Royal Oak's Visual IMPACT! reinvents customer base

Visual IMPACT! used to do a lot of marketing work for advertising agencies, so much so that all that work for a few agencies turned into the bread and butter of the downtown Royal Oak-based firm. That is until the recession hit and that work largely evaporated.

Today Visual IMPACT! still does a lot of marketing work, but for more customers (mostly small businesses) working on small projects. Those projects now include production studio work, Internet marketing and creating mobile applications.

"In 1991 we were one of the first 1,000 websites on the Internet," says Mark Besh, president of Visual IMPACT!. "But we're a multi-media company. We do all media, even a little print."

Reinventing Visual IMPACT!'s customer base allowed it to hold its own during the economic downturn, maintaining a staff of six employees, an intern and 12 independent contractors. The company expects to hire another 2-5 people and 6-12 independent contractors in 2011 on the strength of tripling its customer base or better.

Source: Mark Besh, president of Visual IMPACT!
Writer: Jon Zemke

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