Interactive Media Group

Innovation

Leaping to conclusions that pay off is a practice Andrew Holland and his team at EYEMG put to work with consummate skill in their web-development business. In the nine years they’ve been at it, they’ve redefined “reinvention”—it’s now their middle name.

Originally serving customers as a computer hardware service and computer-based training company, the guys at EYEMG gradually noticed more and more businesses catching on to the Internet as a serious marketing tool. Never the follower types, they jumped on the bandwagon ahead of many others and, using creative marketing techniques like a sandwich-boarded sales rep walking the Galleria, soon became a premier provider of web design and development to some of the largest industrial companies in the Ohio valley.

Always value providers—and not the lowest-priced ones—Andrew and his team in the last couple of years started noticing something else. As the Internet love-fest filtered down to the mid-sized business, they saw a whole new market in the middle—but realized that cost would be more of an issue for this level of companies.

In true EYEMG fashion, they engineered another transformation: using low-cost, high-reliability open source tools, they developed a do-it-yourself product called “eyemg.Compose” that lets authorized employees add, delete and edit website content and then publish it themselves, saving dramatic amounts of time over previous methods and affording contributors pride of ownership—which always inspires people to do their best and give more, which in turn means companies tend to keep more of their knowledge capital if an employee leaves.

Imagining—and then creating—win-win situations is what EYEMG is all about. Andrew’s observations for others: Watch carefully. Look for trends, listen to your customers and respond quickly. Most of all, care.