by Elliott Easterling, CEO / Co-founder

It was a pleasant surprise this month to discover that we made the Inc 500 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. There are few times in the blur of a growing business that you can sit back and reflect on where you‘ve come from, and where you are going. The Inc 500 notice was one of those times.

Red Bricks Media began when Craig Hordlow and I met in an art gallery in 2003. Shortly thereafter we made plans to start “New Co”, an SEO agency that focused on the needs of global brands and sophisticated marketers. Our first task was to untangle the mass of speaker wires in Craig’s kitchen so that we use it as an office. Not long after that, we were moving into a real “office” above a gym with four employees and a roll of boutique clients.

Our first big account was Adobe. For that I want to thank Kate Warner and Joan Bodensteiner. Because she had begun her own career at an agency that started in a house a couple blocks away, Joan had the courage to give a trial PPC project to a startup agency. I have learned that success in business is just as much about luck as it is about execution. And apparently, it’s also about your mother. Joan took the meeting because Kate Warner, my mother and Adobe employee, called Joan’s boss on her cell phone on the road and said, “You don’t know me but you need to meet with my son.” Adobe has a very good culture, and my mom has a presence, so we got the meeting…and the rest was execution.

Execution is a powerful word. As a startup its dual meanings hang over you like, well, an executioner’s blade. Each new project is both a chance to execute impeccable work, and an opportunity for failure. In a marketing service company, your team is the deciding factor between these two fates. Our people got us to where we are today and our people will get us to where we want to go. It is to those people that the Inc 500 list placement is credited to.

For me, the last five years can be summed up in one number – 354. It is a number that I am proud of and will never forget. It is funny to derive joy from three digits. It’s funny what makes a person tick.

But as a data-driven marketer it is not just numbers that make me tick. I am also a competitive person who hungers for the next challenge. The number 354 is a great milestone and now I want to see what is beyond it. At Red Bricks Media, we like benchmarks because we like to beat them. So please excuse us for not resting on our laurels. We have work to do.

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Tags: fastest-growing companies, inc 500, inc 5000, Red Bricks Media

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 9:10 am and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.