Ah, Media Orchard. It’s idyllic here — green, lush, fun-loving, carefree.
It is all those things, that is, until those pesky Idea Grove clients of ours swoop in like the Valkyrie pilots in Avatar and blow up our hometree with their incessant demands for this Unobtanium they call “work.”
And so Media Orchard goes barren for months (and sometimes longer) at a time.
That’s OK; we love our clients. They are more important than our little tree in the blogosphere. In fact, one of the things that makes me proudest about the Idea Grove is that we keep our clients — they rarely leave our PR Pandora after they arrive.
The average tenure of Idea Grove clients since my wife and I founded the company in 2005 is almost three years. That’s pretty good, I think, considering we never demand more than a month-to-month commitment.
But the downside of having a small business where your existing clients stick around is that I have often had to turn away client work — and I certainly haven’t done much new business development work. I’ve been too busy to do it.
Recently I decided that, while this was a nice formula for working around the clock, it wasn’t the best strategy for growing a business.
And so I’ve decided to grow the Idea Grove.
I’m bringing on a partner, Rob Huckels, whom I’ve known for nearly a decade. When I was vice president of corporate communications at Belo Corp., Rob led operations for our design firm, Eisenberg and Associates. And when I left Belo to form the Idea Grove, Rob, who had moved on to become vice president of marketing at a medical equipment firm, was one of our first clients.
Rob is helping me expand the Idea Grove to become an integrated communications firm with services encompassing PR, Web design, print design, social media and SEO. I already do all these jobs for my clients (although this isn’t adequately reflected in our current Web site) — but with Rob’s help we’re going to blow the sucker out.
You’ll learn more when the new hometree — that is, our new Web site — goes up in the next few weeks.
Oh, and since we’ll also be building a staff, with other folks to help with the client work, I’m hopeful that I’ll have time to blog again in this space soon.
Stay tuned.
