WEALTH October 22, 2026 0 Comments

Trenton Moss Drops Unfiltered Career Secrets at Winning Agency — Here’s What No One Else Will Tell You

Ever wondered what it takes to turn a struggling agency into a powerhouse of client delight and commercial savvy? Trenton Moss, the founder of Webcredible—one of the UK’s pioneering user experience agencies—and now the brain behind Team Sterka, recently spilled the beans at the dmg media Ireland hub. It wasn’t just another “how to grow your business” talk; Moss peeled back the curtain on some real game-changing moves he pulled off through a rollercoaster 15 years of building Webcredible from scratch to a £3 million turnover beast before selling it in 2018. But here’s the kicker: at Year 14, facing six brutal months of losses and hemorrhaging cash, Moss and his team didn’t just batten down the hatches—they rewired the entire playbook. From turning staff into “client superstars” with quirky incentive schemes like the We Made It Fund to the genius pod structure that made even creatives think like profit-driven entrepreneurs, Moss showed that survival isn’t about playing safe—it’s about flipping the script in ways you never saw coming. And if a bunch of creatives can learn to hustle commercially without losing their spark, maybe there’s hope for us all. Ready to dive into the details of these jaw-dropping strategies that turned the tide? LEARN MORE

Webcredible and Team Sterka founder Trenton Moss shared insights from his career at the helm of one of the UK’s first user experience agencies at the dmg media Ireland hub on Thursday evening.

Speaking at The Winning Agency: Clients, Leadership & Value event, held in association with corporate finance advisory Ryan Capital Partners, Moss revealed the “gamechanger” initiatives he had undertaken during his career.

Moss founded Webcredible in 2003, and over a “15-year rollercoaster” he grew revenues to £3m and staff numbers to 30 before selling the company to Inviqa in 2018.

In year 14, however, the firm saw six months of consecutive losses and haemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of pounds. Moss and his management team implemented several ideas that allowed the company to claw back ground and prepare for acquisition, though.

The first was to turn the staff into “client superstars” using several strategies.

First of all, the company implemented a profit-sharing scheme, which had a detrimental effect on morale despite paying out in full, as creatives resented having a carrot dangled in front of them.

In its place, Moss created a We Made It Fund (WMIF), which gave staff 0.33% of client spend for them to spend on drinks, dinner, etc.

The company’s teams ended up pooling their money to spend on larger rewards such as the Crystal Maze or going to a show. In doing so, they started thinking more commercially, thinking of way to get more money from clients to grow the WMIF.

Moss later reorganised Webcredible under a pod structure, creating two autonomous businesses of 10-15 people with their own targets to drive “the right behaviour”.

Every other Friday afternoon was dedicated to unstructured ‘pod time’ dedicated to furthering the success of the pod, which also helped to motivate staff and get them to think more about money.

Moss says the pod structure “helped [staff] to get their hands around the commercial realities of running a business … they started to understand why unbillable time was such a bad thing … and why utilisation was so important.

“They started to go above and beyond to actually try and delight clients and to spot client opportunities.

“I reckon for many of them, we took them from 100% of their thinking time on delivery to maybe 97% and 3% thinking commercial, but that’s enough because there were commercial people within the pods who could then help action these things.”

Webcredible also undertook transformation training with mandatory Friday morning meetings for all staff to ensure new ideas stuck and would be implemented.

Sessions were geared around emotional intelligence, empathy, self-awareness to address issues such as staff avoiding potentially difficult phone conversations with clients and making pitches more concise to better appeal to senior stakeholders.

“Every six weeks, we did presentation drills, and three people presented for five minutes and got a five-minute critique. I mean, the whole company — I did it, our office manager did it, everyone did it. Do you know the consistency of our presentations after a year of that? Amazing. So this was hugely impactful.”

Management went on to codify Webcredible’s chosen behaviours and to nominate Stars of the Month based on who best exemplified them.

“We had guides for everything, like a client experience guide, guides for how to run meetings, guides for presentations, and again we worked up PMs to embed those into processes, so they were being used. Again, it really worked. It spread that commercial way of being across the business and that client skills.”

When new business dried up, Webcredible created a regular, invite-only roundtable for around 25 clients to discuss their challenges.

Each guest would give their main challenge, and the table would vote on which two they would like to discuss, 20 minutes per issue. Webcredible never promoted the event, but word spread and people wanted in.

“This was the thing that really helped to turn around that new business,” said Moss. “You’ve got to think up what that value-add thing is that’s going to get their attention, that’s going to be genuinely useful, and then you have to do that every single month.

“So when the time comes when they’re ready to buy, they know you because you’ve been in touch with them. That’s it. It’s just that memory recall.”

22nd October 2026. Trenton Moss of Team Sterka and Damian Ryan speaking at the The Winning Agency event at DMG HQ in Dublin. Photo : Justin Farrelly.

Moss, who has gone on to author the book Human Powered and launch client skills training programme Team Sterka, spoke for an audience of around 30 agency professionals.

The attendees later broke into small groups to discuss their issues and present them to the group, clearly lifted by Moss’ energy and enthusiasm.