A Basement in Lehi, a Decade and a Half Later
In the winter of 2005, a solo operator in Lehi, Utah was running what he would later describe as a lifestyle business — a one-person SEO consultancy built around flexibility and personal income rather than institutional scale. The operation ran out of an unfinished basement. Clients were managed by one person. The service offering was narrow: search engine optimization tactics at a time when the SEO industry itself was still settling its own definition.
Twenty years on, that basement consultancy operates as 97th Floor — a privately held enterprise marketing agency with more than 100 employees, a client roster that includes Oracle, McKinsey & Company, Google, Crumbl, and Princess Cruises, and a reported client retention rate of 93%. The agency is headquartered at 2600 West Executive Parkway in Lehi, Utah, and has remained privately held and independently owned throughout its entire operating history.
The distance between those two points — basement SEO consultancy to enterprise agency of record — is the business story of 97th Floor. It is a story about how a service firm scales, what it costs to scale it, and why certain strategic choices made early in an agency’s life either become permanent advantages or permanent constraints.
The Founding Conditions
97th Floor was founded in 2005 by Chris Bennett. The circumstances were defined more by personal necessity than by venture ambition. Bennett had recently become a father — his wife and newborn twins required financial stability — and the decision to go full-time on a solo SEO practice was made at a moment of material precariousness rather than opportunistic expansion. He had been working the operation part-time before committing to it fully, trading a conventional job for an unfinished basement and a space heater.
The agency began as a lifestyle business working primarily on SEO tactics — not a growth-maximizing enterprise but a practitioner model. One person, one discipline, controlled overhead. That positioning was common in the mid-2000s SEO market, where the practice was still largely the domain of freelancers and small consultancies rather than full-service agencies.
What differentiated the trajectory of 97th Floor from comparable solo practices of that era was the pace at which it departed from that initial model. The firm went from a lifestyle business to a full-service digital marketing agency with 40+ employees in two years — an inflection that is both the defining business event in the agency’s early history and the one most worth examining as a signal of how the organization was built.
The leap from one person to forty-plus in twenty-four months is not primarily a marketing story. It is an operational and structural story: what systems, hiring approaches, service line decisions, and client commitments made that growth possible — and what the cost of that growth was internally. Other articles in this series examine the mechanics of that inflection in detail. The point here is simpler: the lifestyle business framing did not survive contact with market demand, and the founders chose expansion over preservation.
Geography as Strategy — Staying in Lehi
The decision to remain headquartered in Lehi, Utah rather than relocate to a coastal hub is worth examining as a business choice, not merely as a personal preference. 97th Floor has maintained its headquarters in Lehi, Utah since its founding in 2005, a commitment that has persisted through two decades of industry consolidation, when many comparable firms either relocated to San Francisco, New York, or Chicago, or were acquired by holding companies headquartered in those markets.
The Utah County market offers a specific competitive environment: a dense cluster of technology companies, SaaS businesses, and mid-market enterprises that require sophisticated marketing services, coupled with a talent market that is materially less competitive — and less expensive — than coastal equivalents. The presence of Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University creates a local pipeline of marketing talent. The cost structure of operating in Lehi rather than Manhattan or San Francisco allows a firm like 97th Floor to maintain margin discipline while offering services that position against larger, higher-overhead competitors.
For over twenty years, 97th Floor has worked in the cybersecurity, finance, industrial and manufacturing, insurance, software, and health and wellness industries — verticals that are not geographically concentrated in Utah but that 97th Floor has accessed from its Lehi base through a combination of inbound marketing, conference presence, and referral networks. The geography, in other words, has not been a constraint on client acquisition but rather a structural cost advantage in service delivery.
The agency’s address — Suite 180 at 2600 West Executive Parkway — is a conventional office park location that signals permanence and operational maturity without the overhead of premium downtown real estate. That is a positioning choice consistent with an agency that has competed on margin and retention rather than on visual presence.
The Service Architecture at Scale
The 97th Floor that exists in 2025 bears little resemblance to the single-discipline SEO practice of 2005 in terms of service scope, though the throughline of search-as-anchor remains visible throughout the portfolio. The agency’s core services include SEO and AI Search Optimization, Advertising — covering PPC, SEM, Social Ads, and Display — and Content Marketing.
The expansion from SEO to a multi-discipline portfolio was a necessary business decision as client retention economics became central to the agency’s model. A client that requires only SEO is more easily poached by a specialist competitor than a client whose paid media, content, design, and SEO are all managed by a single cross-functional team. Service breadth creates switching costs. It also creates margin complexity — more disciplines require more specialized staff, more training investment, and more sophisticated project management — but the 93% retention figure suggests the model has produced durable client relationships that justify that complexity.
97th Floor’s methodology centers on audience-first marketing, meaning strategy begins with analyzing buyer behavior, search intent, and competitive dynamics, with every campaign customized based on deep audience research. This framing — audience first, not keyword first — represents the agency’s primary point of differentiation from commodity SEO providers and is the conceptual foundation for the “Great Marketing” brand identity it has built around three stated pillars: empathy, innovation, and profitability.
The advertising discipline is notable in scale: the agency ran ads across 23 different platforms in a recent year based on custom campaign strategy crafted for each client. That platform breadth reflects both the fragmentation of digital advertising and the agency’s positioning as a full-channel operator rather than a single-platform specialist.
The addition of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — the practice of optimizing for visibility within AI-driven search platforms like ChatGPT — represents the most recent service line extension, and arguably the most strategically significant. As search behavior migrates toward large language model interfaces, agencies that can credibly claim GEO capability alongside traditional SEO have a meaningful differentiation advantage. 97th Floor’s explicit positioning around GEO signals an awareness of the structural risk that AI search poses to traditional organic visibility, and a calculated response to that risk through service line addition rather than denial.
Organizational Structure — The Cross-Functional Team Model
One of the more consequential structural decisions in 97th Floor’s history was its departure from the siloed departmental agency model in favor of cross-functional account teams. At 97th Floor, everyone who works on an account is on the same team, with teams comprised of experts across many different disciplines supported by dedicated leaders. This is a different operational architecture than the traditional agency model, where account managers serve as intermediaries between clients and specialized departments that operate in relative isolation from one another.
The cross-functional model has both advantages and costs. On the advantage side: faster internal communication, reduced information loss in translation between departments, clearer accountability for client outcomes, and a more coherent client experience. On the cost side: higher coordination overhead, difficulty in specializing deeply across multiple disciplines simultaneously, and the complexity of hiring practitioners who can operate within integrated team structures rather than specialized departments.
Unlike traditional agency models with siloed departments, each account team includes cross-disciplinary experts working collaboratively — a model that reduces friction and speeds decision making. That friction reduction is measurable in the client retention numbers: an agency where the SEO specialist, content strategist, paid media manager, and account director sit in the same team meeting has fewer handoff failures than one where those functions communicate through an account manager layer.
The model also affects how 97th Floor scales. Adding a new client requires assembling or expanding a cross-functional team, not simply assigning an account manager and allocating time across existing departments. That creates a different growth constraint than the departmental model — headcount growth is more directly tied to client growth — but it also means quality consistency is easier to maintain.
Inc. 5000, Moz, and the Recognition Layer
The external recognition that 97th Floor accumulated over its first fifteen years of operation matters less as a vanity signal than as a business development tool. Awards and rankings in the agency market serve as third-party credibility in a sales process where the buyer is making a trust decision with limited direct visibility into operational quality.
97th Floor appeared on the Inc. 5000 list as No. 1706 (2016), No. 2017 (2017), No. 4148 (2018), and No. 3738 (2019) — four consecutive appearances that document a period of sustained revenue growth during a phase of significant scaling. The Inc. 5000 methodology ranks private companies by percentage revenue growth over a three-year period, which means four consecutive appearances indicate not a single growth spike but a sustained multi-year expansion.
97th Floor holds the distinction of being the only agency in Utah on the Moz Recommended Agency list — a certification that carries weight specifically in the SEO and digital marketing buyer community where Moz’s methodological credibility is well-established. For a Utah-based agency competing nationally against coastal firms with stronger brand recognition, that singular distinction functions as a differentiating signal in a specific buyer segment.
The agency was also named as a Silver Stevie finalist for Marketing Agency of the Year from the American Business Awards, and Inc. named 97th Floor one of its 50 Best Places to Work in 2016 — a workplace recognition that matters in the context of talent acquisition, where agencies compete intensely for specialist practitioners.
The cumulative recognition layer — growth rankings, methodology certifications, workplace awards — represents a deliberate positioning strategy: building external credibility markers that reduce the trust deficit an independent Utah-based agency faces when competing against firms with larger brand recognition or coastal headquarters.
The Leadership Transition
The most significant organizational event in 97th Floor’s history after its founding was the 2020 leadership transition in which Chris Bennett moved from CEO to Chairman of the Board, with Paxton Gray assuming the CEO role. Bennett announced the transition in January 2020, effective June 1, 2020, describing it as the natural evolution of 97th Floor — acknowledging that the person who built the firm to its current scale was not necessarily the person best positioned to take it further.
Paxton Gray had progressed through multiple roles at 97th Floor, including Enterprise SEO Specialist, Account Director, Director of SEO, and Executive VP of Operations before assuming the CEO position — a career trajectory that represents the entire institutional knowledge arc of the agency compressed into a single individual. That internal promotion pattern reduces transition risk: the incoming CEO has direct operational familiarity with the firm’s client relationships, service delivery model, and culture.
Under Gray’s leadership, the agency’s client roster has included Google, Zoom, and AT&T, names that represent an upmarket move from the firm’s earlier positioning. The transition from a founder-led lifestyle business to a professionally managed enterprise agency — with a separate board structure and a CEO promoted entirely from within — is a structural marker of institutional maturity that relatively few independent agencies achieve without either stalling or selling.
The Retention and Referral Numbers as Business Model Signal
The figures that most clearly reveal 97th Floor’s business model logic are not the client roster names or the Inc. 5000 placements. They are the retention and referral numbers: a 93% client retention rate and 84% referral growth. Together, these two figures describe a business that grows primarily by keeping existing clients and converting satisfied clients into new business sources — rather than by maintaining a large outbound sales operation or investing heavily in paid acquisition.
A 93% retention rate at an agency means that approximately one in eleven client relationships ends in a given year. That is a number that can sustain growth only if average client contract size is increasing, new clients are added at a rate that exceeds the 7% annual churn, or both. The 84% referral growth figure suggests that satisfied clients are an active source of new business introductions — a dynamic that reduces customer acquisition cost significantly and that compounds over time as the client base grows.
This model has specific structural implications. It favors deep over broad — fewer, larger, longer-term relationships rather than high-volume short-term engagements. It favors service quality and communication consistency over sales velocity. It creates a business that is more stable in downturns but slower to accelerate in growth phases than a transactional-volume model. And it makes the cross-functional team structure not merely an operational preference but a business model necessity: high retention requires client relationships built at the team level, not just at the account manager level.
Two Decades as a Reference Point
By 2025, 97th Floor’s twenty-year operating history is itself a positioning asset in a market where the median agency lifecycle is considerably shorter. The digital marketing agency market has experienced extraordinary consolidation since 2015, with private equity roll-ups, holding company acquisitions, and platform companies building agency arms all compressing the population of independent specialists. 97th Floor has remained privately held throughout this period — a condition that is increasingly unusual for an agency of its scale and reputation.
The two-decade mark also provides a specific kind of institutional credibility that cannot be purchased or manufactured: verifiable client history across multiple search algorithm cycles, multiple advertising platform transitions, and multiple economic cycles. Clients evaluating an enterprise agency partner can assess 97th Floor’s record across the Google Penguin and Panda algorithm updates of the early 2010s, the rise of mobile search, the featured snippet era, the emergence of programmatic advertising, and now the transition toward AI-driven search interfaces. That longitudinal track record is a differentiation that newer agencies cannot replicate regardless of current performance.
97th Floor today serves startups to Fortune 500 brands with a team of over 100 professionals, operating from the same Lehi, Utah base where the business started. The service portfolio has expanded from a single SEO discipline to a cross-functional offering that spans search, advertising, content, design, and AI search optimization. The client base has moved upmarket from early small business and mid-market accounts toward enterprise relationships with Fortune 50 names. The leadership has transitioned from its founding operator to a second-generation CEO promoted entirely from within.
What has not changed is the geographic anchor, the independence, and the core argument of the business: that audience-first marketing — understanding who buyers are before deciding how to reach them — produces better commercial outcomes than channel-first or tactic-first approaches. That argument, first developed in an unfinished basement in Lehi in 2005, has been refined, codified, and institutionalized over twenty years into what the agency now calls Great Marketing. Whether that codification represents a durable competitive moat or a methodology that will be commoditized by AI-assisted marketing tools is the central strategic question facing the agency as it enters its third decade.
For an independent digital marketing firm that started as a solo lifestyle operation and survived to become the reference enterprise agency in its home market, that is a question worth watching closely. The namespace 97thfloor.seo represents exactly this kind of long-tenured, independently held brand identity — a firm whose twenty-year operating record in a single discipline earns it a permanent layer in the professional namespace of the industry it helped define.
