New Client Growth Brings Key New Hires

Having been in the brand marketing business for nearly a quarter century and rowed through the rough waters of two recessions, I’ve had a lot of experience with different employee counts over the years. Along the way, I’ve always found that about 12 people was a really good size. 

So I’ve been targeting a dozen, or approximately so, for a while now, moving alongside client growth and looking for twelve ass-kickers who represent the core skills necessary for branding and integrated marketing campaigns. The plan is to have a core team of a dozen people to represent the hub in the wheel, using freelance partner spokes with whom we’ve established long-time relationships when time-sensitive workload or specific expertise is needed.

Well, we finally got there—new client growth (more than 70% of our clients are now purpose-driven companies and organizations) enables us to hit that magic number 12 with the addition of four strong individuals who were attracted by our existing team and the opportunity to work with purpose-driven clients

Stuart Walsh fills an in-house need for interactive programming, and he gets off his mountain bike just long enough to clock eight hours of coding work at Oliver Russell. He’s a get ‘er done kind of guy and an early-morning person (I finally have some company around here pre-8 AM) with a wry sense of humor. He’s exceptionally strong at front-end programming and has significant experience in developing interactive games, which we intend to make good use of on behalf our clients. 

As an art director, Crissie McDowell brings a decade of experience in branding, advertising, and packaging design. She’s got a sharp head for marketing strategy, too. Crissie’s big on supporting our community and helped start Think Pink, Inc., a nonprofit benefitting the fight against women’s breast cancer—and did so with an award-winning cause-marketing campaign. Crissie completes our design trinity, rounding out a team of three designers here at Oliver Russell.  

Kevin Winslow joins our team to head up our public relations and social media efforts. He comes to us from Idaho Power, where he was a key contributor to the corporate sustainability report and was instrumental in its highly successful social media cause marketing campaign, “Powering Lives.” Kevin started his career as a reporter for the Associated Press and became a pro at social media strategy, analytics and implementation while at Weber Shandwick and Visible Technologies.

While we can’t promise to forever keep our team at 12—hey, there’s a lot of purpose-driven companies out there who need our brand-building help—we can promise you this: you’ll like what these new team members bring to your marketing efforts.