A "different" kind of way

I attended a great networking event last night hosted by the Startup Chicks (http://www.startupchicks.net/), a group of female entrepreneurs. It was a roundtable set up where we were randomly assigned to tables, and each table had a moderator which changed 3 times, every 30 minutes. Each 30 minute session had it's own topic, and one of them was Sales & Marketing. The moderator asked me what made Element different, why a potential client would chose to work with us instead of someone else, and I realized that's a question I should probably address here as well.

The short answer is because we have experience across multiple industries and disciplines, and in our combined 16 years have accumulated a pool of knowledge and resources that makes us capable of handling virtually any size/type project. What I realized however, is that a number of other companies like ours can easily, and rightfully, attest to the same. "So what else?" the moderator prompted me...

And the somewhat longer answer is the kind of clients that we want to work with, which are businesses much like our own: the small business owner, the self-employed start-up, the family-owned company, and the local neighborhood establishments that are all so essential to their respective communities. We recognize first-hand, because we are one ourselves, how hard it is to be a small business. We know the challenges of starting and running your own company. We understand what it's like to have small or non-existent budgets that need to yield big results. We don't just talk the talk, we also walk the walk.

Prior to forming Element, Keira and I each worked for Big companies, but we also worked for Small ones as well. And because recessions don't discriminate, we saw them both suffer (we were actually each laid off from one Big and one Small). The difference though is that the Small ones seem to suffer worse for longer, because of the sheer nature of being small, and that the suffering there is so much more personal. And as Keira said in an earlier post, we saw all these lemons and decided they would make some great lemonade.

For the start-ups and entrepreneurs, we realized that this is a great time for them because just as for every down there is an up, with every recession comes opportunities in a "necessity is the mother of all invention" kind of way (taking for example the multitude of products that were invented in previous recessions (http://www.billshrink.com/blog/10-products-and-innovations-from-recessions-past/#more-4021). The idea of working with people who also prefer lemonade to lemons is not only exciting, it just seems to be a natural fit.

For the existing small business, we realized this can be a very scary time in more of a "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" kind of way. We've been down that road too (and are still on it). In talking to our friends and family who own or work for small businesses, we found that many of them are having to market themselves for the first time, or are realizing that their marketing efforts are suddenly their key to staying in business. The compounding part of that challenge is that, again, due to their sheer nature of being small, they don't have the knowledge or the resources to handle it themselves. This is where we come in, and can come in as much or as little as needed.

And not to get all contrived and patriotic, but we realize that this country is built on small businesses. That's the "feel good" part of what we do. We can bring Big company ideas to Small company scales and budgets. We can offer our clients the same level of service and attention that larger companies command, but only smaller companies tend to deliver. We view our clients as partners and acknowledge that our success is directly related to their success in a "we're all in this together" kind of way.