Location: Tipp City
Owner’s name: Michael McDermott
Years in operation: 21
Number of Employees: 16
Describe what your business does: Bash Foo is a reliable and affordable digital marketing agency, always helping small businesses with their lead generation and marketing efforts. Our team is dedicated to building the online reputation of the small business through search engine optimization, digital marketing and creative web design.
Bash Foo is driven by a skilled development and marketing team that truly spans the globe across seven time zones of excellence.
Bash Foo operates uniquely in the digital marketing space as a "Distributed Agency" that aggregates the best web development and inbound agency talent out there. From customized API integrations, mobile app development to content marketing, Bash Foo can help elevate marketing teams, or fully support every aspect of marketing for the growing small business.
What inspired you to start this business? As I worked for companies like EDS/HP and Reynolds and Reynolds here in Dayton, I had the opportunity to observe the many unmet marketing needs of clients, both large and small. I felt underutilized and helpless to deliver value-driven solutions for our customers. That is what drove me to break free and fill all those gaps missed by larger organizations.
How has your business embraced innovation? Full-throated and completely. We work almost exclusively with new and growing software companies. Our work and our input inform their design, which results in better SaaS tools that we use daily to support our client’s marketing objectives.
What’s your biggest challenge right now? I would like to pin the struggles related to COVID-19 and the associated “loss of confidence in marketing efforts” to the cork board, as I honestly believe that better days are just around the corner. Consistent challenges for Bash Foo and our industry would be finding talented individuals to hire and retain that genuinely help to optimize our business operations.
Operating as a distributed agency, right now Bash Foo has folks working all over the globe to achieve those goals. We've more than doubled our Dayton-area talent in the past 12 months, and I would love to see that trend continue.
What’s your biggest opportunity right now? Sales Enablement. Marketing agencies can either continue to toss massive lots of low-quality leads over to their clients and walk away with their retainers, or they can do the yeoman’s work of handing over “ready to go” Sales Qualified Leads to their clients. We see extraordinarily little of that going on right now, but that is right where I am placing most of my current focus.
What do you want readers to know about your business today? Don’t settle for less than what you believe you should be getting — ever. In life or business. Clients that provide their five-star ratings for Bash Foo usually do so because they came out of a prior relationship with a marketing consultant or agency that wasn’t really prepared to help them. Ask lots of questions, and if something doesn’t seem right, ask some more.
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