Customer: Piers Shepperd
Company: Stagelink Limited (www.stagelink.com)
Tell Us A Little Bit About What Your Company Does And What Services You Provide:
Stagelink provides specialist technical design and production services to the live event industries. We have worked all over the world, helping teams from the Rolling Stones and U2 to the Opening Ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics and 2010 Vancouver Olympics. We provide specialist 3d technical design solutions using AutoCAD and Rhino, technical drawings, specifications and technical direction. Much of our work involves the coordination of lighting, sound, video, rigging and staging teams to ensure that everybody is heading in the right direction. Our real ‘buzz’ is bringing together hugely complex projects and teams to realize a creative dream.
How Did You Get Started:
After leaving school, I worked as a lighting technician on events all over the world, before moving onto the technical design of stage sets.
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Tags: Blue By You, small business
Company: Junebug Weddings (www.junebugweddings.com)
Tell Us A Little Bit About What Your Company Does And What Services You Provide:
Junebug Weddings is an online wedding magazine featuring the award winning wedding blog, What Junebug Loves, and a Plan Your Wedding Hotlist of the best wedding professionals in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. Our invitation only network is expanding this year to include the world’s best wedding photographers.
How Did You Get Started:
Junebug Weddings is owned by Blair deLaubenfels, Christy Weber, and Kim Bamberg. After a decade of running successful photography businesses, we decided to share what we knew about the best products and people in the wedding industry with newly engaged couples worldwide. We’re thrilled to provide inspiration and advice to stylish couples everywhere.
How Long Have You Been In Business And How Many Employees Do You Currently Have:
We’ve been in business four years, and we have six employees.
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Tags: Blue By You, small business
Name: Becky Shankle
Company: EcoModernism (www.eco-modernism.com)
Tell Us A Little Bit About What Your Company Does And What Services You Provide:
If modern kitchen design and sustainable materials had a baby, it would be EcoModernism. We design, assemble and install residential kitchens. We start with IKEA cabinet components – because they are extremely affordable – and finish them out with as many green materials as possible. Some of those materials include quartz countertops, bamboo shelving, cork flooring, recycled glass tile, and zero VOC paints. Green building materials haven’t become mainstream enough yet to get the price down. By using IKEA to save on the boxes, we’re able to shift the budget toward the more expensive finishes, and still come out cheaper than a fully custom kitchen. We design the kitchen to meet the client’s needs and goals, functionally and aesthetically. Once we lock in on that, we compile the order and help them place it.
The average IKEA kitchen comes in about 150 flat packed boxes. We offer an assembly and installation service, which starts with verifying the order’s completion when it gets there. Then we assemble it all, install it and help coordinate the countertop templating. We also dispose of all recyclable packing materials at a local facility.
How Did You Get Started?
I grew up in neighborhoods that had houses under construction, so the smell of wood and sound of saws and hammers has never gotten out of my blood. I started in commercial architectural design in 1986. Did that for 10 years, then moved into space planning and management for a dot com company. Got laid off from there in 2001 and have basically been on my own since. I find the project size & lifespan of residential design a lot more enjoyable than commercial projects. I’ll always be involved in design in some capacity.
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Tags: Blue By You, small business
Name: Benjamin Christie
Company: Gourmet Ads www.gourmetads.com
Tell us a little bit about what your company does and what services you provide. Gourmet Ads is a global vertical advertising network with offices in America, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Gourmet Ads represents quality food, wine and beer websites throughout the world, aggregating and managing advertising across these highly relevant websites and blogs. We focus on delivering branding campaigns which drive sales and customer acquisition.
- How did you get started? We started originally in Australia, but demand from both advertisers and publishers in North America allowed us to start international operations. Now we have solid businesses in four countries (America, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia) and growing rapidly into new countries.
How long have you been in business? We started in May 2007.
- Who is your target audience? Our clients vary greatly, in terms of the industries that they are from. We work with all sorts of food and wine companies, plus additionally we work with financial, automotive, travel companies and many more. The common goal for all our clients is they want to reach our unique online audience of female 27-55 years old who are commonly the the household grocery buyer.
How does your company stay connected with clients and your business community? We stay connected with clients mostly via email and phone. The ability for BatchBook to sit in between our email server tracking all incoming and outgoing email communications is essential for client communication. Being able to look at client cards and see previous discussions has been one of the reasons we switched to BatchBook from our previous CRM provider.
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Tags: batchbook, Blue By You, Community
Congratulations to Kai Jesse of Karlsruhe, Germany. He’s the lucky member of the Blue by You user group who was randomly selected to receive the Small Business Starter Kit.
Thanks to all our Blue by You members who participated in the survey. If you’d like to be a member of Blue by You, our virtual user group, please let us know.
UPDATE: Here’s a little more information about Kai and his business in his own words:
“I’m a freelancer and consultant for Enterprise 2.0-technologies since 2007. I’m planning to build an enterprise-2.0-platform for small and smallest companies in Germany next year.
I’ve been in business over 10 years. I was CEO of a small company called TeraSystems until last year. TeraSystems is a service provider in CRM-solutions for small and medium business. I founded TeraSystems during my study (computer science at the excellence university of karlsruhe), because I’ve felt that I’m an entrepreneur and not an employee, because the best thing at entrepreneurship is the freedom of execution and the exciting work daily.
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Tags: Blue By You, small business
