I build the infrastructure other agencies skip.
Cristian Petrila, founder of Basil Studio Co. Based in London, working with clients anywhere in the UK.
I built the marketing systems at a premium kitchen design and installation studio in London: paid ads, organic search, the website itself, analytics and tracking, and a custom CRM to manage the leads once they started coming in, none of which existed before I joined. I've since moved on from that role to run Basil Studio Co full-time, and retained the studio as a client rather than walking away from the relationship. It's also where the kitchen and bathroom expertise on this site comes from: real budgets, real showroom traffic, a real sales process, not a case-study-shaped guess.
Basil Studio Co is that same approach, offered to other businesses, across the handful of industries I know well enough to be useful in fast: home improvement and kitchen design, SaaS and B2B software, architecture and interior design, and independent hospitality. I work with a small number of clients at a time, on the parts of marketing that actually compound: the systems underneath the campaigns, not just the campaigns themselves.
Before this, I worked in B2B digital marketing at a risk management software company, then moved into consumer-facing marketing. That combination is unusual: most people specialise in one side or the other. It means I can speak to a SaaS buying committee and a homeowner choosing a kitchen with equal fluency, because I've had to sell to both.
Along the way I picked up hands-on range across Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, SEO, WordPress and Elementor development, Google Tag Manager, GA4, HTML and CSS, and enough JavaScript and Python to build my own tools when the ones on the market didn't fit. The lead CRM I built for the kitchen studio, in Electron and React, exists because nothing off-the-shelf matched how the business actually sold.
I care about understanding how systems work under the hood: an ad platform's auction logic, a CMS's plugin architecture, how an AI model actually processes information. I build my own tools rather than settle for off-the-shelf ones that don't fit the way a business actually operates.
Basil Studio Co exists to offer that same from-scratch, systems-first approach to businesses who need marketing infrastructure that actually holds up: not campaigns that run for a quarter and get forgotten.
Specialist freelancer, agency, or in-house hire.
Each model suits a different situation. This isn't a pitch that one is always right, cost, attention, industry knowledge and speed, side by side, so the choice is based on what your business actually needs.
| Criteria | Specialist freelancer | Generalist agency | In-house hire |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Pay for senior expertise directly, with no account management layer built into the price. | A retainer that covers strategy, account management, and execution together, often at a premium. | A full salary and benefits, regardless of how much or how little work there is in a given month. |
| Attention | Works with a small number of clients at a time, by design. | Split across many accounts, and day-to-day work is often handled by junior staff. | Fully dedicated to one business, but limited to what one person can cover. |
| Industry knowledge | Deep in the specific disciplines and industries they choose to specialise in. | Varies by account team, and the team assigned to you can change. | Builds deep knowledge of the business itself, less of the wider industry and other approaches. |
| Speed | Direct decisions, with no internal handoffs between strategy and execution. | Slower in practice: requests often route through an account manager before reaching whoever does the work. | Fast for day-to-day execution, slower to bring in expertise the business doesn't already have. |
| Best for | Businesses that need senior strategy and execution together, without full-time overhead. | Businesses that need broad coverage across many channels at once, and can resource the retainer. | Businesses large enough, and consistent enough in workload, to justify a dedicated, embedded role. |
A generalist agency makes sense when a business needs broad coverage across many channels at once and has the budget to resource a full retainer. An in-house hire makes sense once workload is consistent enough, and large enough, to justify a full-time, embedded role. A specialist freelancer makes sense in between: senior strategy and hands-on execution together, in a specific set of disciplines, without committing to full-time overhead or an agency retainer. That's the gap Basil Studio Co is built to fill.