Growth Blog

A committed and inspired Father, Entrepreneur, Business Growth Specialist, Marketeer, Designer & founder of Venture Works.

Prior to starting Venture Works in 2013 as a Business Growth Agency, Karlis had culminated several years of professional experience in a number of fields including design, marketing, consultancy, social enterprise, community development, sound engineering, youth / play work and media among others.

Leaving school, Karlis went straight into business (at the complete deep end) opening up a computer shop building, selling and repairing PC’s for personal and business use across rural West Wales at age 16. This organically developed into his initial passion for design, with freelance work in graphic and web design eventually taking over from the PC business. Alongside this, he was also working voluntarily on a number of local community projects and trained as a youth and play worker.

His work would then progress in design and web development alongside further freelance work developing interactive outdoor theater performances for children, touring around Wales (there are photos of him playing a pirate, and a fairy-tale character in Cilgerran somewhere).

Leading on from this, Karlis worked for a short time on a digital community development project under Wales Objective 1 funding. Again parallel to this he was still working on building his skill set and customer base within the design and web side of things. From this, he naturally started exploring further into marketing, online marketing, and social media as a way to further support his clients. The reason behind this was down to seeing a number of clients wanting websites designed for the sake of it, looking at it as a bolt onto to their business without taking consideration or understanding on how it could drive customers and growth. 

A short break was taken from this at age 20 when he took on a role as a Sales Manager for a national company. Excelling incredibly quickly to become a top regional manager within one year before leaving. In this time he gained a great understanding of sales and marketing processes, strategies and pipelines which would later feed into Venture Works. He was also responsible for staff coaching and training within a regional team of 5-7 and turning a region that typically generated 30k per year to over 300k in 12 months.

After a few months off after leaving this position, Karlis started working for Welsh Government and The Wales Co-operative Centre under their Communities 2.0 programme; developing and managing multi-stakeholder regional community development projects alongside substantial work providing consultancy and advice to social enterprises around digital technology - including web design, I.T infrastructure, social media and business efficiency among other topics.

Now in his early 20’s, with a clearer picture of life, he had the vision of creating a Business Growth Agency that would bring together typically separate areas of design, marketing, and business consultancy. Later adding in business intelligence to create the final strand to this.

Over the years, working freelance and within Welsh Government Karlis had experienced the disjointed approach that businesses can be forced into; hiring consultants to create plans, taking these plans to IT companies, web designers, and marketing companies separately and ultimately losing the vision, purpose and desired results through the process. Particularly when left to be self-managed by the business owners.

As a result, Venture Works was born to create a single specialist agency that could cater for his clients needs all in one place. No matter how small or large.

If you're interested in working with Karlis and his team, contact us.