Glyphix


Year Founded:

1995

Core Business:

Advertising and Web design

Revenue in 1995:

$301,000

Revenue in 2000:

$1.9 million

Employees in 1995:

2

Employees in 2000:

11

Goal:

To continue to grow and position the company among the best in its field

Driving force:

The growing number of companies, especially Old Economy companies, realizing that design and advertising are effective tools to reach customers

Advertising executives take their ideas and turn them into web pages for some old economy companies and find themselves on inc. magazine’s top 500 list

Getting used to new digs is one of the easiest transitions Larry Cohen has had to make for his new business lately. The company no longer has to share an old office with another firm.

After all, as the result of a whirlwind of activity over the last few years, Woodland Hills-based Glyphix was named one of the country’s fastest growing companies by Inc. magazine recently. Sporting a 563-percent growth rate during its five-year lifespan, Glyphix is just hitting its stride, said Cohen, the company’s 30-something president and co-founder.

According to Inc. magazine, the firm rocketed from $301,000 in sales in 1995 to $1.1 million in 1998 and $1.9 million in 2000.

Begun in 1995 as a successor to Wordsmith, an advertising firm Cohen and partner Brad Wilder founded, Glyphix came into being as a hybrid advertising/Web design agency, mixing technology with standard advertising services. It wasn’t much of a reach for Cohen and partner Wilder when it came to creating Glyphix, using $100,000 in startup funds they scraped together.

“We were doing traditional advertising and we were very successful doing that,” Cohen said. “The technology at that point was going to have a large impact on advertising, so we decided to change and create Glyphix.”

Today, the company sports a client list of more than 100, including heavy hitters like Honda Motor Co., IBM, Mattel Inc., Playmate Toys and Litton Industries, so-called Old Economy companies that use Glyphix’s help in making the leap to the New Economy.

Charging from $10,000 and up for its Web designs, Glyphix has managed to develop scores of sites for its customers, many of whom also have hired the company to take care of their traditional advertising needs too.

Building Web sites has been a large part of the company’s business. But building on what others have done before them has been important too.

“Most Web sites are bad because they’re not well thought out, and they’re not made for the user. They’re made for the company, and that’s wrong,” Cohen said. “It’s like saying, ‘Here’s what we want to tell you,’ but maybe that’s not what (members of the intended audience) want to hear.”

Litton was Glyphix’s first client.

“They believed in us,” Cohen said.

Fred Repich Litton’s director of proposal management, who works directly with the Glyphix staff said the firm’s expertise and advertising knowledge is especially valuable.

“They’re very imaginative and, whenever there’s something wrong, I can just call. They’re like an idea factory for us, and it’s great,” Repich said.

Landing such a big fish after three months of hustling helped the young startup get even more clients.

Helping from the beginning was partner Brad Brizendine, who left a successful ad agency to help move Glyphix forward.

In Glyphix’s early days, the three of them made do with one computer terminal and one phone.

“It was all on a shoestring budget, so we just tried to make things work,” Wilder said.

In its second year, the company doubled its sales and posted its first profit. Revenues consistently grew over the next three years by 33 percent, 23 percent and 69 percent, respectively.

“After our first year, we knew we had a tiger by the tail. We really had a good business, so the question was, how do we grow responsibly?,” Cohen said.

Working with clients who understand the value of advertising has been the key to Glyphix’s success, Cohen said.

“People today are bombarded with messages. I think the average person gets something like 3,000 ads in the course of a day,” he points out. “Why do they choose Heinz ketchup instead of the store brand? It’s because it’s a brand they trust. We work with clients who understand that.”

Another key to Glyphix’s success sems to be its team approach to problem solving.

“We all bounce things off each other, and when we put it all together, things seem to work,” Brizendine said.