Direct Marketing and response advertising agency. (Woodland Hills)

Growth Rate 472%

Executive:

Russell Kern, president and co-founder

Early Days/Financing:

It all started 25 years ago with myself and my former high school principal. We ran into each other and started talking. We hadn’t seen each other for six or seven years. I was working at a large agency; he was into marketing and we had the same philosophies. So we decided to start an agency on our own. We started with an office, two computers and a secretary. Capital came off of credit cards. We started with about $5,000 to 10,000. We started on a shoestring and didn’t take any salary. The initial idea was to blend proven concepts of brand advertising with the best practices of direct marketing disciplines, which was a very new idea at the time. The idea was to help marketers improve performance and build their brand at the same time.

Big Break:

There were two. One was getting a chance to work with Microsoft and Lotus and get a foothold in the software business. The second was First Interstate Bank and getting a chance to work on home equity promotions and mortgage promotions. Those got the business making revenue. The two big brands the Kern Organization supports (now) are DirecTV and Sprint/Nextel. Our work supports the key brand ideas while driving immediate response to their sales call centers.

Biggest Challenge:

Properly managing growth while still delivering a high level of performance and service. We focus on numbers and benchmarks, making sure the numbers are consistently improving with growth. Constant improvement is what’s required to handle growth.

Secret of Success:

Our name has been developed in the last 10 years because of our large return on marketing investments. We get response rates above the industry norm more consumers responding to a campaign and we help reduce client cost by 10 to 20 percent. We run our business like a well organized manufacturing organization. We have proven processes and procedures. We’re focused on continual improvement. How to do it better the next time is part of culture.

What’s Next:

Our plans are to continue to diversify our service offerings, diversify our client knowledge and expand our offerings in data and analytics. We’re investigating integrated campaign management software solutions and Web analytics software solutions. We’re also looking into additional leaders in the area of interactive and digital marketing. Our target growth rate is 25 percent a year.