From the Trenches: Marketing a Design Firm
Part 4: Principled Expansion
by Joseph Dennis Kelly II

Calculated expansion of a design firm is unlike growing a business in other industries. The team at Altitude Inc. has found a recipe for making the shift from dependence on client referrals, to independence through generating leads, toward interdependence in teaming with clients.

In less than a decade, the Boston-based product consulting firm Altitude Inc. grew from a two-person operation with a single employee huddled in a small office above a Cambridge, Massachusetts dry cleaners into a thriving firm of twenty-nine strong. Now collectively assembled in the firm's third home—a graciously accommodating Davis Square environment that's nearly a stone's throw from Harvard University and equipped with an assortment of comfortable amenities befitting a design industry leader—Altitude's current team is down to fifteen, a result of 2001's economic downturn. But its leaner team operates with an efficiency the firm has never known.

Altitude now operates as an entrepreneurially-minded enterprise. Team members willingly don multiple hats, efficiently conserve resources, and carefully expend their energies on only the most important project and client relations functions. Founder and CEO Brian Matt has successfully guided his firm from the once seemingly infinite dark days defining the early-21st century to the almost boundless exuberance electrifying the present. To realize the potentials for future market expansions that the present seems to promise, Matt's restructured his organization to add a delineated marketing and sales component, which he still guides, but with the help of a full-time business development professional. In putting into motion this component—a rarity within the product consulting industry—and positioning a non-designer in a key client interface role, Matt is demonstrating that design firms may need to reconsider how they focus their marketing energies and rethink the relationship between their business strategies and their professional responsibility of helping their firms expand and evolve.

A Past Like Many Others
Long before starting Altitude, Matt successfully realized and operated his own construction business and his own tee-shirt design enterprise. During summer break from his studies at University of Hartford and Rochester Institute of Technology, Matt operated a miniature golf course and snack bar that he constructed and owned, and which he also operated with his twin brother in their hometown of Schenectady, New York. After RIT, he joined Design Continuum, staying long enough to get an inside eye of the business before venturing out on his own. With his first firm, Wave DesignWorks, however, he quickly learned he was too young to be on his own. He needed to learn much more about the business of design before successfully realizing his entrepreneurial ambition of owning a design firm. Matt then merged his start-up with Herbst LaZar Bell's Boston office, where he eventually rose to vice president and partner. In January 1993, Matt stepped away from HLB and co-founded Altitude with Al Ball. His intention was simply to build a firm known for producing outstanding work. To accomplish this, he articulated four guiding principles that, to this day, define his approaches to developing products and operating a business: show up; tell the truth; have realistic expectations; and remain open its outcome. Matt's personal embrace of these professional principles secured Altitude's first client, Davol Pharmaceuticals, a division of CR Baird.

Matt and his team were servicing Davol for HLB just prior to Altitude. When Davol executives heard he was leaving to form his own firm, they insisted on following Matt, despite Matt's attempts to convince them to continue the program with HLB. Matt was concerned about Altitude's developing a negative reputation as a firm that steals accounts, but Davol refused to relent. Altitude accepted the opportunity to develop a surgical blood scrubbing device; HLB never blinked an eye. The project provided Altitude with a much needed stream of revenue. That and other condensed projects carried them for a year until they hit their first big break. Symbol Technologies—which today is just over a $1.5 billion company, but in 1994, according to Matt, was about a $300 million business-hired Altitude to establish the corporate design language and define the ergonomic principles for all lines of Symbol's products. It was the type of project new firms hunger for. Altitude started from scratch and delivered the results their client wanted. What was perhaps most curious about this job was the way Altitude won it.

Uncommon Ways for Generating Work
A recruiter working for Symbol contacted Matt with the hope he would recommend someone for Symbol's then-nonexistent director of design position. When the person Matt suggested was hired as the new director, this long-time associate of Matt's was eager to hire Altitude again. This experience is not isolated. Matt has found that openly sharing information with others is one of the best methods for forging relationships built on trust. In addition to enabling Matt to expand his network of business associates, industry contacts and staff, this soft selling strategy generated a significant volume of Altitude's work during the 1990s boom years: Matt's maintaining frequent contact with the firm's clients generated about ninety percent of Altitude's workload. "The remaining ten percent," reports Matt, "was purposefully mined by similar techniques applied to targeted opportunities."

Along with continuously communicating with his clients and industry associates—which he says is the easiest form of marketing—Matt consistently puts in the extra effort that positions Altitude differently than its competitors. Matt is adamant about the importance of knowing and remembering his client's personal interests over and above the relevant working business knowledge of his customer's enterprises. On a client's birthday, he sends a personalized card. When on the phone, he asks about children and talks about shared topics of interest, such as baseball, news in their industry, or current events. These are skills, he says, which today's business industry greatly lacks. He's astonished that many designers don't read the newspaper, pursue sports, or follow current events in the world or in their own communities. "They think I'm a freak," he continues, "because I talk baseball all of the time…yet they all read a certain kind of book…They only read design magazines and trendy biz-books or BusinessWeek [because of its IDEA design awards]. I strongly believe in reading this material myself; I just balance it within the world around me."

The reality that Matt describes is that such self-imposed, socially exclusive behavior ultimately restricts a firm's capability to compete. Key team members are often unable to develop informal relationships with clients because they lack a working business vocabulary and the language of common social interests that usually comprise non-work-related conversations. Such conversations—and the lack of ability to hold such conversations—can make or break deals. Clients who themselves may not be design people and not a part of the design scene—but who have a project and who need a design team—often want to hire someone with whom they can relate on some kind of personal level. Not as friends, but as fellow team members working together. Not having the skills to informally communicate with clients often makes building trust an unnecessarily difficult process. To combat this at Altitude, Matt encourages all employees to teach, guest lecture, publish, participate in student critiques, attend conferences, go to trade shows, stay in touch with good people, mentor, and join relevant organizations. In short, to go out and engage the world beyond design. The ability to maintain informal relationships with clients is an important a tool for generating new work.


Matt is most adamant that his senior-level staff form informal relationships with clients so staff members have an established channel for approaching clients about upcoming projects at their company. Camaraderie helps a firm gets its foot more easily in the door. As a result, Altitude's clients often act as the firm's unofficial sales force. "When you do really good work," says Matt, "and you stay in contact with people, your clients will do the selling for you." Contacts at multi-department client companies have introduced Altitude team members and recommended the firm to other key decision-makers in other departments or divisions within the client's company. These contacts have also introduced and recommended the firm to other industry associates.

This method has produced a significant amount of work with minimal effort. The result is a client list that reads as a who's who of product manufacturing firms: Raytheon, Tyco, Honeywell, Oster, Vicks, Lego, Herman Miller, Crayola, Kensington, Polaroid, 3M, Brita, Hasbro, TRW, Tupperware, Sunbeam, Motorola, Bose, Fisher-Price, Gillette, Ericsson, HP/Compaq, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Colgate-Palmolive, among many others.

Along with the prestige and numerous contacts working with such well-esteemed leaders provides, these relationships have often allowed Altitude to push the design envelope further than they might otherwise have with smaller firms unable to afford taking chances. Such pushing generated the firm's twenty IDEA awards and numerous international design and engineering recognitions. Most recently, the firm won an IDSA/BusinessWeek Catalyst Award for their DeWalt Worksite Radio/Charger and an IDEA for their Nike High-Performance Golf Tee concepts.

The Early Path to Growth
In the 1990s, when Matt wanted to work on a particular item, he simply pursued the company and worked his way through it via an internal web of departmental recommendations and relationship building. When he wanted to work on tools, he approached Black & Decker, networked his way to an appropriate contact, offered to make a presentation, pursued them until they invited him in, and then delivered a presentation that impressed B&D's executives enough that they gave him a trial engagement. B&D's satisfaction with Altitude's work quickly led to other projects garnered by networking through B&D's five-company umbrella: divisions were recommending Altitude to other internal divisions. That was ten years ago, and that relationship continues to thrive. "Historically," says Matt, "we have taken the approach of a smaller number of great clients that give us repeat business rather than one-shot/high-turnover clients. Our retention rate is around ninety percent. Typically, a mature client relationship is seven years, but we have a few clients that are going on eleven years."

Altitude's success rests in its embrace of a core design-to-value methodology. Matt finds that laying his cards on the table for others to see is the best way to build relationships. He says that going too far is the only method for knowing when he has gone far enough. For him, design-to-value is comprised of three parts: Having the things that make a firm competitive, like adding an engineering component when other firms also offer this service; Removing all potential negatives, such as offering clients a convenient location with easy parking and a friendly office environment and helping them arrange lodging, transportation, and dining reservations; And, most significant, delivering what he calls the wow factor, that little something special that gives joy to the user, whether it's part of the product's design or it's Altitude's receptionist baking homemade cookies and muffins for client meetings and her remembering each client's taste preferences for their future visits. This type of attention to serving his clients has garnered the loyalty of Altitude's clients. Matt remembers that in the 1990s, Altitude's biggest limitation to growth was hiring good people, not selling. But now, he says, it's a different market and an entirely different ball game. Firms cannot depend on past relationship to sustain the future.

Confronting Challenging Circumstances
As the first signs of 2001's long-sloping economic downturn began to take hold and eventually cripple the business world, Altitude's work schedule simultaneously slowed and the number of new projects declined. "Before 2001," says Matt, "about eighty percent of our opportunities, which involve face-to-face invitations, turned into RFPs. We still managed to land about fifty percent of those projects in the weak economy." The boom times promoted laziness; lean times demanded working smarter to ensure survival. In response to having less work, Altitude trimmed its staff of twenty-nine to fifteen, keeping only the essential personnel needed to keep itself going. In this new culture, everyone became an engineer/designer-entrepreneur. Team members now help conserve resources, reduce expenses, and generate new work. In the boom days, when training was needed, many employees would go to an outside resource, most retaining only about twenty-five percent of the training. Now, only one staff member attends classes, and only when absolutely necessary. And now that the team member who attends classes is also responsible for training the rest of the staff upon their return to the office, this individual's level of retention is much higher.

Other benefits of working more efficiently are equally impressive. Altitude's now highly organized and thrifty distribution of supplies also includes the cycling of equipment and computers, which means not buying the new Mac just because it looks cool, but purchasing such tools only when absolutely necessary. Such stringency informs all operations, including the hiring of staff members. Before they seek someone, Matt says the firm is razor sharp about its needs.

Increasing to Expand
The post-2001 economy had changed the culture at Altitude. As late as six months ago, the firm still expended a great amount of energy than prior years in getting new work and keeping work going. In early 2003, Matt realized he was wearing too many hats, and that the effort he put in to generate new work was exhausting him. He knew that without the proper help, he would soon burn out. More important, he concluded that his performing all of the primary business development activities, when he was already overextended with other responsibilities, was depriving the company of achieving its maximum growth potential. He began searching for a marketing person to bring on board, someone who could support and complement his sales responsibilities in an active way. In mid-2003, he thought he found the right person. But much to his disappointment, that relationship ended within a month. Matt explains a lack of appropriate motivation: he wasn't able to make a phone call without a hand-written script, and he also wanted Matt to initiate his introduction to the firm's clients. Matt started his search again and re-interviewed many of his original candidates over a period of several months.

His ideal candidate, he decided, was a designer or engineer who could talk with clients, contacts, and other firms about Altitude and its work. He wanted someone from inside the industry that he could move up into marketing and nurture as a deal closer. But he came up empty in his search. According to Matt, there are maybe twenty of these people—what he calls hybrids—successfully working in the United States. So he turned instead to his alternate plan of bringing in a sales professional from the outside. He knew such a person would need much education about the product consulting business and would need to learn how to sensitively talk about design to clients. He called in some of the people he interviewed the first time around and found himself most interested in Dan LaRochelle, an accomplished sales pro who received both his Bachelor's (marketing and finance) and his MBA (product development and marketing high-technology products) from Boston's prestigious Babson College, an institution known for educating international-caliber entrepreneurs. With a background in selling software and technical products, and ambitions to work in the product development industry, LaRochelle stood above the rest.

Forging a New Role
LaRochelle, who Matt describes as a classic sales guy who is super-energetic and self-motivated, impressed the Altitude team with his manner, ability to communicate, and strong and positive presentation of himself. What sold Matt and his senior management was that LaRochelle doesn't quite look like a salesman. "Our profession is so touchy-feely," explains Matt, "that as soon as somebody thinks somebody is a salesperson, even if the salesperson is one of the nicest people in the world, designers put up a barrier, and they think 'used car salesman.'" In the six months since LaRochelle got the nod, he and Matt have been working together to carve a place for a marketing and sales component within Altitude. Prior to his search for a marketing person, Matt defined the responsibilities of the position as generating leads, making cold calls, writing proposals, closing deals, and working with Matt in building ongoing relationships with potential, new, and former Altitude clients. After much experimentation, Matt realized LaRochelle needed time to get up to speed and acquire an in-depth knowledge of the industry. Together, they decided that LaRochelle should begin by focusing on what he does best: cold calling and lead generation.

Matt's hope is that within the next two years, LaRochelle will emerge as a solid deal closer. To get him there, Matt and his team are helping LaRochelle acquire a language for talking about design, developing the ability to talk sensitively to clients and design professionals about projects and the design process, and understanding the dynamics of the personalities that drive the product consulting industry. Matt likens these dynamics to two familiar personalities—comparing engineers to dogs and designers to cats: "Engineers don't care what the environment looks like, where they work, where they sit, if their fly is zipped. If you roll up a newspaper and smack them on the nose, they'll still come back and love you. Designers are like a cat: 'I'll love you if I feel like it today. If the litter box isn't just right, I'm going to pee on the couch. Don't touch me and I don't want another cat here. And this is my space, I know you think you own the house, but this is really my space.' A regular sales guy doesn't get this. He thinks he can pressure sell. But engineers and designers don't understand this language. They're not trained this way."

Traversing Boundaries
Coming into this position, LaRochelle knew the product consulting industry was a tight-knit community that would prove a difficult challenge for a traditional sales professional to penetrate. Now that he's inside, he's found that the industry's greatest lack, much to its detriment, is individuals who have a formal business education. This lack of a link means that LaRochelle must find ways to translate business language into an idiom that design industry professionals can understand. "The industry doesn't have much appreciation for individuals who are business professionals, regardless if the business person has a technical background or not," says LaRochelle, who has found that his personal technical-oriented pastimes, such as building cars and repairing televisions, have helped orient him to working with designers and engineers. "Matt is different than most in this industry. He understands what it means to run a business and to generate business. He has a very practical mindset…and knows what it is that the firm is trying to do in servicing its customers. It's not so much about the art of design as much as it is in servicing the customer and giving them what they need to service their market with what will work in their market. Selling is about getting connected with people who have opportunities for product consulting firms to help them. Firms are trying to run a business and trying to grow a business and the task is finding people with money as well as projects that need to be accomplished. Design firms are not selling art. Designers get too wrapped up in this idea that they're selling art. They're selling their ability to perform a particular task and to solve a particular problem. They're problem solvers."

LaRochelle believes that the greatest challenge principals have in running the sales and marketing components of their businesses is their lack formal business training. "It behooves any design firm owner," he explains, "to look at a true business development person with open eyes and open arms and embrace what they can learn from a formally trained business person. You can't learn business just by doing business. You've got to have some formal training in it as well as experience to avoid making mistakes. That's why most design firms stay small, because they don't have the necessary training to put in place strategies to help them grow." The secret to successful selling, he adds, cannot be pinpointed to any one thing, but is the result of a variety of elements: the relationship, the service, the product, the experience, the location of the firm, and the capabilities of the team, among many other factors. "Any one element cannot close the deal. It's not only about the relationships. There are lots of nice people out there, but the fact of the matter is the people you sell to have enough friends; they don't need a friend. They need a firm who can perform a particular task for them within the time constraints and the budget that they have, and who can deliver the quality that they need. It sounds cold, but that's just the way it is."

What's most compelling about Altitude's revamping of its organizational structure to include a sales professional as a key team member, is that it resolves the challenge many mid-size firms face once they hit the ten-year-old plateau. This is the juncture when firms usually reassess their progress, look towards the future, and consider developing or rewriting long-range plans. The ten-year mark is a time for realizing that passive word-of-mouth marketing strategies are unstable and unpredictable, even if these activities are generating much present work. Such strategies, more significantly, often deter, and even prohibit, expansion. At Altitude, Matt's answer to meeting these challenges is to embrace the core values and guiding principles that built his firm, and use them as the foundation for developing a proactive and delineated marketing and sales component comprised of an experienced business development team that, for now, is functioning as a powerful lead and project generation force. Perhaps the best analogy for understanding a design firm's need to expand its operations to include a marketing and sales component, according to Matt, is habit #7 of Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Sharpen the Saw. This habit is the culmination of Covey's six previous habits, encouraging the transition from a state of dependence on others, to one of independence through one's own actions, towards a condition of interdependence among partners working together in a larger network that allows everyone involved to flourish. For Matt, this means actively choosing clients that are a good fit for Altitude. This also means working to strengthen the capabilities of the firm, and encouraging individual team members to become stronger and wiser in the process.

Other articles in the series:
Part 1: Green Desire (Profile of Jamie Salm)
Part 2: Making the Leap (Profile of Jeff Miller)
Part 3: Beyond Guerrilla: Survivor Marketing (Profile of id-ONE)

From the Trenches is a six-part series that examines the methods contemporary design firms use to market themselves to their clients and establish an identity within the industry. Each of the first five installments focuses on a firm at a particular stage of evolution. Installments one and two profiled design firms under two-years-old, the first operated by a recent design school graduate, the second by an established industry pro now striking out on his own. The third installment featured a five-year-old firm embracing traditional marketing methods to forge a powerful presence in the high-tech industry. This installment examines a well-established and award-winning eleven-year-old firm that provides new and established companies a model for rethinking conventional design firm business practices. Installment five will look at a firm that has weathered the industry's feast-or-famine tides for more than fifteen years. The final installment will sum up the series by comparing the marketing and public relations methods that contemporary design firms use with the methods employed by firms who are battling for a competitive edge in other innovative industries.

Philadelphia-based journalist Joseph Dennis Kelly II primarily writes about design—architectural, object, interior, and urban—and its relationship to contemporary culture, events, politics, socio-economics, and education. A graduate of the University of the Arts, his work is often published by Metropolis, Architectural Record, Architectural Lighting, Architecture, I.D. (International Design), and ICON. His work has also appeared in World Architecture, Interior Design, and Clear. He can be reached at jdkelly.kellycomm@verizon.net

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