Lisa: Donovan and Smith is a full service marketing, PR and advertising firm. We do everything from media campaigns to buying the television and radio. We do the scripting and the production of everything on a campaign in terms of consumer campaigns. We also do public relations and media relations, so if you need to get your message to special audiences, special populations, to the press. We have a full service design team. We do graphic design- the booklets and brochures and design work that you see everywhere from television to print pieces. We're very heavy in technology. We use a lot of infrastructure tools -computers and programs and software - highly specialized technology in a lot of cases.
Tom: And how do you use the computers and technology there to support that?
Lisa: Oh my - computers and technology are not necessarily a support mechanism for us - it's business for us. We communicate in every way with our computers. We're at a point now where we have so much production coming in and out of the shop. We do almost all of that via network and email. So we might set something that's a very large file size up on a site so that someone can go and access it to view it. Or if it's a small enough file we can email that to a client so they can take a look at a brochure or listen to a radio commercial or whatever it is that we're outputting.
Tom: How did the relationship between Donovan and Smith and KI get started?
Lisa: Well, Donovan and Smith was lucky enough - you know I'm one of the principals here and in my past life I had met the owners of KI Technology. So it was really just a relationship that unfolded so naturally. We just started doing the media buying. We started buying television and radio for KI Technology - in the meantime, never really having a plan ourselves for technology. And again one of those happy circumstances is - that as we learn about you and what you do, we began to understand that having a plan for technology and backups and making sure that we're protecting and preserving the things that we produce every day - as well as what the future holds, what kind of new improvements do we need. We basically needed a full consultant when it came to technology and a technology plan for ourselves.
Tom: And KI has always been able to do that then - be your IT department?
Lisa: You know I think it's more than that, because an IT department is one thing - it kind of speaks to having a business that understands what IT is, what they do and what needs to happen. We're not there. You know, we use technology and it runs our business. At the same time, we don't really know very much about. So we don't know what things could be tremendously helpful to us and those are the kinds of things that KI has been able to tell us. That the server we're currently using isn't necessarily built to be the kind of server that we need it to be and that something a little different - an investment in capital improvement for us - could create tremendous time savings, and have remarkable capacity for saving files and sharing things and those kinds of things.
We need more than somebody who can come in and fix a problem. We need somebody who can tell us what we don't know and have the kind of credibility for us to make the decision on options. So rather than having a consultant come in and say “this is what you need to do”, we need a consultant that can come in and say “this is what we're seeing and here are what your options are”. And then KI takes it even further. They can price it for us. They can let us know how much time we're going to be down before we implement something like this. For us it's better than IT because we don't have to run the department. The department just helps us run our business.
But I can say that being down – ever, for 10 minutes - means that everything here stops, because everything we do is on a computer. We create every design on a computer. Television and radio go through computers. Public relations practitioners write press releases on a computer and send it out to the media via email. You know today everything happens on-line. We do research through the computer. We communicate with our clients through the computer. We can't do books. We can't do any of the administrative things without it. Just like an accountant or an attorney, if we're not billing an hour we're not productive. We're not paying the bills.
KI Technology gave us a snapshot of where we are and where the next path is for us in technology. We had no idea where we were going. We didn't know what our options were. A lot of time businesses don't make decisions simply because they're unaware of their options. So to have someone in technology that is aware of what our options are is important. It's much like for us when we have a client that needs to get a message out - they don't necessarily know what all of their options are and we do. So it's hard to know that you don't just have to do direct mail or you don't just have to do a newsletter - that there are other ways that today's technology gives you movement and person to person, one on one communication, communication that's a two way street, where you can talk to your client or your prospect and they can talk back. So it's not always just posting the information and hoping that somebody notices. Today it's a different thing.
I can see that this is something that we can't live without. It's that “Ah Ha” moment where you go “oh right, I'm with somebody who can lead me now”. It's peace of mind - having someone in your business that can coach you on those things without you having to take the time out of your day to do the research and understand what it is you're trying to do with technology. Just lay out the question and get an answer rather than figuring out are there options, do options exist, what are they, how much do they cost, how do I implement them, and how long am I going to be down if I choose to do this. You just ask a question and you get an answer.
KI Technology helped us understand that a relationship with a technology company can be of great benefit to our business. And because KI has different service plans with different levels of participation, it's easy for us to see that this is exactly what we're going to get for our dollars. And if we need to step it up, we can step it up and here's what the next step is. So you have a system and a plan that helps you make that decision on what it is you're getting and what it is you're doing.
Always before when we talked to a technology company it felt like this gray area. You didn't know what you were getting and you just felt like you got these bills in the mail and you weren't quite sure what they did for you. But with KI you know exactly what you're getting and how it's helping you and that's a tremendous boon in the decision making phase for a business owner. You want to know why you're paying this bill and what you're getting for it and you want to know if I need to step it up, this is what's it's going to be for me.
People who are brilliant at what they do oftentimes don't necessarily have that stake in the client management side of the business. So it's nice to find somebody that's got the system that you can look at, that you can see so that you don't have to rely on someone telling you what it is that you're getting. They just don't have that customer service plan and I think KI does. So you feel better about making the purchase.
