At a human level, and this applies to organizations as well, there are moments and achievements in life (or the life of the organization) that stand out and hold special significance. The FitzMartin team had one of those moments recently when we were ranked on the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies list.
Inc. started the list in 1982 to celebrate American companies that are achieving remarkable growth. We’re proud to be recognized alongside so many spectacular and renowned companies. While it’s certainly nice to be noticed for what we’ve accomplished over decades of hard work , that’s not fully how we measure success.
As the old cliché goes: Success is a journey, not a destination. In this case, success is not the award. We measure our success in what got us here to the point of being recognized on the list. We measure success in the many clients we’ve been able to help. That’s why at such a significant time in our company history, we prefer to take a moment to reflect upon the long (award-winning) path that culminated with Inc. 5000.
We opened our doors in 1991 as a high-end boutique design firm, seeking to help business-to-business clients improve their sales, drive new growth and increase profitability. Over the years, we became even more strategic in those services, embracing a more pragmatic approach and (happily) recognizing that we’re not the right fit for everyone. We also leaned into our fixation on innovation, focusing on new ways to help clients with short-term revenue creation while simultaneously tackling long-term value creation. The more we focused on equipping our clients with strategies to increase their market share and exert their authority and prominence in their industry, we began looking more critically at a big picture strategy to help clients grow organizationally, operationally and strategically. To do so, we shifted our thinking on creative services—looking instead at design through a sales-first perspective and how it can (and should) contribute directly to the company’s overall growth and vision. We became rooted in the science behind growing revenue—what we call centricity. Centricity is the application of behavioral change to the sales pipeline.
This science is nothing new. In fact, it’s straight from research of three renowned scientists—Prochaska, Norcross and DiClemente. We simply applied their research to the ever-complex sales process our clients navigate every day. Centricity is what allows us to intricately understand the six steps of the buyer’s journey so that we can help our clients align their sales and marketing teams around the needs of their buyer. Why? Because it makes the organization more effective and drives true (and lasting) change. Just ask Family Trust Federal Credit Union, who with our guidance on a seven-month campaign is yielding a 140% advantage in new membership over its peers. Or OHD, a company in the occupational health sector that was struggling with out-of-sync, recurrent methods that were requiring too many man-hours. By designing and implementing an e-commerce platform to automate their processes, we helped them realize a savings of $585,000. And we can’t fail to mention the success of BBVA and the Smart Pursuits we helped put in place, which has created more than $127 million in new business for the bank.
Our ongoing obsession with solving complex sales and marketing problems is what drives our three key departments—Advisory Services, Revenue Operations and Creative Operations—which were developed in 2016. These specific and targeted teams each have their own piece of the FitzMartin puzzle, but they unite around one key element: helping clients conquer organizational silos to advance short-term improvements in cash flow and accelerate long-term transformation in profitability.
All of this brings us to where we stand today—which just so happens to be as experts in driving new growth and profitability, particularly in the mid- to late-stage funnel of the selling process. We live and breathe centricity each and every day, and we’ve used it to help hundreds of lower middle-market and emerging middle-market companies sell more—with a lower cost of sales, and at a greater profit. We’re honored to continue putting this expertise to work for you.
