DeCODE Digital is a 2026 SBA Small Business Awards

We’re a finalist. And we’re still a bit stunned.

There is a particular kind of quiet that falls over a small office when an email lands that nobody was expecting. That happened to us this week.

DeCODE Digital has been named a finalist in the Innovation in Business category of the 2026 SBA Small Business Awards, presented by the Stirling Business Association in partnership with the City of Stirling.

We entered because it felt like a useful exercise. Sitting down and writing an honest account of what you have built, what you have changed and what you have learned is a rare thing for a small business to do. Most of us are too busy doing the work to describe it. Being named a finalist off the back of that is something else entirely, and we are genuinely chuffed.

Thank you, sincerely

To Christine Trimboli and the entire team at the Stirling Business Association, thank you. Not just for the recognition, but for creating a program that gives local businesses a reason to stop, take stock and celebrate the work. That opportunity is the real prize, and the SBA does it with a level of care that shows.

Thanks also to the judging panel, who had the unenviable task of narrowing down what we understand was a very strong field. Reading the finalist list for our category alone, it is clear we are in outstanding company. Every one of those businesses has earned their place.

And to our clients: this one is largely yours. Innovation in a services business is not something you do in a lab. It happens because someone trusts you enough to let you try a better way of doing things. Thank you for that trust.

What “innovation” has actually looked like for us

We will not rehash our entire submission here, partly because there is a gala to get to and partly because some of it is still cooking. But the broad strokes are worth sharing, because the thinking behind them applies to almost any small business right now.

We rebuilt how we build. Over the past couple of years we have developed our own internal tooling and AI-assisted workflows that take the grind out of website production. Structure, scaffolding, repetitive configuration, quality checks: the parts of a build that eat hours without adding creative value. The result is that our team spends more of its time on strategy, design and problem solving, and less on the mechanical middle. We have written before about why the best web builds still need a human at the wheel, and we meant it. The technology accelerates the work. It does not replace the judgement.

We automated the boring bits of running an agency. Onboarding, reporting, site monitoring, maintenance routines. Small businesses lose an extraordinary amount of capacity to administrative drag, and we were no exception. Systematising that work has freed up real hours, which we have poured straight back into client outcomes rather than headcount.

We changed how we approach search. The way people find businesses online has shifted more in the past two years than in the decade before it. AI-driven search, answer engines and zero-click results have rewritten the rules of visibility. Rather than wait for the dust to settle, we have leaned in: adapting our SEO methodology, expanding how we measure and report, and helping clients show up in the places their customers are actually looking now, not the places they were looking in 2019.

We grew, carefully. All of the above has underpinned steady growth in our team, our client base and the scale of the projects we take on. We have been deliberate about it. Growth that outpaces quality is not growth we are interested in.

None of that is revolutionary on its own. Innovation in a small business rarely arrives as a single dramatic breakthrough. It looks like a hundred small decisions to do something better than you did it last time, made consistently, until one day you look up and the business has changed shape.

The part we are proudest of: the work stayed here

There is a well-worn path in our industry. As an agency grows, the production work gets pushed offshore or handed to a rotating cast of contractors, margins get protected, and the value quietly leaves the state along with the code.

We did not want to walk that path, and because of the way we have built our systems we have not had to.

Every website we produce is still built here in Western Australia, by our own team. The efficiency we have gained through better tooling and automation is exactly what has made that viable. Where another agency might solve a capacity problem by sending the work overseas, we solved ours by making the work itself faster and more consistent, without touching quality. The jobs, the skills, the intellectual property and the money all stay local.

The second effect is one we did not fully anticipate. Those same efficiencies let a small Perth team pitch for and win work that would otherwise have gone to much larger agencies, most of them over east. Projects that would once have been out of reach on scale alone are now well within it. That matters for us, obviously. It matters more for the local businesses on the other side of those projects.

Because the flip side of efficiency is affordability. We are able to deliver genuinely sophisticated websites and marketing systems at a price point that small and growing WA businesses can actually reach. That is not a discount, it is a structural advantage passed on. It means a business that would otherwise have settled for a template, or waited another two years, can get into the market properly now, and can keep more of its capital for the thing that actually grows a company: promoting it.

Helping local businesses compete without draining their working capital to do it feels like a reasonable definition of innovation to us.

Why the City of Stirling makes this one land differently

We could have entered a lot of awards. This is the one we wanted.

Stirling is not just a service area on a map for us. It is where we live, where we raise our kids, where we do the school run and the grocery shop and the Saturday morning coffee. When we talk about keeping value in the local economy, we are talking about our own neighbourhood, and about the businesses we walk past every week.

There is something quietly brilliant about being able to build a modern, technically ambitious digital business from right here, without needing to move to Sydney or Melbourne to do it, and without sending the work somewhere cheaper to make the numbers work. That the City of Stirling and the Stirling Business Association invest in recognising that is not a small thing. It is one of the reasons a community like this holds onto its businesses and its people.

What’s next

The winners will be announced at the 2026 SBA Small Business Awards Gala on Friday 4 September 2026 from 6:00pm at Maylands Peninsula Golf Course. We will be there, dressed up and quietly nervous, cheering on every business in the room.

There is also a publicly voted Community Choice category, with voting due to open in the next few days. We do not have the link yet, but we will share it across our channels the moment it is released. If you have enjoyed working with us, we would love your support when it goes live.

For now, thank you to the Stirling Business Association, to the City of Stirling, and to everyone who has backed this business along the way. Being named a finalist is a lovely thing. Getting to do this work at all is the better one.

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DeCODE Digital is a Perth-based web design, development and digital marketing agency working with businesses across Western Australia and beyond. If you would like to talk about your website, your search visibility or where AI genuinely fits in your marketing, get in touch.