can be essential at something specific.
“You can’t be an absolute expert in everything, so you can decide to be middle of the road. You can decide to do volume over quality. You can decide to actually make quality the number one thing you want to deliver. But then you have to pick a lane.”
The Startup Within Enterprise Mindset
The secret to Crowd Favorite’s success is balancing startup speed with enterprise reliability.
“You’re behaving quite like a startup, but a startup within an enterprise organization.”
This means keeping the innovation pace of a startup while delivering the reliability enterprises need.
“Very often, startups don’t think about things like security, backup, and whatever. They’re just pushing forward. And here it’s the best middle ground – the enterprise sense of security, which is very important, but still pushing forward, but staying in the stream of security.”
Building What Lasts
Crowd Favorite’s story shows that agency success isn’t about having the perfect plan – it’s about building systems that can adapt while sticking to core principles. By focusing on business problems instead of cool technology, treating open source as a strategy instead of cost-cutting, and turning maintenance into real partnerships, they’ve built something that survives both market ups and downs and leadership changes.
The lesson for other agencies isn’t to copy what Crowd Favorite does, but to figure out their own clear principles about what they stand for, who they serve, and how they create lasting value. In a world full of agencies chasing whatever’s trendy, the ones that succeed go deep on what matters to their specific clients.
Whether you’re building complex enterprise apps or simple marketing sites, the basics stay the same: solve real problems, build for the long haul, and never cut corners on security and reliability. Everything else is just details.
Ready to Scale Securely?
Partnership Opportunities: Looking to expand your agency’s capabilities without diluting your focus? Crowd Favorite specializes in complex enterprise WordPress and open-source projects, working as a technical partner for agencies that need deep development expertise. Learn more about Crowd Favorite’s partnership approach.
Enterprise Security: When you’re managing high-stakes projects for enterprise clients or serving enterprise clients as a hosting company, security can’t be an afterthought. Patchstack’s mitigation and vulnerability intelligence helps agencies stay ahead of threats, maintaining the trust that enterprise relationships require. Discover Patchstack’s solutions.
Curious about integrating Patchstack into your stack? Book a discovery call.
