GRP Media: Small Giant

Small Giant, a story of who GRP Media is and why we “look” like we do.

From Guy Lay, CEO

?

The heralded business books at the time GRP Media was born in 1996 were Good to Great by Jim Collins, and his follow up, Built to Last. The point I took away from both were that successful companies had to learn to grow, exponentially, in revenue and employee count.

But John Reebel and I didn’t see it that way. We saw what the gigantic media agencies had become and while we admired their ability to generate massive profits, we also saw what the employee experience was like. And it wasn’t what we saw for GRP Media.

It wasn’t until 2005 when Small Giants by Bo Blasingame was published that we had the written blueprint for who GRP Media was and would continue to be. Blasingame described the Small Giants he admired as: “They’re also interested in being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers….and finding great ways to live their lives.”

And we knew we had found a kindred spirit! GRP Media had already been working with those ideals in mind! We operated at what Blasingame called “a human scale” which he described as a “size at which its still possible for an individual to be acquainted with everyone else in the organization, still possible for the CEO to meet with new hires.”?

With that desire to be great, but small by media agency terms, came freedom. We reserved the right to say “no” to opportunities that didn’t fit our criteria. We looked for clients that shared our desire for senior level involvement in their business, who respected the work we did to attempt to grow their business, and were looking for a true partner in their business. We stepped away from some very lucrative opportunities that we knew wouldn’t fit our culture and would make a fun business feel more like drudgery.

But what we gained was a staff that felt respected for their work and efforts both by the client and their own agency management. We gained what we felt were fair profits for the work we preformed. And we gained clients who recommended GRP Media to their friends. Our greatest new business growth has come from former clients who moved to new companies that needed media strategy help.