In Our Mind The Squad is Going to Carolina

Aside from being a great James Taylor hit, it’s also a thing for The Marketing Squad in 2019. The ownership of The Squad over the years always had a vision of opening up another office in another city. I elaborated a bit on this back in early January when we wrote about Jud rejoining the team remotely from Charlotte.

We never really envisioned a presence in Indy, Cincy, Nashville, or Lexington. We have clients in those cities and we can service them and still have face to face meetings in Louisville or their town. We saw an expansion being to a city that’s a ways away. Would it be Austin, Colorado Springs, somewhere in Florida, or in the mid-midwest like St. Louis? We never really knew until the stars aligned this past fall.

Our former graphic designer Jud was interested in making a return and he had lifetime roots in Charlotte. He was someone we knew we could build a team around. Our new VP of Business Development Marshall Fall was born in Asheville, NC and grew up in Charlotte. His family still lives there as a matter of fact. All those signs were too much to look past. Outside of having to deal with some Tarheel and Blue Devil fans, we couldn’t see the downside of expanding into the Carolinas.

In my mind, we were never willing to jeopardize Louisville operations in order to expand into a different market or even a different product offering. We’ve stayed close to our core with natural expansions of services over the years. I believe in our Core Values strongly, and there’s no chance I’d be willing to risk operating as Trusted Allies or Faithful Stewards because we wanted to chase new things. We were only willing to do it knowing we’d created solid processes, implemented an operating system in EOS, and build a talented team of people.

That being said the timing was right in 2019. The plan is very organic. We’ll be bringing Jud up to Louisville for about 8 weeks in 2019 and sending Marshall and others down to Charlotte about the same amount of time. We believe this synergy will help us establish some roots in Charlotte. We’re not announcing office space, additional hires, or anything of that nature yet. As Truth Tellers, we’d rather avoid the hype, and tell you when we’ve actually done something beyond dreaming.

That being said, real actions are taking place. Marshall rolled out a "Hello Charlotte" video before his most recent visit. Then he spent a week down there back in late January building relationships and making connections with Jud. The two of them wrapped up the week enthused about the potential. They shot a recap video of their time in Charlotte (below) and tomorrow we’re publishing a post about a huge Google event they attended while in the area.

Our goals in 2019 are simple in regards to Charlotte. We’d like to bring on 10 new relationships in 2019. That means we’ll get to serve 10 organizations by helping them build their new website in Charlotte, or helping them Tell Their Story and Grow Their Business via video production, or even designing a new logo for their brand. At some point, we’ll be bringing our bread and butter services to Charlotte as we add staff. That’s our ongoing digital marketing packages, programs and partnerships, and extending even to our Outsourced CMO program.

Hopefully next year we’ll be talking about our quaint little office that’s starting to take root in Charlotte. That’s a lot of hard work and effort away, but we’ll pursue it with passion and see where it takes us.