Wow, where do I even begin to talk about how the road has led us here to this point? I guess, we will need to rewind nine years, back to the year 2001. I had just concluded 12 years working for a electronics company based in North Texas, the final five years were spent running the marketing department.
After the company’s closing, I knew that I wanted to start my own firm so with the little severance they provided I started my first company. A little creative agency called SOEG Creative (a mash up of my kids names, Sophia and Greg). I was very blessed, and that company quickly grew out of my home and into a co-working space on Carroll Street in Fort Worth called Colab.
After a couple years building that company I was approached by a competitor to merge our two companies, which is exactly what happened.
We were extremely blessed to see great growth and I was privileged to work with many talented creative’s and developers through the years of running that agency.
Fast forward about five years and the time had come to sell that company and start something new. I won’t get into the details of that transaction (that is a story for another day). But I am extremely blessed to be embarking on this new journey known as LOVE Media Group.
At all my previous agencies I’ve always worked very closely with my brother, Adam Gerred. So this time around I knew that I wanted to partner with him in building something new. No investors, no outside parties, just my and my brother, building something that we could be proud of, and something where we could bless others.
One of the things that I’ve always really enjoyed doing with my previous agencies is donating time and effort to bring our branding expertise to local nonprofits. Specifically to the type of nonprofit that is doing great things but is underfunded, or just starting up, and is unable to afford a fancy digital agency to help them tell their story.
This is the type of thing that really excites me, this is the kind of thing that I can feel passionate about. To be clear, I feel extremely passionate about all client work that we do and as an agency we have always put everything into every project, I am very insistent on that. There’s one thing that can always be said for the agencies that I’ve run is that the work product was always excellent, and that is something that I will never relent on.
Whether it’s a billion dollar company or a local nonprofit we want to bring excellent, state-of-the-industry branding to all of the organizations that we work with. This obviously includes these small nonprofits.
So when the time came to sell the old agency and start something new, I wanted to take the efforts that previously had been in the background, and not only shine a spotlight on those efforts, but literally move them to the very forefront of what this new agency would be about.
Make no mistake, we want to be massively successful we want to conquer the world, and make excellent creative for excellent brands, but in doing so do you want to share that success with the people and the organizations who are doing great things to help others and help our world.
We want to help these organizations accomplish great things. So when it came time to name this new agency there was never any question in my mind that the agency had to be called… LOVE.
The branding was always crystal clear in my mind it was very “agency-y”, very strong, very black-and-white. As I started telling friends and family about this new company they always wanted to know what the name was going to be and when I said “Love” I always got a little sideways head tilt and a “oh… That’s kind of cool… I guess“.
When you hear the name LOVE, it certainly evokes thoughts of red hearts, rainbows, and unicorns, and… well, a whole lot of cuteness. But as you can see we are strong, capable, we have very big goals and we intend to achieve those goals.
Our mission is to show love to our clients and nonprofits that are doing great things in our communities. And our brand is all about cutting edge digital marketing that is helping these organizations be successful, helping these organizations accomplish their stated goals, helping these organizations win!
Because of the mission of this company is to give back, we have decided to work exclusively with clients who have a heart to give back as well. This can look a couple of different ways:
- You’re already giving back.
- You would like to start and just need a little guidance to get started.
We have excellent consultants and mentors that can help companies along this path.
We strongly believe that what gets measured gets done so we wanted to find a way to measure the love, to measure the effectiveness of giving back.
To this end we are launching The 1M project. Simply stated we are working to give away $1 million to local nonprofits as fast as possible. We do this in two ways,
- Through the efforts of the clients that we partner with.
- Through our own volunteered efforts, as we are volunteering 10% of our time to select local nonprofits. So for every nine hours we bill, we are working one hour off the clock to help these organizations thrive.
So when we say we are “mission-driven“ that’s not just buzzword marketing, that is our heart, that is our mission, that is who we are.
Some may call us hippies, or bleeding heart, or maybe even more colorful monikers but we wear those as a badge of pride. We will not relent from our mission to make our world a better place.
Are we naïve enough to think that we can save the world, no, we probably won’t be able to pull that off. But we do feel strongly that we can make our world a little better.
