The Sales Factory / Ged King

The Pitch: Through research, we allow clients to get the right message to the right consumers resulting in increased sales.

Entrepreneur: Ged King
Age: 43
Company: The Sales Factory
Industry: Advertising
Founded: 1984
Start-Up Funding: Undisclosed
Employees: 23
Hometown: Queens, NY
Good Reads: The Wall Street Journal, New York Times (online versions)

Q: Your parents started this company. Did you always know you’d take the reins at some point?: Ged: No. I graduated from North Carolina State University with an engineering degree and went to work for a company called Swing and Slide. I did very well there and after a few years I was eager to come home and show my dad how to run his company. I thought I knew how to do it so much better. I was 26.
Q: Did things go the way you planned?: Ged: Not at all. My dad got very sick and I was only able to work with him for a little while before he passed. My mom stepped away from the business to be his caretaker, and I hired my brother. Over the next three years, we succeeded to spend all the cash in the business and we got to a point where we almost, you know, bankrupted the company.; Thankfully, we had this great accountant that told us to go out and talk to our vendors. They really helped us. We were profitable by the next year, and have turned a profit every year since. Even in 2001, which was a terrible year for ad agencies.
Q: What do you look for when you hire new employees?: Ged: We look for specific personality traits in relationship to the position we’re hiring, so we do a bunch of testing. It isn’t enough to just tell us you are detail oriented, we have you take a test that will show us you pay attention to detail. Experience is less important. We’re talking to someone right now from the non-profit sector. It doesn’t matter.; And after you’re hired, we actually keep using those tests to put work groups together. We used to allow all the creatives to go off in one corner and just be creative – they didn’t get much done. And the organized people would stay in a different corner and talk about how crazy the creatives were. Now, we always pair a marketing strategist with a designer, and you build a team around that.
Q: Have you ever worked on a project where you didn’t believe in the product?: Ged: My mother really set the standard for that. For years, Mom was the spiritual/cultural advisor of the company; in addition to doing the books, helping with copy, proofing, that sort of thing. She wouldn’t stand behind a product and market it if she felt it wasn’t right. And I’m glad we do that. It gives us credibility and I can sleep at night.
Q: Will this company stay in the family? Do you see your kids taking over some day?: Ged: The joke in the family is that my daughter will be the next president of the company, but I don’t know. We’ll see what the world is like by then. I’ll be a long time from now; both my kids are still little.
Q: I see apples on your card, in the hallway, on your website. Does the apple have some sort of significance?: Ged: My dad used to say that you can’t improve an apple by putting a bolt through it. You have to cultivate it and really pay attention to every aspect of the environment that affects it. And that sort of nurturing takes time. He applied that kind of thinking to this business. My brother and I have really carried that forward by applying market research to what we do and taking a holistic approach to advertising.
Q: What advice would you give to an entrepreneur that is trying to start out in this industry or in general?: Ged: I think probably the number one thing for me is you need to enjoy, really enjoy what you do. When I think about the challenges that we face; I lost my mom and dad in this business, we almost went bankrupt. If I didn’t love this, then it wouldn’t be worth it.; I think also surrounding yourself with good people is important. My brother is here and it is great to have someone that you can rely on and trust. We’ve also been diligent in bringing on other key team members to help us get our company beyond the family start-up phase.
Q: What’s next?: Ged: The challenge is that our steady growth has reached a kind of natural plateau. Everybody is working hard and getting stuff done, but it has been hard to scale up. We’ve really begun to focus in on the process of what we do and make our model duplicable, while maintaining our quality standards and culture.
Q: What’s been the favorite campaign or project that you’ve worked on?: Ged: My favorite campaign ever? I can’t answer that. I really like them all. I’m very fortunate that I really like my job and I love all the things we do. Some of the stuff we’re working on now is really great. We’re working with Texas Pete, there is a campaign to stop texting while driving that we’re excited about, and the Greensboro Grasshoppers is a new client. We have a lot of fun with what we do.
Q: What are the threats to the advertising industry in the next few years?: Ged: There are some external threats to this industry that we’re working to become the beneficiary of. I’m still young, but I’m the oldest guy in the firm. I recognize that the ways in which this world communicates is changing rapidly. Whenever we watch a real-time television show, my 7 year old son can’t get over the fact that we can’t fast forward though the commercials. It just doesn’t make sense to him. Old guard ad agencies are going to struggle in this environment, but we’re prepared for really dynamic shifts in the market.

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