Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Vere Nicoll.
Alex, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
With a degree in marketing from the University of Colorado at Boulder, my first experiences in digital marketing were during my schooling with various internships. Upon graduation, I worked briefly for a software company in marketing until I realized that I wanted to put the office on hold for a while to see more of the world. I moved to Thailand, took a teaching course, and spent awhile teaching children English and traveling all over Southeast Asia.
After my adventures, I returned to Colorado, to return to my marketing career, however, it was a very tough time to find a job with one of the worst economic declines in decades. After spending some discouraging time attempting to find work, a friend and I had an idea for our own company. Growing up and going to University in Boulder, we were well aware of the cities’ strong affinity for drinking, especially amongst university students. We decided that hangovers we’re a major problem in Boulder and set out to create a service to fix them.
The business was called Hangover Helpers, which was a combination of food delivery and cleaning. We provided those ailing a hangover with breakfast burritos, Gatorade, and cleaned their houses for them. Not long after we opened for business we told the local newspaper about our new service and from there, our concept spread like wildfire. This was my first real experience running a digital marketing campaign for my new business and it worked out better than I could have ever imagined.
Within months we were in newspapers across the country and started being asked on TV shows. We were interviewed on national television shows, such as Fox and Friends, and our publicity continued to grow and grow. From there, our concept developed international media attention and we were featured in newspapers from Argentina to Japan.
After all the publicity in the media, we started to gain the attention of reality TV networks to make a show about our business. At one point we were even given a contract to make the show, but we were ill-advised by an agent we hired not to take the deal as we were so hot in the media. While many other networks sniffed around our concept, we were never given another offer, and our short-lived dream of becoming reality TV stars was over.
While our digital marketing and media were extremely successful, our actual business model wasn’t as lucrative. It was grueling work doing the cleaning ourselves as we had no startup capital and our financial model was barely paying the bills. Eventually, the media started to die out and after such a wild rollercoaster of a time, I needed a break from it all and left the business in the hands of my partner.
I went to travel and teach in Central/South America for awhile putting my digital marketing skills and love for writing into a popular blog about my adventures. After a year abroad I returned to Colorado once again, this time in a better economic climate and ready to really progress in a marketing career. I obtained work for a digital marketing start-up working with a few other guys in a garage. After a few years, we’d grown our little start-up business into a full-scale digital agency with an office near downtown Denver.
Having learned the trade from helping to grow this startup I had more dreams of entrepreneurship. I decided to leave the agency and start my own with a partner, called The Brandsmen. Our agency has now been in business for 6 years serving a variety of businesses across Colorado, other states in the US, and abroad.
Has it been a smooth road?
If anyone tells you entrepreneurship is a smooth road, they aren’t telling the truth. Creating something on your own presents a multitude of serious challenges from time management to new problems and no one to help you solve them.
Please tell us about The Brandsmen. What should we know?
The Brandsmen are a digital marketing agency in Denver composed of experienced marketing and branding professionals who specialize in facilitating business growth using the Internet. We specialize in SEO, PPC, branding, website design, lead generation, and social media.
Our business model is all about developing long-term relationships with our clients for mutual benefit. If you take a look at our reviews you can see that our clients are very happy with us and that’s something we are very, very proud of. We despise the large agency idea of churning through clients, our whole MO is proving our worth every month. The Brandsmen believe in honoring a code of conduct in everything we do which can be described by five adjectives:
– Honest
– Gregarious
– Purposeful
– Authentic
– Skillful
We genuinely take pride in our work and love helping businesses grow.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Denver is an excellent place to start a business in marketing and in general. It’s a fast-growing community with lot’s going on.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1800 Wazee St #398, Denver, CO 80202
- Website: https://thebrandsmen.com/
- Phone: (303) 945-3080
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebrandsmen/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebrandsmen/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheBrandsmen
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