Built to Last: Netalico's Journey with Harvest

At a Glance

Netalico: Mark Lewis, Founder and CEO + Katherine VanLent, Director of Operations 
Journey: From struggling freelancer to building a thriving Shopify Plus Partner agency over 12+ years
Challenge: Build credibility and scaling from solo work to team operations
Solution: Leverage Harvest as part of the operational foundation for growth
Result: Grow to become a boutique Shopify agency with 80% retainer clients and consistent year-over-year growth

In 2012, Mark Lewis faced the challenge that haunts every new freelancer: how do you get people to take you seriously and actually pay your invoices?

"I wasn't bold enough to get people to pay me at first," Mark recalls. "I was like, I need the most legit looking invoices so that people will actually look at this as a real business and say, 'Oh, we need to pay him.'"

The invoicing tools he'd tried didn't project the professional image he needed. His invoices looked amateur, and his confidence in collecting payment was shaky. That search for credibility led him to Harvest in 2012 and became a building block in Netalico’s operational growth.

Today, Mark is the founder and CEO of Netalico Commerce, a boutique Shopify agency with 80% of clients on monthly retainers. What started as a simple need for professional-looking invoices became the operational foundation for 12+ years of entrepreneurial growth.

The Breakthrough: From Project Chaser to Partner

Mark's early freelance work was typical—build a website, deliver it, and move on to the next project. But when he started working with eCommerce clients, something clicked.

"What I really loved about the couple of e-commerce clients that I had was that they were more relational and more ongoing relationships as opposed to just doing a site and it's one and done," Mark explains. "The sites needed fixing, they needed updates, they needed extensions installed. It was a lot more of an evolution versus doing the site and then you're done."

This insight became a core part of Netalico’s client-focused business philosophy. Instead of constantly hunting for new projects, he realized that he could build lasting partnerships with clients who needed ongoing support. But this realization also created new challenges: how do you manage multiple ongoing relationships? How do you track work across different clients and projects? How do you price ongoing services fairly?

As Mark's client base grew, so did his need for operational systems. Harvest evolved from a simple invoicing tool into the backbone of his business operations. "As a developer, I didn't really like sales," Mark admits. "Having ongoing relationships meant I could keep getting work without having to constantly pitch people."

The transition to Shopify specialization came around 2015-2016, during the challenging Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration period. Mark saw an opportunity to help clients move to a more manageable platform, and gradually Netalico became a Shopify specialist, leveraging deep platform expertise as a competitive advantage. Today, 95% of their business is Shopify-focused—a decision that created predictable, scalable processes that Harvest could track and optimize.

From Doing Everything to Empowering Everyone

The transition from solo freelancer to agency owner brought other new complexities that Mark hadn't anticipated. How do you hire the right people? When do you know you need more team members? How do you maintain quality and client relationships when you're not doing all the work yourself?

"I love empowering my team and seeing what can get done without me," Mark reflects. But getting to that point required Netalico to develop systems that provided visibility into team performance, client needs, and business health.

Katherine VanLent joined as Director of Operations four years ago, and she explains how Harvest became central to Mark's scaling strategy:

"By being able to track what that billable percentage is for each of our team members, it helps me make hiring decisions. If this team member has been over their utilization for the last four weeks, and looking at forecasting, we have the workload for another person."

This data-driven approach to scaling has enabled consistent growth—approximately one new team member per year—without the feast-or-famine cycles that plague many agencies.

Building Systems That Support Growth

Using Harvest's ntegration with Asana for task-level time tracking, Mark's team created operational systems that drive three key areas of their business:

Improving Client Relationships Through Transparency
With 80% of clients now on monthly retainers, Mark had to learn how to manage ongoing relationships at scale. Harvest became essential.

"We can look at that and track—'Hey, we are getting close to hours. Let's talk to the client about overage,' or 'Maybe we're under-servicing this client in the middle of the month. What other projects could we pull up?'" Katherine explains.

But it goes deeper than just tracking hours. The team uses time breakdowns to educate clients about how their requests impact project budgets: "We can show them, 'Actually, we spent 40% of your time this month on project management. Maybe let's think about—you're sending 10 emails a day. Do you want me to reply right away, or do you want me to stack those at the end of the week to conserve your time so we can put more toward development and UX design?'"

Making Smarter Business Decisions
Mark learned to track the metrics that matter most for agency health. "At the beginning of the month, seeing how many recurring clients we have that basically just roll over is a pretty important health metric of our baseline growth and health of the agency."

This focus on recurring revenue, supported by Harvest's data, has created the stable foundation that enables consistent growth.

Getting Better at Estimating and Delivery
"We can look and see how much time does a designer typically need to design a new homepage, or how much time do we need to integrate a wholesale app," Katherine notes. "We're able to look at that across multiple clients in reporting to give more accurate estimates."

This historical data has become invaluable for project scoping and setting realistic client expectations—something Mark struggled with in his early freelancing days.

Team Wellness Monitoring
Netalico offers unlimited PTO, but they track it in Harvest. "We can see throughout the year how much time people are taking off. That, along with utilization tracking, helps me talk to team members—'Hey, you haven't taken time off in a while. I'm a little worried you're going to burn out.'"

Evolving with Technology: The AI Advantage

Mark's willingness to adapt and evolve has been a constant throughout his journey. When AI tools emerged, instead of fearing disruption, he saw opportunity—but with a twist that reflects his client-first philosophy.

"We're pretty transparent that we're using AI, but we're using it to make our work quicker," Mark explains. "If something only takes an hour versus the five hours we estimated before using AI, we're going to bill them for the hour. They can have that time back or we can allocate it for another project."

This approach—passing AI-driven efficiency gains directly to clients—has strengthened relationships rather than commoditizing the work. This reinforced Netalico’s reputation as a forward-thinking partner for its clients. It's a philosophy that could only work with the operational transparency that Harvest provides.

The team now uses AI for everything from monthly client reporting (exporting Harvest data to AI tools for analysis) to product catalog work and project tracking. But the foundation remains the same: accurate time tracking that enables honest, transparent client relationships.  The AI handles the data analysis, but the human insight and client relationship management remain central.

What Enabled Netalico’s Transformation

Looking back at the Netalico journey, three aspects of Harvest proved essential for their evolution:

Growing with Ambition, Not Against It
"What I love about Harvest is that it's really scaled with us in terms of team size," Mark notes. "The ability to just add one user and the bill goes up just by a little bit versus some of the other software we use where if you get to 15, it's another tier, and 16 is the 20 tier."

For someone who started worried about invoice credibility, having tools that supported growth—rather than penalized it—was crucial. This flexibility enabled Mark to take on seasonal eCommerce demands and scale the team organically without hitting pricing walls.

Systems That Don't Fight the Work
The seamless Asana integration eliminated friction that could have derailed adoption. "I like that it natively connects. You can see the specific task that took time, and it's fairly seamless for the team member. Most of the time they can remain in Asana and hit the tracking button," Katherine explains.

This integration supported Mark's evolution from doing all the work himself to managing a team—without creating administrative burden that would slow down delivery.

Reliability as a Growth Partner
"The features have been very consistent over the years. I actually appreciate that Harvest hasn't moved things around. It's pretty steady, and that's been important for us," Mark reflects.

For an entrepreneur building long-term systems and processes, platform stability meant Mark could focus on growing his business rather than constantly adapting to tool changes. After 12+ years, this consistency enabled sophisticated integrations and workflows that support his team's success.

For instance, by honing repeatable processes and expertise, Netalico has been able to deliver major wins for clients – one brand saw a 188% jump in subscription revenue within three months of their new Shopify launch, thanks to improvements Netalico implemented. Such results stem from the very operational foundation Mark and team have built.

Looking Ahead: The Confident Entrepreneur

As Mark looks toward the future of Netalico, his perspective reflects the confidence that 12+ years of systematic growth has built. He's no longer the freelancer worried about invoice credibility—he's an agency owner focused on innovation and team empowerment.

"Every time we've considered other invoicing software or time tracking software over the years, we come back to Harvest as being the best integrated solution," Mark concludes.

His wishlist for the future includes AI-powered time tracking that could reduce administrative burden on his creative team members—but notably, he's not looking to replace the human insight and client relationships that remain at the core of Netalico's success.

Mark's journey from struggling freelancer to confident agency owner illustrates a fundamental truth about entrepreneurial growth: success comes not just from finding clients or building skills, but from building the operational systems that can support sustainable scaling.

For Mark, that foundation started with a simple need for professional-looking invoices. Twelve years later, it's become the backbone of a thriving agency that delivers exceptional results for clients while empowering a growing team.

Ready to start your own entrepreneurial journey? Whether you're a solo freelancer looking for credibility or an agency owner ready to scale, Harvest provides the operational foundation for sustainable growth. Try Harvest free for 30 days.