Core Competencies Of West Designs

1. Give a brief description of your business. Describe your principal products and/or services.
West Designs is a highly-specialized digital marketing agency focused on creating relationships with growing businesses to serve them with impactful branding, highly functional and engaging websites, and business-changing inbound marketing.
West Designs dedicates itself to three core competencies:
1. Branding: We tell stories through design and messaging. We develop extensive identity packages for clients that include logo design, branding style guides, collateral design, and captivating communication strategies.
2. Web Design/Development: We develop highly functional and attractive web presences that build upon a client’s brand identity
and create a funnel to engage their target audiences.
3. Inbound Marketing: We help our clients attract new visitors to their websites, convert those visitors into leads, close those leads into customers, and turn those customers into raging fans.
2. How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
West Designs is a strategic agency that produces measurable results. We recognize our strengths and pour into constantly bettering those instead of trying to be “full-service.” We focus on our core competencies and specific verticals such as construction and engineering, healthcare, education, and non-profits to hone in on how we add value to our clients.
The infectious culture of West Designs has attracted a diverse team of original thinkers who love solving problems, big or small. Rather than outsourcing our work, our employees have come from across the country and landed right here in Gainesville to serve our clients. They make clients their priority, regularly meeting for check-ins and strategy sessions. West Designs team members approach customer service with love and a desire to serve, as well as a desire to make both the client and West Designs better than they were before.
3. Why and how did you start your business? Tell us your story.
In June of 2013, Brandon West, current CEO of West Designs, founded our company to fuel his passion for helping people and businesses grow. Brandon saw a need in the Gainesville market for a reliable partner who could communicate well, deliver projects on time, and think outside the box. After receiving unanimous counsel and support from close mentors, Brandon ended his full-time teaching career to start West Designs.
In early 2014, after nine months of launching great branding campaigns and websites, we had a large number of clients coming back to us wanting ongoing support and digital marketing solutions. This was the call from the community to start a marketing department. Since then, our marketing team has grown tremendously and we have quickly been recognized throughout the state as a go-to source for strategic marketing that produces results.
What started as a single guy working from his home office has now grown into a full team of super-committed, creative professionals, with their own attractive office space, making an impact on hundreds of thousands of people around the globe each day.
Since our beginning, we’ve served companies ranging from plumbers to orthodontists, from Walt Disney executives to local utility companies, and from local non-profits to international speakers.
4. What are your company’s core values and mission?
In January of 2015 we adopted a mission to “make the Internet a better place by helping companies look good and get found online.” We operated under that mission statement for approximately six months until we could no longer see that definition being sufficient to define the killer work we were doing for our clients. We needed to define our “why.”
We love building brands and helping them grow, but what really fires us up is seeing how the relationship we build with our clients completely changes the lives of key stakeholders and their clients. We so strongly believe we can have that kind of impact, that we made it the mission of our
business.
Our new mission statement and our core values, which have stood the test of time, have become the foundation for uniting and strengthening our team and client relationships. They provide purpose, energy, and meaning to the work we do every day and they have helped us create a culture of encouragement, invention, boldness, and mutual accountability.
West Designs’ Vision:
To be known as the leader in web design and online marketing in North Central Florida.
West Designs’ Mission (Adopted May 2015):
To create relationships with growing businesses to help their customers discover, evaluate, and enjoy their products and services.
West Designs’ Core Values:
1. Leadership Our passion for education and empowerment.
2. Creativity Our passion for inspiration and innovation.
3. Love Our passion for selflessness and servanthood.
4. Integrity Our passion for results and accountability.
5. Community Our passion for culture and collaboration.
5. Please list any awards or other recognition your company has received.
In 2013, West Designs was subcontracted to develop the Meridian Behavioral Healthcare website that went on to win a Golden Image Award from FPRA (Florida Public Relations Association).
In 2015, West Designs partnered with HubSpot (a multibillion dollar, international company) allowing us to offer certifications to our team members and ROI-centric marketing and sales tools to our clients.
In 2015, West Designs was awarded Google Partner status after demonstrating AdWords skill and expertise, meeting significant AdWords spend requirements, and delivering agency and client revenue growth.
In 2015, West Designs was nominated by the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce for Best Tech Company of the Year.
Since September of 2016, West Designs has been the #1 highest rated marketing agency in the state of Florida on Google.
SECTION II. STRATEGIC & FINANCIAL GOALS
1. Please include a copy of your company’s current 3-5 year strategic goals with the application or list below:
In support of our company’s current vision and mission, we have been pursuing the following 3-5 year strategic goals since January 2015:
1. Create a killer team
a. Recruit the best
b. Develop a culture of growth and synergy
2. Develop outstanding marketing
a. Enhance current relationships and grow new relationships
b.
Build the West Designs brand
3. Embrace efficiency
a. Establish and implement best practices
b. Adopt a culture of continuous improvement
For each goal, we have a “champion” who steps up to be responsible for bringing that goal to life and defining measurable objectives. We meet every other week for a Strategic Action Planning Session to assign action items to each team member and hold one another accountable to our commitments.
We firmly believe that achieving these strategic goals will help us incrementally reach our vision, driven by our mission, and guided by our core values. We believe that achieving these strategic goals will not only help us achieve financial and client-based goals for West Designs, but also personal goals for our culture and workplace environment.
SECTION III. EMPLOYEE PRACTICES
1. What development opportunities are provided for staff members, along with additional benefits beyond healthcare packages?
In support of our core values of leadership and creativity, the whole team participates in an annual, full-day, international leadership event known as Leadercast. Leadercast provides our team with leadership presentations from some of the most impactful leaders around the world and offers a terrific forum for culture creation at West
Designs.
Additionally, each member of the team completes an inbound marketing certification within their first thirty days of employment to ensure each team member (even our non-marketing team members) understands how what they do affects a company’s marketing campaign. We all renew our certification in inbound marketing annually as well as pursue new certifications in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and various HubSpot certifications.
In support of our core value of community, West Designs offers paid lunches twice a month where we spend time together as a team and talk about what we have learned since we last met. We also have off-sites 2-4 times per year to celebrate growth, anniversaries, and successes at West Designs.
Each team member is offered nearly four week of paid time off each year (including two weeks between Christmas and New Year’s), flex days to work from home as needed, up to two hours a week for professional development, a $500 continuing education allowance each year, and a $2,000 health and wellness stipend as a part of their annualized salary.
SECTION IV. CUSTOMER SERVICE
1. Describe your business culture. How does your business work to create a culture of customer service excellence?
Our mission is “to create relationship with growing businesses,” which means we want our customers to be head-over-heels about working with us.
Each week at our team meetings, we go around the table and give detailed “shout-outs” to team members that have demonstrated our core values with our clients or with members of our team.
We encourage each other during difficult client interactions to LAER (listen, acknowledge, explore, and then respond) and follow-up on how that went.
We send our clients regular Random Acts of Kindness (RAKs) just to show our appreciation for their continued business.
We blog about the questions we get from clients so we’re prepared to serve the next person who might have the same question.
We hold company fundraisers for the non-profits we work with to raise support for their causes and demonstrate our belief in their mission.
We strive to create an unforgettable customer experience by taking loads of time to listen to our customers, understand their needs and goals, deliver on time and on budget, and minimize their effort, wherever possible.
We understand that our clients won’t love West Designs until our own team does, so we build into our people and work hard to create a culture of people who believe in our company’s vision, mission, and values.
SECTION V. COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
1. How does your company impact the community both as a whole and by individual employees’ community involvement?
Because we encourage individual involvement in our community, in the past 12 months, West Designs has been able to serve each of the following local organizations with various design, development, and marketing services:
1. Leadercast | 40 hours of graphic design, volunteer support, and social media strategy
2. Ronald McDonald House Charities of North Central Florida | 15 hours of email migration and support and a Google AdWords Grant Application that secured them $120,000/year of free advertising with Google
3. Harvest Bible Chapel Gainesville | 15 hours of graphic design and digital marketing support
4. Peaceful Paths | 10 hours of branding services
Several members of our team serve the community with regular speaking engagements at business and entrepreneurial programs throughout Gainesville (including Santa Fe’s Center for Innovation and Economic Development (CIED) and the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce) and through leadership in a local BNI chapter.
We have sought to have a strong impact on the future web and marketing community by creating a robust internship program at West Designs (we have served six interns this year), partnering with the STEM Ready program to employ interns (we have one), and a partnership with GatorNest through UF’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center to support an educational opportunity for undergraduate students (we incubated a team of four).
On an international level, West Designs financially supports families and communities around the world through Compassion International, investing in children from the beginning of their lives until they have reached adulthood.
SECTION VI. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
1. Is there any other information you would like us to know as we consider your company for a Business of the Year award?
What we have at West Designs is really unique. Rarely do you see such a cohesive team of creatives who can have loads of fun and accomplish such industry-shattering results with the super high level of positive client feedback and satisfaction that we’ve created. This team was created by, and has been sustained by, a commitment to culture and accountability.
During each team members’ onboarding we have them read through a carefully crafted Employee Handbook, but we’ve now created an extensive West Designs Culture Handbook that we also have them review. The Culture Handbook was created to provide a clear and inspiring picture of what our core values look like in action and how each person can be a part of creating an infectious culture here.
SECTION VII. FEEDBACK
1. How did you hear about the Gainesville Chamber’s Business of the Year Awards?
The Chamber’s weekly newsletter has been the most consistent source of information for West Designs on the Business of the Year Awards as well as other Chamber activities.
2. If you have previously applied for a Business of the Year award, we would appreciate your feedback. How can we improve the application process or overall value of the program?
It has been a pleasure for our team to be a part of the program and benefit culturally from working together on these applications. The one area I feel the overall value of the program could be elevated would be in the application feedback process. Encourage judges to point out specifics in each section of the application. A single positive and/or negative piece of feedback in each section would really provide each business with some strong growth opportunities.