Will Jones
Photo: Sonia Hoey
Sonia Hoey resigned from one of the biggest tech companies in the world during a market downturn, had no website, no curated portfolio, and no roadmap — and landed her first seven-figure client within a month. That is not a lucky accident. That is what happens when years of watching corporate marketing fail in plain sight finally reach a breaking point. Hoey is the founder of SoniqueCopy, a boutique growth agency building revenue infrastructure for eCommerce, SaaS, and digital-first brands across the United States.
She works directly with founders across every layer of their business — SEO, email marketing, paid ads, content, web design, and conversion — not as separate services, but as one unified system. She reached annual revenues of mid-six figures with 20–40% year-over-year growth, built entirely through referrals and word of mouth. No paid acquisition. No cold outreach calendar blocking her week. The story of how she got here is messier, more human, and far more interesting than most agency origin stories.
From Tech Floors to Open Space
Hoey studied business management alongside production and videography in college — two polar-opposite tracks she pursued simultaneously because she genuinely could not choose. She learned to code through a friendly competition with a software engineer boyfriend, took an eight-month boot camp, and landed a role at Slack. Then she moved into sales, joined Salesforce, and worked there for four years, eventually managing operations teams.
It was a trajectory that looked successful on paper. But something kept surfacing. “I was watching smart teams spend real money on marketing that looked successful on paper, but didn’t really translate clearly to profit,” she said. She saw the disconnect between campaigns that generated buzz but did not translate into revenue. The gap between strategy and outcome was everywhere — and nobody was owning it. Then came the injury. A competitive weightlifter, Hoey sustained a serious physical setback that put her on disability leave for several months.
For the first time in years, she stopped. She had time to think. And the conclusion she reached was clear. “I didn’t start with the goal of building an agency in the beginning, but I started with the need to fix that problem.” She resigned from Salesforce at the end of 2024 — directly into one of the most turbulent market climates in recent memory — and launched SoniqueCopy. A month later, she had her first seven-figure client, all thanks to precision, drive, and a pitch that delivered exactly what a founder needed to hear.
The Problem with Playing Telephone
Most agencies operate through layers. A strategy director briefs a copywriter, who hands off to a media buyer, who reports back to an account manager, who eventually surfaces a summary to the client. Every transfer costs something — nuance, speed, accountability. By the time a decision reaches execution, the original thinking has been diluted three times over. Hoey eliminated all of that.
She works directly with founders and CEOs, owns both strategy and execution herself, and brings in a small team of VAs for operational support when bandwidth gets tight. “That proximity builds trust, and it speeds everything up,” she explained. Founders do not brief someone who briefs someone else. They briefed Sonia. This is not just a workflow preference. It is the core of why clients stay.
Long-term retainers are the norm at SoniqueCopy. Brands expand their scope over time rather than cycling out for a new agency every year, which, in a sector defined by churn, is a meaningful signal. The agency’s client roster has included Dragon Pharma Labs, White Rabbit Energy, NeuroGum, AG1, and Krabot, among others. All through inbound demand and referral. The work itself has been the marketing.
What sets the model apart is also what she calls revenue infrastructure — channels that reinforce one another rather than run in parallel. SEO feeds the content calendar. The content calendar fuels the email program. Email informs ad creative. Conversion optimization closes the loop. When every channel serves the same objective, the math compounds over time. Revenue becomes more predictable. Acquisition costs fall. Retention holds.
What She Would Tell Anyone Starting Out
Hoey is unapologetically enthusiastic about entrepreneurship without feeling like a motivational speech. It feels like someone who burned out repeatedly in corporate, took a calculated leap in difficult circumstances, and genuinely did not look back. “I would rather make $50,000 in a year for myself than make $100,000 working for somebody else that isn’t passionate about what they do,” she said plainly. “If you put in a lot of work, as the momentum and the years come together, it compounds — and you will substantially make more if you believe in your dream.”
Her advice for anyone standing at the edge of a corporate career, wondering whether to jump, is grounded in something simpler than hustle rhetoric. Understand the why first. Know the real reason the idea will not leave you alone. Because when that reason is strong enough, the first step — which she calls the hardest thing a new entrepreneur will ever do — becomes possible. “If you say it enough times, you’ll actually believe the things that you think,” she said. “And I think that’s very powerful.”
SoniqueCopy is expanding across the domestic US market and is seeing growing interest from Canadian clients. The long-term vision is a lean, strategic ecosystem — agency services, education, and proprietary frameworks working together — built for founders who have moved past the experimentation phase and are ready to grow with intention. Not noisy. Not bloated. Just clear, compounding, and built to last.