These Fish Have Manners: The Second Decade of TMC Digital Media

As you might have noticed, there's a new coat of paint on the digital walls here at TMC Digital Media. While our new website has been a long time in the making, creating a new website for the sake of creating a new website is never a good idea. There's a purpose behind our paint.

We've been in business for over a decade now. It's hard to believe time goes by so fast, but isn't that the nature of time? It's elusive. In one breath, a decade seems like nothing, like yesterday. In other ways, we realize so much has happened, and it feels more like a century. But this isn't about time, or us, or our new website. It's about YOU.

How Can We Help You Grow?

We started as a marketing agency creating great content, cool brand marks, websites, videos, and other important collateral. We did much of this work on the HubSpot platform because we know how much value it provides in helping businesses determine the ROI of their marketing efforts. But we quickly realized that cool graphics and social media posts aren't enough for our clients to make a significant impact.

Today, we've moved beyond marketing. Yes, it's still part of our core competencies, but our experience tells us it's also important to implement sales tools and develop a service plan. Today, we're a growth agency, and you don't hire a growth agency because you just want a flashy website or a cool podcast. You hire a growth agency because it knows how to take those things -- and more -- and turn them into real business opportunity. As a creative director, of course good creative still matters to me, but I'd be lying if I didn't say you have to go beyond an email template or a tagline. To be effective, you have to know the best practices for leveraging good creative, and that's what we do here at TMC.

We help our customers grow today because we've also grown -- in our service offerings, in our relationships, on our own team, and in our experience. Today, we look at marketing for what it really is, a critical component of your business that doesn't exist in a vacuum. Today, successful marketing is interconnected to every part of the business, and we've made it our business to go beyond successful marketing.

The Role of Change in Business

On the previous version of our website, we created what was sort of a Gold Fish Mission Statement based on our love of the movie Jerry Maguire. These fish have manners, of course, and they're coming with us. But to consider another quote, the former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, once said, "The moment the rate of change outside an organization exceeds the rate of change within it, the end is near." So what did we do? We updated that mission statement. We recreated it here.

There are still important takeaways from our original, of course. Take Kodak, for example. Instead of zooming in on why they existed, they chose to frame themselves by what they did. In short, a company known for preserving memories was left behind because they were hell-bent on how those memories were preserved. Instead of listening to what people wanted, they tried to dictate it.

At TMC, we're not in the business of mandating. We're in the growth business. We help companies evolve through digital transformation. If people are going to the web to find answers to their problems, we help our customers provide the information those people are searching for. If executives want to see the sales data influenced by a website chat feature, we provide it. If a company doesn't realize that adding a digital service component can create new marketing opportunities, we help them plan for that and execute it.

The Evolution of an Industry

I'll start by saying this. We're thrilled to see other agencies similar to ours in the foodservice equipment industry because, when we started, we were the only ones. Competition between manufacturers, reps, and even digital marketing agencies benefits everyone. It helps drive innovation, and as it pertains to our services, it validates what we've been saying for over a decade.

We're doing different things now, of course. If we weren't, we wouldn't be here today, launching a new website with a revised mission statement and new service offerings that matter in today's digital landscape. But we're not stopping there. Many companies still have an old-school way of looking at sales and marketing, so there's still work to do. When you limit your business exclusively to traditional methods because they worked in the past – in effect, rejecting change that can benefit you in the future – you risk becoming another Kodak.

Change is going to happen whether we like it or not. As Charles Darwin observed, it isn’t the strongest or most intelligent who survive. It’s the ones who are most adaptable to change.