Founder: Seth Evans
Role: Founder/CEO
Company: Big Fish Local

I’m Seth Evans, founder and CEO at Big Fish Local, a digital marketing company focused on SEO, web, social, and PPC. I also pastor a church, so I’ve had to get good at building trust and clarity across people who aren’t in the same room.

Our first remote hires were in content and design, because those roles let us scale output without needing in-office proximity.

In this story:

What Worked

What worked was making Marketing Sonar the spine of onboarding. Every new remote teammate started by learning how we diagnose a business — audience, positioning, and messaging gaps — before they touched deliverables. That cut down the classic remote problem of busy work that looks productive and gave writers and designers a shared strategy language.

Remote hiring worked best once we built clarity into the system, not just the deliverables.

What Didn’t Work

What didn’t work was vague feedback loops.

We fixed that by requiring every draft — ad, page, social post, or site section — to map to one intent: get the right people to the right offer at the right time, with proof baked in from the beginning. That proof could be a testimonial, a review, or a short case-study snippet, but it had to be part of the thinking early, not bolted on later.

That change made a real difference.

Remote hires pushed us to become more consistent in storytelling and messaging. It also forced us to make our standards more explicit, which improved quality across clients. Instead of rewarding activity for its own sake, we got better at aligning teams around outcomes: higher engagement time, more reviews, stronger messaging, and sustained traffic growth.

Biggest Lesson

That was probably the biggest lesson for us. Remote hiring did not lower the bar. It forced us to define the bar more clearly.

For creative and marketing roles especially, that matters. You can outsource execution, but not clarity. If the strategy is fuzzy, remote work exposes that quickly. But when expectations, messaging, and intent are clear from the start, remote talent can move faster and produce better work than most founders expect.

Declaration

This story is based primarily on information shared directly by Seth Evans and has been slightly edited by WorkWhisper for clarity, structure, and readability while preserving the substance of the original submission.