when i set out as a corporate refugee looking to open a marketing, design + web agency for small/mid-sized businesses and startups, a lot of people told me i was nuts. i don’t think so. the small business marketplace is full of vital, exciting firms driven by some of the most innovative thinkers i know.
and these growing businesses deserve strong marketing advice event though their small budgets and low name recognition make them poor clients for traditional agencies.
in fact, serving small businesses meant pulling apart the entire agency model and rebuilding it from an entrepreneurial perspective.
we had to flexible, we had to be prepared to offer small, a-la-carte design services as well as full-service marketing plans and everything in between. we had to be capable of working around an entrepreneur’s hectic schedule. we needed to make sure that every dollar in our proposals tied to a specific deliverable so our clients would understand where their investment was going. blind retainer payments and fat proposals don’t fly in this market.
we also needed to charge pennies on the dollar against our big agency counterparts to ensure that our target clients could afford us. and in fact, our budgets usually run 50-75% less than what a traditional agency or design house charges.
our tactics needed to change as well. our clients wouldn’t be able to afford mass media advertising and so we needed to build marketing plans around less expensive initiatives with higher roi.
the entrepreneur is a completely different animal than the corporate marketing director; they have different needs, different challenges and more at stake…
i developed my toolkit and methodology specifically for entrepreneurs and have tuned my approach by working exclusively with small business owners 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
have a marketing challenge that could use a fellow small business owner’s perspective? drop me a line.
