Wonder where we have been since mid-Summer?
In late July, we embarked on a joint effort with one of our clients - an advertising agency (Propaganda Methodology). In the new arrangement, all the sales, support, and admin for both firms ran through a shared team of people, and we stayed in the background, doing the website stuff.
It's been a wild ride. Not surprisingly, sometimes bigger, newer agency projects came in and pulled us away from our core business. At the same time, since agency staff were handling sales and support, we almost never spent time with the clients, and didn't even meet them in many cases.
Our new arrangement added layers of people and processes between us and our customers — and while it worked for a few clients, it didn't work for many. We realized we had lost something — we weren't nimble anymore.
And that just didn't sit right. Our success grew the way it did because we could provide a high-quality website at a good value, we had a good understanding of our clients' businesses and goals, and when you wanted to talk to Bill or Kim, you got us right away.
So we and the ad agency decided to change back to where we were before. We still have a great relationship with the folks at Propaganda. We will still provide web services to them, as a vendor, and they will still provide the other ad agency services if we need them, so all the same talent is available to all our clients.
But by returning to two separate businesses instead of trying to operate as one, we can better control the customer service that our clients receive, and we can have a much better understanding of our clients' needs when we work directly with them before ever starting a project.
We were pleased to receive the opportunity to grow our business to something new. But we are also satisfied now — with our decision to return to what we do best, once we realized that the new arrangement wasn't working the way we had hoped.
We're back now, and more nimble than ever!
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