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About Growth Keys™
The Agency Whose Stated Goal Is That You Need It Less
Most agency "About" pages are a wall of stock-photo handshakes and the word "passionate." Here's ours instead: who we are, why the name changed, what we believe, and why one of our actual goals is for you to need us less over time.
The Short Version
Growth Keys™ is a Fort Wayne growth firm led by Dustin Keeslar.
We help established service businesses and B2B teams turn disconnected marketing, sales, vendors, technology, and follow-up into one accountable system.
The basic idea is simple:
See the system. Find the Growth Lock™. Fix the right thing first.
Then use the KeyCode System™ to keep everything pulling in the same direction.
Because most businesses don't need another random tactic. They need somebody responsible for making the pieces work together.
Yes, We Changed Our Name. Here's Why.
This company started as Creative Cat. And for a long time, that name made perfect sense.
We were a creative agency doing brand, design, web, advertising, and all the things people generally expect when the word "creative" is on the door. The work was good.
Then the job changed.
Clients stopped needing us to just make things. They needed us to figure out why the things they already had weren't producing the growth they expected.
Why marketing was generating leads sales hated. Why sales wasn't following up. Why five vendors could all report a win while the owner still had no idea what was actually working. Why the CRM nobody used somehow became the most expensive piece of software in the building.
Why the answer to every problem seemed to be: "Have you considered a rebrand?"
Eventually, the work became less about making creative things and more about making the whole growth system work: brand, marketing, sales, lead generation, technology, follow-up, measurement, scale — all connected.
At that point, "Creative Cat" described where we came from better than where we were going. So we changed the name.
Not because of an acquisition. Not because somebody bought us. Not because there was some dramatic agency breakup involving lawyers, a conference-room table, and a suspicious amount of bourbon.
The work evolved. The name needed to catch up.
So Creative Cat became Growth Keys™. Same company. Same people. Bigger job description. A name that finally matched the work.
The Person Behind It
Meet the Founder
Growth Keys™ is a team. But the standard is set by founder Dustin Keeslar.
He's run the company since 2016 — through the Creative Cat years, the Growth Keys™ rebrand, and more than a few versions of "marketing is completely different now."
His lane is turning messy marketing into clean, accountable systems: research first, strategy second, technology where it earns its keep, creative sharp enough to make people pay attention, and measurement close enough to revenue that nobody gets to hide behind a pretty chart.
Dustin still digs into the market, the offer, the customer, the sales process, and the numbers before recommending you buy anything. That matters.
Because we have a strange policy around here: we don't want to sell you something just because we know how to sell it.
Sometimes the answer is SEO. Sometimes it's Google Ads. Sometimes it's positioning. Sometimes it's your website. Sometimes your marketing is perfectly fine and the real problem is that leads sit untouched until Thursday.
Those are very different problems. They should not receive the same invoice.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
- Founder, Growth Keys™ — running the company since 2016, through the Creative Cat years and the evolution into Growth Keys™.
- President, AAF Fort Wayne — because apparently running one organization wasn't enough.
- Research-first operator — customer research and real market evidence before strategy.
- Builder, not just buyer — Growth Keys™ develops and uses its own tools, dashboards, automations, and AI systems where off-the-shelf software falls short.
- See the System → Find the Growth Lock™ → Fix the Right Thing First — the diagnosis comes before the prescription.
Want Dustin one-on-one instead of agency-side? Visit dustinkeeslar.com →
The Short Version, in Numbers
Fifty-Some Sentences Won't Prove It. These Might.
The Four Things We Actually Believe
Not Values-Poster Material. Operating Behavior.
You won't find "Integrity" printed six feet tall on our conference-room wall. We figured behaving with integrity was more useful. These are the things that actually change how we work.
First to the Frontier
Marketing changes fast. AI changes faster. Waiting until every agency conference has a breakout session about something is usually a good way to arrive after the advantage is gone.
So we build. We test. We break things.
We built Quarkis. We built our own SEO systems and AI citation tracking. We built the GK Insights dashboard. We build automation, research tools, and internal systems when the thing we need doesn't exist yet.
Not because "AI" looks good in a headline. Because sometimes building the tool ourselves gets clients a better answer faster. And when it doesn't? We use the boring thing that already works.
Capability Over Dependency
This one confuses people at first: we are an agency whose stated goal is for you to need the agency less.
Yes. We realize how terrible that sounds in a recurring-revenue meeting.
But growth that depends on an outside vendor forever isn't much of a system. It's dependency with a monthly invoice.
So we document. We train. We build capability inside your team. We put systems in your accounts. We help your people understand what's happening instead of keeping the machinery behind a curtain.
The better the engagement works, the more control you should have. Not less.
Honest Even When It Costs Us
Sometimes the right answer costs us money. We're okay with that.
We've told clients they didn't need the rebrand. We've told them not to increase the ad budget. We've told them an impressive-looking growth chart was mostly bots. We've told them the current vendor was doing a perfectly good job and should stay.
That should not be remarkable. Apparently it is.
Here's our rule: if the advice changes because we're the ones selling the solution, the advice is probably garbage.
The diagnosis comes first. Then the recommendation. Even when the recommendation is: "Don't buy anything from us yet."
Embedded, Not External
You can learn a lot from a dashboard. You can also learn a lot by walking through the shop at 7:30 in the morning while the crews are loading trucks.
Or sitting in the sales meeting. Or listening to the office manager explain what actually happens after a web lead comes in. Or asking why the CRM says one thing while everybody in the building knows another thing happened.
We go on-site. We learn margins, capacity, seasonality, sales cycles, lead flow — the weird workarounds nobody wrote into the SOP because everyone just "knows how we do it." That's usually where the real Growth Lock™ is hiding.
We don't want to be an outside marketing vendor looking at your business through a dashboard. We want to understand enough of the business that the marketing decisions make sense inside the P&L.
The Promise
Growth That Depends on Your Agency Forever Isn't Growth.
Every engagement starts with the same deal: straight answers, a team that treats your business like the outcome matters, a system you can understand, and a plan for needing us less over time.
That last part is not a cute positioning line. It's the philosophy.
If your marketing works only because an agency holds all the passwords, owns all the knowledge, controls all the reporting, and keeps the whole thing mysterious enough that you're afraid to leave… that isn't a growth system. That's a hostage situation with a dashboard.
We'd rather build something your team understands. Something measurable. Something accountable. Something you own.
Because the goal isn't to make Growth Keys™ indispensable. The goal is to make your growth system dependable.
Client Proof
They increased our website traffic by over 40% within the 1st month of launch and quickly improved our local rankings for our primary garage door repair keyword after the new site launched. We've only started month 1! These guys deliver on what they promise and are great to work with.Joe Schenke, Owner, Fort Wayne Door & Dock
Want to Know What We'd Fix First?
You probably don't need another agency pitch. You need to know what's actually holding the system back.
The Growth Lock™ Audit looks across your marketing, sales, vendors, lead handling, follow-up, and measurement to find the constraint closest to revenue.
If we can help fix it, we'll tell you how. If you don't need us? We'll tell you that too.
Book a Free Growth Lock™ AuditTerrible short-term sales strategy. Pretty good way to build a company.
Or skip ahead and put us to work on your numbers.
Book a Free Growth Lock™ Audit