Author: Kris Hutchinson

Author

  • Kris Hutchinson

    Kris Hutchinson contributes to Thryve Digest on topics related to client management, performance marketing, and agency-client relationships. He is the founder and CEO of Hutch, a demand generation and RevOps agency for B2B service companies, and has spent two decades either owning an agency or running growth inside one.

    Location: Mougins, France
    Expertise: Client Management, Agency Operations, Demand Generation, Performance Marketing, Paid Media and Attribution, Scope and Expectation Setting

    Highlights
    Kris has 20+ years of experience in performance marketing and demand generation across SaaS, FinTech, professional services, and hospitality. He founded and sold one agency, spent five years in senior leadership at another through its acquisition by Omnicom Media Group, and now runs his own. Across his career he has worked with more than 400 companies, from early-stage businesses to $100M+ enterprises. He holds a B.S. in Marketing from NYU Stern School of Business.

    Experience
    Kris began in advertising in 2002 at The Danbury Mint, managing offline campaigns for jewelry and collectibles, before moving into search. From 2004 to 2007 he was SEM/SEO Manager at ProFlowers.com, running search engine marketing for the Gourmet Foods business units including Shari's Berries, Cherry Moon Farms, and Uptown Prime.

    In 2006 he founded Magnifi Online, a digital advertising agency helping startup and growing organizations scale their online marketing campaigns. He ran it for 12 years and sold the company in 2017. That stretch is where most of what he writes about comes from: not the marketing, but everything around it. Which clients to take, what to do when scope drifts, and how to end an engagement without burning the relationship.

    From 2018 to 2023 Kris held senior roles at Jump 450, a New York performance marketing agency, progressing from Vice President of Media Buying to Senior Growth Director to Managing Director. Omnicom Media Group acquired Jump 450 in October 2021, during his tenure, and he stayed through the integration. In that period he led media buying and growth strategy for B2B and consumer clients across YouTube, paid social, and search.

    In 2023 Kris founded Hutch, which he runs from the south of France with a distributed team. The firm focuses on diagnosing where revenue is actually leaking for B2B service companies: attribution, geo-targeting, lead quality, and the gap between what platforms report and what actually closes. That diagnostic work gives him a ground-level view of the client management problems that derail small and mid-size businesses, usually well before anyone involved calls it a client management problem.

    Editorial Perspective
    Kris writes about client management from the agency operator's seat. His view is that most of the damage in service businesses happens before the work starts, in how expectations get set, how scope gets defined, and how the relationship gets framed. At Thryve Digest he focuses on how to set expectations before things go wrong, how to handle scope creep when it shows up anyway, and how to protect client relationships while still running a business that works.

    Kris is not an attorney. His articles describe how client agreements, scope documents, and engagement terms generally work in practice. They are not legal advice, and where a situation needs a lawyer the article says so.

    Education and Certifications
    Kris holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing with a minor in Sociology from NYU Stern School of Business. He is certified as a Data Integration Expert by Windsor.ai.