A fast-growing, high-tech startup is expanding from its modest home in downtown Akron’s business incubator to an office in Seattle.
“Sales are up about 50 percent from last year,” said Brian Deagan, the 36-year-old chief executive of Knotice, which develops software that companies use to deliver marketing messages to customers via the Web, email and cell phones.
“We should reach $12 million in revenues this year.”
The digital-marketing company’s growing list of customers include Oreck Corp., Time Warner Cable and Canon’s U.S. unit.
The Seattle office, set to open by early December, will help the company serve customers – and attract new ones – in Western time zones, Deagan said.
The new office also will help recruit from the West Coast’s pool of high-tech talent, he said.
Already, Knotice has lured a Microsoft Corp. senior engineer to the Seattle office, and Deagan expects to hire 10 to 15 employees for that operation in the next 12 months.
Knotice’s headquarters – and the bulk of its jobs – will remain here, Deagan said.
“We very much view Seattle as a satellite office,” said Deagan, a native of Lake Township who attended the University of Akron.
Deagan noted the Akron office has seen a sizable increase in payroll, with 30 workers hired this year alone.
Akron employment now stands at 85 full-time workers, up from nine just five years ago.
While Knotice lives in a digital world, earlier this year it turned to old-fashioned advertising – a billboard – to help recruit tech-savvy employees to the Akron operations.
The billboard, along Interstate 77 North in Cleveland, declared “Grow with Us,” and featured an image of a blimp hovering over Akron’s downtown skyline.
Deagan, Knotice’s co-founder, said that while the company didn’t land hires directly from the billboard advertising, “it was very effective reinforcement during the recruiting process.”
Driving Knotice’s sales growth is its proprietary software platform called Concentri.
The system marries the three marketing avenues of email, Web and mobile marketing, such as text messages and mobile Web pages. Some companies operate the platform inhouse, while others hire Knotice to run it.
There is growing competition. Knotice’s “big differentiator,” Deagan said, is that it has offered a single system – bringing the different marketing avenues together – “from day one.”
Among Knotice customers is the Texas Roadhouse chain, headquartered in Louisville, Ky., which uses the system for its text-ahead table reservation system.
Crocs, the Colorado shoe company, uses the program to text coupons to customers.
BuildDirect, an online wholesaler of flooring and other building materials, uses Concentri to personalize email – highlighting specific products – based on what the customer looked at during a visit to the BuildDirect website.
Oreck, the vacuum cleaner manufacturer based in Nashville, plans to initially use Concentri in a similar fashion.
Linda Tilt, manager of interactive marketing for Oreck, said she was sold on the platform because “it’s super sophisticated and super easy” for marketing personnel to use.
Deagan said digital marketing “is a market with enormous opportunity” as companies shift advertising dollars “from offline to all things digital – which is usually cheaper, faster and measurable.”
He envisions Knotice taking one of two growth paths.
One path is going it alone – without additional outside investment – and reaching sales of $30 million to $50 million in the next five years. The other route would be bringing on equity investors and growing to $100 million in sales in the next five years.
“We’re happy building a business to either size,” Deagan said. “It really comes down to the right deal with the right financial partners.”
The West Coast office could help draw outside money, he said.
“With a presence in Seattle,” he said, “the risk of talent being a bottleneck to growth is addressed.”
Knotice, a 2003 spinoff from a traditional marketing venture, has taken only one outside investment. That was in 2006, when it got $500,000 from JumpStart Inc., the regional nonprofit that invests in Northeast Ohio startups.
A year later, Knotice moved into the Akron Global Business Accelerator, the city- and state-funded business incubator in the old B.F. Goodrich rubber complex on South Main Street.
Today, Knotice is the incubator’s biggest employer and has offices on two floors, said Terry Martell, operations director of the facility.
Martell said he expects employment in Knotice’s Akron offices to soon reach 100.
Already, he said, he and Knotice officials are talking about the company’s eventual move from the incubator, which is designed to nurture emerging businesses.
Deagan said the plan is to remain in the Akron area.
“We very much identify ourselves as an Akron company,” he said. “We’re from Akron.”
Katie Byard can be reached at 330-996-3781 or kbyard@thebeaconjournal.com.
