2024 State of the Business
By John Rushin, Account Director of Frontside Consulting
It’s hard to believe that we’ve nearly reached Q4 of 2024, but here we are. As the summer winds down Frontside Consulting will be celebrating a major milestone—September 11th, 2024 marked five years of Frontside Consulting being in business. To say that a lot has happened in that time is an understatement (and a trite one at that), but… a lot has happened in that time.
Coming into 2024 we were looking back on everything that the company had accomplished while also looking forward to opportunities that will help it reach its full potential. Back in January, the team went through in-depth strategy sessions to develop plans to expand Frontside’s offerings and chart a path to continued growth. The result was a four-pronged strategy focusing on specific initiatives to grow Frontside’s digital presence, expand its book of business, and offer its clients high-quality service and flexibility.
1. Double Down on the Retainer Client Business
As the Founder of Frontside Consulting Joe took it upon himself to lead the efforts to grow the retainer business, focusing the majority of his efforts in 2024 on bringing in new clients. Year to date, Frontside has brought on six new retainer clients while minimizing the existing client churn and we’re continuing the push to bring in more clients in Q4.
With Joe focusing on sales and new client recruitment there was a gap in duties to direct the retainer client business itself. To smooth this over, John was promoted to Account Director and has been overseeing all of the operations and management of the day-to-day retainer client business. This has proved to be extraordinarily beneficial as Joe has been able to focus nearly full-time on bringing in new clients and has positioned the business for ongoing growth.
The retainer business will continue to be the backbone of Frontside Consulting’s operations and we’re looking forward to the challenge of bringing new accounts into the fold and providing them with the highest-quality service possible.
You can learn more about our Full-Service Retainer business here.
2. Produce and Publish Educational Content
As a consultancy, we believe that it’s not only our job to provide service to existing clients but also to guide and educate our target market, as well as industry fellows. In 2024 we made a concerted effort to exponentially increase the amount of educational content we were producing while developing and nurturing the vehicles to get that content disseminated to the masses. Under the umbrella of content production, we identified three key content types to focus on: blogs, newsletters, and short-form videos.
The Frontside Consulting Blog
The primary hub of the content that we produce is the Frontside Consulting Blog. Featuring relevant, informative, and digestible content the blog has grown significantly in 2024. The major blog initiative this year was producing a series of seven posts that we titled “The Small Business Series”. Written with the intent of introducing small business owners to the world of digital advertising each installment focused on a key hurdle small business owners need to overcome when kicking off digital advertising efforts. We’re happy to say that the 7th and final blog in this series was recently pushed and together they create a solid platform of knowledge for small business to build their digital advertising presence upon.
The Frontside Consulting Newsletter
In the spring, we launched a monthly newsletter to keep subscribers up to date with what was happening with the business and push out the new highlighted content for the month. The newsletter has been well received and we’re looking forward to continued subscriber growth and using this channel to educate our audience.
If you want to keep up and stay informed, sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of this post!
Short-Form Video Content
In conjunction with the content produced for the blog, we’ve begun developing short-form video content primarily being distributed on our organic social media. These recording sessions focus on conversational moments between our team members where we discuss industry news and trends, break down and provide additional context for our blogs, and capture Joe’s hot takes regarding the various advertising channels. Stay tuned to our social media channels for more and more of these punchy, info-packed videos. Give us a follow on our social channels at the bottom of this post.
3. Develop and Launch a New Service Offering: Consulting Packages
Until 2024 the primary service offering of Frontside Consulting was our full-service retainer package. Though this business was going well and established long-term relationships with numerous clients over the years we identified a gap in the market for a shorter-term limited service engagement. There were businesses in our target market that needed help getting their digital advertising efforts off the ground, but for multiple, unique reasons, an ongoing service relationship didn’t make sense for them. Enter the Consulting Packages.
These one-time purchase, limited-run engagements are designed to provide pre-packaged service offerings at a competitive price. We currently offer two types of consulting packages, a Strategic b2b & E-comm Starter Package and multiple variants of a Social Media Creative Optimization Package.
Strategic b2b & E-comm Starter Package
The premium package is this line-up, the Strategic b2b & E-comm Starter Package provides businesses the opportunity to get strategic and tactical support for launching their digital advertising efforts. Essentially, we treat each of these packages as if they were a retainer client providing strategic direction regarding channel and campaign type selection, technical set-up, ad creative and copy development, budget recommendations, and complete construction of account architecture including ad builds and pushing the first wave of testing live. In addition, we provide each customer with a robust suite of SOP documents, additional copy and creative to test, and reporting guidance before conducting a handoff meeting. We then provide one follow-up meeting 30–90 days after the final handoff to review progress and answer any questions the customer may have regarding the ongoing management of the accounts.
Social Media Creative Optimization Packages
With years of experience testing various creative iterations in Meta Ads, we know what makes an ad that will perform across key metrics. This is a core expertise of the Frontside business as a whole and we thought it made sense to break this out as a stand-alone product. Tailored for businesses that already have their Meta Ads account up and running, but are struggling to build ads that convert, our Social Media Creative Optimization Packages provide the opportunity to purchase a package of pre-made ads crafted by experts.
Featuring package options containing pre-built video, static, and/or carousel ads the final delivery includes the completed ads, images/video files, copy document, the Figma board where the assets were built, and one round of revisions.
4. Accepting Bitcoin as Payment
As another trend, Bitcoin has continued to mature as a system of payment and store of value, recovering from the 2022 drawdown in price to new all-time highs in March of 2024. Joe’s personal interest in decentralized, permissionless money has also developed into a small business strategy to protect the company assets as well as stay abreast of changing and advanced monetary technology.
Accepting Bitcoin as payment is another means to show our customers that we’re supporting the way they’re doing business with very low transaction costs and nearly instant settlement.
Learn more about Bitcoin and why we chose to offer this as a payment method here.
And there you have it! A snapshot of the year to date as we celebrate the 5 Year Anniversary of Frontside Consulting. The team couldn’t be more stoked on the progress we’ve made in 2024 and the overall direction the business is taking. Cheers to 5 years of success and more to come!
As always, give us a follow on social and sign up for our newsletter below to keep abreast of more great digital marketing and small business content.
