I’ve spent 17 years building marketing that founders keep.
I’m Ben Kouba. Since 2009 I’ve run Leaf9, building websites and marketing systems for more than 220 businesses, many of them founder-led companies like yours. I come at it like the inventor I’ve been since I was a kid: take the business apart, find what actually drives it, then build the whole system and keep improving it.
- 17years in business
- 220+clients served
- 35clients with us nine years or more
It started with a tennis club.
In the early days of the internet I found HTML, and I couldn’t put it down. I wrote website code on paper during class, then typed it into my first free hosting site that night. Anyone could publish something the whole world could read. That still amazes me.
My first job was at an indoor tennis club. Clean the courts, do the laundry, answer the phone, book the courts. When the phones went quiet, I was coding: the club’s first website, by hand, with rounded corners and table grids that were advanced for the time.
Eventually the owners noticed the laundry was piling up while the website grew. In my exit interview I showed them what I’d built. Most businesses didn’t have a website yet, and they wanted to buy this one. I asked for $1,000, a fortune for a teenager, and they said yes.
My first paid project was a side effect of getting fired from my first job.
I’ve always thought like an inventor.
Long before websites, there were inventions. As a kid I filled little notebooks with sketches of solar-powered cars and other ways to fix the world’s problems. I built circuits in the basement, including an anti-gravity device that ran on ionic thrust, powered by an old TV monitor. I still can’t believe my parents let me.
That habit never left. I take a problem apart before I touch it: what’s really happening, what’s causing it, and what would prove it’s fixed. Then I build the smallest thing that works, measure it and make it better. It’s why every engagement starts with a plan, and why you get numbers you can actually read.
It’s also why I reach for new technology early. I was hand-coding websites when most businesses didn’t have one, and I’m building with AI now for the same reason: it changes what a small team can do. Twenty-some years in, the difference is judgment, knowing which new tools are worth it and which will take you the wrong way fast.
So I treat your marketing as one machine and design it the way an engineer would: every piece connected, every piece doing a job, and the whole thing built to run without you babysitting it.
How I work through any problem
- Take it apart
- Find the real cause
- Build the smallest thing that works
- Measure it
- Make it better
My college invented a major so I could do this.
I went to Cedarville University to be an engineer. I loved electronics, robotics and anything from the future, but I loved art and photography just as much, and engineering only fed one side. That $1,000 sale settled it. Cedarville had no major for what I wanted, so they built one with me: business, art and media design, and programming. I was the first student in it, and it’s part of the school’s offering today.
I met my wife there. Our first child came a couple of years after we married, and with a family to support I had to choose between a real job and building the business. I didn’t come from a family of business owners. It felt like jumping off a cliff and building the parachute on the way down.
I found my footing in the library’s business section, and in a handful of people, five or six, who trusted me early. Almost everything Leaf9 is today grew from those relationships. They taught me the things that still run the business: serve people well, do excellent work, stay faithful to the clients you have, and be honest about the ones who aren’t a fit.
Your business needs leaves.
A business starts as a seed. Given the right conditions, it breaks out of its shell and pushes up into the light. Then it grows, and here’s the part most people get wrong: plants don’t grow by pulling food out of the ground. They take water from the soil, but they make their food in their leaves, from sunlight and air.
Your business works the same way. Its leaves are the things that turn attention into customers:
- Your website
- Your marketing
- Your advertising
- The systems behind them
Healthy leaves feed the whole plant. That’s what we build, so your business grows faster and stronger than it would on its own.
What I keep seeing go wrong.
After more than 220 businesses, the same three mistakes cost owners the most.
Going cheap on the engine.
A website is easy and cheap to get now, and that’s the trap. A bargain site with no system behind it is a dirt-bike engine under the hood of a Ferrari. It looks the part and stalls on the first hill. Businesses that grow put real budget behind the system that drives them.
Four vendors and no plan.
Some of it in-house, some at an agency, some done yourself on weekends. Nobody owns the whole thing, so the pieces don’t talk to each other and the money leaks out between them.
Building before planning.
Launch a site, run an ad, try whatever’s next and hope something sticks. It almost never does. A plan puts all your energy in one direction, so every dollar and every hour pushes the same way.
We start with the plan, and we stay.
Every engagement starts with the plan. Then you get one person who knows your business and is there when you need them. That’s why clients stay ten and fifteen years, and why we treat them like family.
I can’t offer that to everyone, so I’m careful about who we take on, for builds and for advisory. I don’t patch broken old systems, I don’t travel and I don’t give talks. That time goes to the clients we choose.
Who I say yes to
- Founder-led and growth-minded
- Wants work-life balance, for themselves and for us
- Values strategy and is ready to invest in a whole system
Not a fit for one-on-one work? That’s why we built the GrowthMap™ and GrowthKits™: decades of what we do with clients, packaged so you can make the plan and do the work yourself. See the GrowthMap™
A small team, with AI on it.
I run Leaf9, with a small team of contractors and partners for the specialties I don’t cover myself. AI is now part of the team too. We use AI agents to run our own workflows, to sharpen the process behind client work, and to turn twenty-some years of experience into the training and tools inside the GrowthMap™ and GrowthKits™.
People design the strategy and the creative. AI does the legwork. You make the calls.
I watched the web arrive. This is that moment again.
In the early days, just having a website put a business ahead. The next wave is here: being found and recommended in AI search, marketing personalized to each customer, and ideas tested in days instead of months. I believe it’s the start of a renaissance for owners who move early.
AI can also take you the wrong way, fast. It needs someone at the wheel who has seen what works. That’s the job I want: to be your guide, from the kid sketching HTML in a notebook to whatever comes next.
Outside work.
I’m a homeschool dad of three great kids. We love to travel and spend a lot of time in Maine. I’m active in our church, and my faith shapes how I work, though we work with clients of every belief.
I care about time freedom, and the systems I build for clients are the same ones I run in my own business. That’s how I get my evenings back, and it’s what I want for you.
You can’t tape plastic leaves to a plant and expect it to grow.
If I could give every owner one piece of advice, it’s this: a whole system is worth more than the sum of cheap parts. Let’s plan yours.
