How BFJ Digital is Leading the AI Charge – A Conversation with Hubspot & Fabian Valado

Innovation is in our DNA. Over the past two years, we’ve made it our mission to integrate artificial intelligence across every part of our business—from campaign planning and media modelling to attribution and customer experience. It’s not just about being early adopters—it’s about building better, faster, and smarter systems that deliver real outcomes for our clients.

One of the key drivers behind this transformation is both our Founder, Ben Henzell, along with our General Manager, Fabian Valado.

With deep technical knowledge and a sharp commercial mindset, Fabian has helped lead BFJ from a nimble performance agency to an enterprise-ready HubSpot partner trusted by clients with databases of up to a million contacts.

In this episode of Owning the Outcome, Fabian sits down with HubSpot to share that journey. He gets candid about scaling up, overcoming IT blockers in highly regulated industries, and how staying focused on customer outcomes helped him turn loss-leader tactics into long-term success.

🎧 Listen to the podcast below or read the full transcript that follows.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/145ylicNI0jc24beZYmdRV?si=1635b81a1d0f47a2

** Automated Transcription using Happy Scribe (Yes, AI generated, in this instance, we've noted the transcription is not 100% accurate)

[00:00:00.000] - Fabian Valado My worst fear is if some other business came into our ads account or partner and went, They've been doing this wrong the whole time, or, This is a solution that's easier. I want to be the person who routes things out and go, There's actually an easier way to do this. It saves everyone time. I think that's been our USP, and companies love that.

[00:00:16.520] - Sarah McDevitt In under a year, GM, Fabian Valado and his team at BFJ Digital went from new partner to platinum tier, something most in the HubSpot ecosystem could only hope to achieve. But for Fabian, it It wasn't about speed. It was about focus. Focus on delivering cross-functional value across marketing, design, and CRM. Focus on growing through existing client relationships, and most importantly, saying no to the work that wasn't a right fit. Today, Fabian shares the frameworks that fueled their rapid rise and how intentional growth, smart talent development, and a bold ecosystem strategy helped BFJ scale on their own terms. I'm Sarah Macderet, and this is owning the Outcome. Fabian, welcome to the show.

[00:01:11.760] - Fabian Valado

Thanks, Sarah. It should be fun.

[00:01:13.740] - Sarah McDevitt

Fabian, you went from on tier to platinum in inside a year. That's something that most partners would aspire to. What were the critical decisions or frameworks that you used to help you on that trajectory?

[00:01:26.120] - Fabian Valado

For us, maybe it's a bit of cheating. We had existing clients, so BFJ It was formed 15 years ago by our founder Ben. We are foremost a digital marketing agency, and we looked at our clientele and realized 95% of our clients are just other marketing managers, not business owners. It's just marketing managers who actually need serious help. I found a disconnect in marketing managers when we're trying to report Google Ads, SEO. Our reports will say one thing, their CRMs will say one thing. So we really focused on HubSpot because it's such a great tool. It's easy to learn. Marketing managers love it. We use as our USP, as our central account management system. So for us, it started off as we were just selling into our clients. We push into our clients and go, look, this is the USP of Having HubSpot. When our services are actually getting better, your ads are getting better. We talk to you better, we report to you better. But also I have this brain and I've looked at your business and I've spoken to you for years, I can solve this thing for you. From there, it was just cross-selling between everyone.

[00:02:26.900] - Fabian Valado

Anyone that didn't have a digital marketing, once they went through one our projects for HubSpot or another service, would love to look at other options in our business. Once we got the first couple projects through, it's just been a snowball effect.

[00:02:39.200] - Sarah McDevitt

I love that you used the building blocks of a strong relationship to really expand the relationship and It's a great opportunity with HubSpot. That's fantastic. For you as a leader, what's the ownership moment that really was a decisive factor in making platinum possible?

[00:02:56.020] - Fabian Valado

When we really started being at HubSpot, we had seven staff, and at the moment we've got 25. And it was just taking it early and going, we're going to embed HubSpot early into our core product modeling, into our account services and whatnot. And when we started to do that, it just really made our product whole and really helped it grow. I think for us, it's when we have a client just doing reporting and the account manager can not only go, Hey, we got you 50 leads from Google Ads, but HubSpot says 20, and here are the deals, here's the revenue. I don't think any other agency He did that to them four or five years ago because that's when we started doing it. They loved it. It was just a life-changing. Our clients were with us and were able to, at this point, their budgets are growing significantly because we're just proving revenue. We then can engage with those clients to help nurture the lead into the revenue point through nurture funnels and workloads. That was a big one for us is just watching, not myself, but I build the process, gave it to an account manager and watched them do it.

[00:03:57.160] - Fabian Valado

That was awesome.

[00:03:58.120] - Sarah McDevitt

There's times you have to say no things to refocus on what you want to focus on. What did you say no to in this process?

[00:04:04.840] - Fabian Valado

We always like to say we're agnostic. I think it really had to lean into we really enjoy working with HubSpot, so we want to do more HubSpot. I think a big thing was looking at the other CRMs, we were developing in and going, Well, hold on. If our core business model is going to serve pushing on HubSpot, let's consider going that route. I think the next scope from there was really just taking on jobs so we know we can hit 100% of the I think like any great lawyer, they're going to take a case, they're going to win. And I think that's not to, it's not that I won't solve challenges. I've got a supplier list. If I get a build brief and I'm like, This is too complicated for me, but I have this supplier will solve for you. I think that was really key. So we knew our limitations. There's not much, but we did know our limitations. We just tried to make sure we took on projects we know we'll make the client happy with at the end.

[00:04:54.100] - Sarah McDevitt

So no win, no fee. Is that what you're saying to me, Fabian? Pretty much.

[00:04:59.240] - Fabian Valado

It's not a BSL, but you can give it a crack.

[00:05:03.480] - Fabian Valado

I think a standard project is the Gasoline Ali, Harvey Davidson project that you have done. And that's been a really standard moment for you. Can you walk us through what was the business challenge for the customer. And how did your team show up for that and really own the outcome for the customer?

[00:05:21.360] - Fabian Valado

Ghd has been a client of ours for a really long time. We did their marketing at the start. We helped build the design of e-commerce website to sell merch. And that That was probably also one of our first big HubSpot projects as well that we still put our hands and shoulders with. I think a big thing for those guys is they had a system that was living on the server. That's all their first-party data, install purchases, bike sales, part sales, all of them are server. We built a system to pull it all out, pull it into HubSpot, mixed it with online orders, and we built this ecosystem of server reminders and bike sale emails and happy birthday. The big thing with any dealership, not just a Harley-Gaverton or a car dealership, anything that's based on these products that need a community, like you are buying into the brand that's community-driven, was that we understood that we need to really personalize comps. That was a big use case for us is building that out, and we've got a really fantastic solution that focused on personalisations. It's got great ads running to the platform, to the website.

[00:06:23.880] - Fabian Valado

If you buy merch, you're getting reminders to go check your bike out or go get you serviced at this dealership. We're really focused on personalization and community, and that's been a really big game changer for those guys, and they've continued to grow immensely off that. It's been a great business, and to be keep working with these guys and keep building upskill a lot of their staff as well to use HubSpot. No more need for the mechanics to send reminders. The system does it automatically.

[00:06:50.460] - Sarah McDevitt

How do you structure your talent and balance that with the delivery that you need to achieve at scale with customers? Maybe you talk us through, how has that changed with AI coming on the scene?

[00:07:02.820] - Fabian Valado

When we started, I did every build. I did everything I did. When we really got started through it, I think every HubSpot build that came through, I managed, I delivered, I devved it, I did everything. You can't manage what you don't know. You just need to know enough to call someone out is my management philosophy. If I'm going to do a new channel, if I'm going to have a new ads manager who's going to run TikTok ads, I need to know just enough so that when I review their work, I go, that's good or not. I think the strategic benefit there was I knew it, I built the process. We started by hiring more. Onshore, Australian, Brisbane, HubSpot devs. We got a head of Martech so that she's taken my project management philosophy. I can go from a sale and go, Here's the project, here's the brief, you're good to run. With the team structure, BFJ is a bit odd because we have all these services. We got design team, a dev team, ads team, and now we have a CRM team. We really make sure that it's cross-functional, that these guys are in the office, they talk with each other, they're allowed, account managers are allowed to just throw them work that we don't need to quote for.

[00:08:12.470] - Fabian Valado

This client is at HubSpot, can you help me review and tell me what ads are performing best, which has been great for the other services. But from the project side itself, it's just someone to replace me and myself to, I call myself the safety net. And they get really technical. If they hit a HubSpot problem, they just can't resolve. They'll always come to me. I think that that safety net gives them this chance just to go, just to be innovative as they can. But essentially, the head of Martech runs the project brief. We got the developer and the head of Martech is there to do the change manager as well. So a The big thing in the team structure is that you're moving anyone off the CRM, 50% of the job is in training and in change management. If you can't get that right, you're not going to get the build right. We make the project manager in charge of talking to people and changing and then drawing great designs so the developers can get all that run through. So that's been our team structure and process in that way, and I think that's been a big one for us.

[00:09:07.960] - Sarah McDevitt

You mentioned change management there, and it's something that a lot of partners struggle with actually managing for customers. What's your secret sauce when it comes to actually driving that change management piece within customer businesses?

[00:09:21.020] - Fabian Valado

It's just that we always do a capacity review at the start. So we talk to the business owner and go, we take on this project, what do you need to know? We can send you secret one-to-one. We can tell you how your staff are going, whatever the relationship is. Then we review the staff that are actually going to be using Service Hub or Sales Hub or Marketing Hub and understand their capacity. We just mark, we put them on a one-to-10. Depending where they are, we know how much we pick someone to go, this person needs a lot of love, we'll make sure that person gets a lot of love and push through a training. The big thing from there is a lot of great documentation. Bringing in some of the AI tools like Gemini, Notebook, LLM, anything that we can use.