Kevin Gibbons has been running agencies since 2006. He started in Oxford on a laptop, built affiliate websites, won clients off the back of case studies, and watched something that looked like a side project quietly become a company.
He didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. He set out to do something he was good at. The company was a side effect.
Twenty years later, he's the founder of Re:Signal, one of the UK's most respected SEO agencies, and a first-time acquirer with a clear thesis for what comes next. But the story between those two points: the founder split, the near-collapse, the sell-side conversations that taught him more than any deal he closed, is the part worth telling.
The Business He Built Before He Knew It Was a Business
Kevin graduated into the web in 2006. A placement year at a web design agency gave him an unusual combination: he could build a site, design it, and market it through SEO. He started applying that to affiliate websites. The affiliate websites started making money. The money turned into case studies. The case studies turned into clients.
"In my mind, it was never a grand plan," he told me. "It's just an evolution of curiosity that's led down a rabbit hole."
By the time he came back from a year in Australia, where he'd been working remotely before remote work had a name, he had enough clients to skip the job search entirely. He teamed up with someone he'd met locally, someone who knew paid search while Kevin handled SEO, and they started building SEOptimise from a kitchen table in Oxfordshire.
The early years were good. Deloitte Fast 50. Strong growth. National clients, then global clients. The kind of trajectory that makes you think the story writes itself from here.
It doesn't.
The Founder Split and What It Actually Cost
Kevin and his co-founder split in 2012. He's careful about how he frames it, not a personal fallout, more a professional divergence, but the context matters: the same year, his father died of cancer.
"I wasn't enjoying it," he said. "And looking back, no wonder I wasn't enjoying it. It didn't even have to be the professional stuff. It was the personal stuff."
He negotiated a way out: he took the London office, four staff, a handful of clients, some cash split down the middle, and started again. What he didn't do. and what he now says he should at least have explored, was buy his partner out.
"I don't think I'd even considered that," he told me. "With what I know now about financial modeling and deal structure, it would certainly be an avenue to pursue."
The deal they did was, by his own description, structured like a divorce. Not corporate. Not advised. Just two people trying to untangle something quickly, without the framework to know what they were leaving on the table.
That lesson stayed with him.
The Years of Rebuilding
The second version of the business took time to get back to where the first one was. Two or three years, he estimates, just to return to the pre-split level. Growth eventually came back. Then it hit a ceiling. Then the personal stuff intervened again.
Around 2018–2019, Kevin attended a business growth programme at Cranfield University. He went in thinking he was building toward an exit. He came out realizing he was closer to shutting down.
"We went from 1.2 million pounds in revenue to about 600K within a year," he said. "And that was quite a difficult period."
During that same stretch, a PE-backed agency came sniffing around with acquisition interest. The numbers were too low to make the conversation worth having at any reasonable multiple. Kevin knew it. What the Cranfield programme did was clarify something more fundamental: stop looking at the horizon and look at what's in front of you.
"Get your head out of the future into right now," he told me. "You need to be taking action right now."
What followed was zero-based budgeting, a rebuilt cash flow forecast, and the discipline to turn a business that was heading toward an overdraft into one that was building cash reserves. They executed it well. The balance sheet started to recover.
The Sell-Side Conversations That Didn't Close
Over the years, Kevin had no shortage of M&A conversations from the sell side. Competitors sold. Offers came in. He had lunches with potential acquirers.
One of those lunches produced what he now calls one of his most useful lessons about deal structure. They were offered a high seven-figure valuation, conditional on hitting a very ambitious forecast. Kevin's financial director ran the numbers.
"You might as well keep the company," she told him. "Because the amount of cash you would be generating to hit that performance, you would almost make most of that back in profit. And you'd have a company worth a lot more than what they'd pay."
He didn't dismiss the offer because the number was too low. He declined it because, once they unpacked the terms, the structure wasn't actually a good deal for Re:Signal.
That's a different kind of sophistication. It took him years of sell-side conversations to develop it. But it's also the kind of thinking that made him a more credible buyer when the time came.
He also made a habit of staying close to competitors who had gone through exits. Once they were through their earn-out periods and no longer direct rivals, he'd take them to lunch and ask them to be honest.
"Some very good, some very bad, and a few in between," he said. "That's the reality."
The Aqua-Hire That Came First
Before the first real acquisition, there was a smaller move, around 2015 or 2016, that turned out to be a useful rehearsal.
A competitor founder was burning out. He wanted to wind down the agency, find homes for his team and clients, and go independent as a consultant. Kevin had a conversation over coffee. It turned into a deal: Re:Signal brought in five or six people and a handful of clients. The founder received a commission structure, a higher percentage in year one for clients that retained, a lower percentage if they renewed into year two.
No big upfront payment. No complex legal structure. A solution that worked for both sides.
"It fell on our lap," Kevin said. "But at the same time, I think it was good to take action on."
Not everything from that deal worked out. But enough did. It moved Re:Signal forward, and it gave Kevin a first-person experience of what a deal could look like when both parties had clear motivations and didn't overcomplicate it.
Learning to Think Like a Buyer
The evolution from practitioner to agency leader to someone who thinks in terms of capital allocation didn't happen overnight. Kevin marks it as a gradual shift, from doing the SEO work, to leading the sales and marketing function, to coaching the leadership team, and then asking himself what comes next that's both valuable and genuinely interesting.
"If I'm not excited about it," he told me, "it's not going to work."
M&A cleared that bar. He started working with an M&A advisor, initially in the context of preparing Re:Signal for an eventual exit, and somewhere in those conversations, the direction shifted. Why exit when you could use the capital you've built to grow?
The balance sheet had recovered. The cash reserves were healthy. The question became: what's the best use of this capital?
How They Found Route Digital
Before Kevin looked at a single target, he surveyed his clients.
The question was simple: if Re:Signal were to launch a new service, what would you pay for? Digital PR came out on top. That became the thesis. Not UK SEO agencies, that was organic growth territory, and not turnaround plays where the damage was already done. A thriving agency in a complementary service, UK-based, where a cross-sell was obvious on day one.
They shortlisted digital PR agencies. An advisor ran the initial outreach, without disclosing Re:Signal's identity at first, just gauging appetite for a conversation. The ones who were interested got an introduction. The ones who weren't got filtered out.
Route Digital came through that process. Just under £1M in revenue. Strong profit margins. A founder who had built something real and was ready to think about what came next.
"We didn't want to do a turnaround," Kevin said. "We wanted to buy a thriving agency that we could then work together with."
The Deal Structure and What He Learned
Kevin is candid about how much he didn't know going into his first real deal.
The big shift wasn't understanding the legal mechanics. It was getting his head around the economics: that you're not buying past performance, you're buying future performance, and the deal structure reflects your confidence in that forecast. That cash upfront, deferred payments, equity released into a group structure, earnouts, none of these are fixed rules. They're tools. The right structure is the one that makes the deal work for both sides.
He also had to adjust to a counterintuitive feeling: the bank balance going down in order to create capital value.
"We're spending cash to create share value," he said. "That feels backwards until you really understand the modeling."
He read Brad Jacobs on this, specifically the back-of-napkin discipline. If you can't understand it without a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet is hiding something. The fundamentals have to be legible at the highest level before you get into the numbers.
The multiple arbitrage question: are you buying at four times and valued at six times? What does the cashflow look like in between? If those questions don't have clean answers, the deal isn't ready.
The Integration So Far
Re:Signal and Route Digital are still operating as separate entities, with Kevin explicitly resisting the urge to consolidate too fast. He told his leadership team last week he wanted to ban the word "group."
"I don't think we're big enough externally to be called a group," he said. "And internally, one of our values is one team. The word group feels like two teams."
The longer-term direction is a single strong brand, not a holdco model with distinct agencies under an umbrella, but something that looks and feels, from the inside and outside, like it was never two companies. Brad Jacobs's principle: make it look like you grew organically, not through acquisition.
He knows that takes time. He's not rushing it. This was his first deal. Smashing two companies together on day one is a move that works when you've done enough deals to have documented what goes wrong. He hasn't done enough deals yet.
"We've done a lot of watch and learn," he said. "How do we have some shared clients and work side by side? What can we bring to both businesses that helps us move forward?"
Combined, Re:Signal and Route Digital are now north of £3M in revenue, somewhere around $4M. Not dramatic scale by any measure, but a meaningful jump that proves the thesis and creates a foundation for doing it again.
What's Next
Kevin isn't looking for another acquisition right now. He's looking to make the one he has work.
The immediate priorities: organic US expansion, a rebuild of agency workflows around AI, and the continued integration of Route Digital into a single, coherent brand and team. Get those three things right, and the next deal becomes possible.
He's still thinking like a capital allocator, even without an active deal on the table. The US expansion is a capital deployment decision. The AI investment is a capital deployment decision. The shape of the next acquisition, if there is one, will be informed by what he's learned from this one.
"I always feel like it can be dangerous to have everything mapped out," he said. "What comes after that piece."
He's also, at 20-plus years into this, still doing it because he finds it genuinely interesting. The reinvention cycle, from practitioner to sales leader to agency head to deal-maker, has kept him engaged through stretches that would have broken someone who needed certainty.
If you're an agency owner in the US thinking about what's next, he's on LinkedIn and happy to talk.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Hear how Kevin Gibbons went from accidental agency founder to capital allocator, including the founder split he wishes he'd handled differently, the near-collapse that forced a reset, the sell-side deals that never closed, and the first real acquisition that finally put him on the buy side.
