Fourth birthday — you know what that means!
Today marks Cromulent Marketing’s fourth birthday, and as is tradition* we’ve marked the occasion by donating to organizations doing important work for our community.**
First, we’ve re-upped our donations to:
- Kitchener Public Library and Waterloo Public Library, to cover a year’s worth of data for their respective “Borrow the Internet” hotspot programs
- Sanguen Health Centre, to support the vital work they do, particularly their management of Kitchener’s Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) site
But it’s our fourth bday, so we needed to find a fourth organization. While there are so many deserving groups in KW, we ultimately decided to help out the SHORE Centre so they can continue to provide all residents of our community with sexual health information and support.
So that’s it for the birthday donations, but we’re not done yet…
Heartbreak and Hope
In the span of four months over fall and winter, the Cromulent family lost both members of our beloved Terrier Team: Mags (soft-coated wheaten terrier) and Minnie (miniature schnauzer).
Those who know the Cromulent team know how much those gals meant in our lives, and how devastated we are by losing them. We cherished every single instant we shared with them, and we miss them dearly.
In memory of Mags and Minnie, we also made a donation to the Kitchener Waterloo & Stratford Perth Humane Society, and we hope that we can help another family to experience the love and joy that we felt for so many years.
Cromulent Stuff
We don’t often share much about what Cromulent’s been up to — frankly, we’ve just been too busy with client work — so here’s a quick update for those of you scoring at home…
In four fun and fulfilling years, we’ve helped more than 30 clients:
- Our smallest clients are just starting to get revenue, and our largest do well over a billion per year.
- Most are ‘tech companies,’ but a handful aren’t.
- Some of the most common themes are: cybersecurity (several flavours), clouds, and AI.
We’ve truly enjoyed learning about a wide range of technologies, industries, and markets, as well as seeing how different companies operate. It’s a real treat to get exposure to such diversity!
In terms of what we actually do for our clients, we’ve:
- Authored (and often fully produced) almost 500 of pieces of content, ranging from smallish stuff like blogs, success stories, and infosheets to large pieces including whitepapers, eBooks, and flagship thought leadership assets;
- Developed dozens of Positioning Guides, Messaging Guides, and Content Plans; and
- Handled the information architecture and written content for a handful of websites (the writing, not the design!).
Through hard work, positive word of mouth, and no doubt more than a little luck, we’ve enjoyed YoY growth of +140%, +120%, and +40% (perhaps we’re reaching a steady state?), and nowadays somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of our business comes from outside Canada (mainly the U.S.).
Crazy, eh?
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Once again, I want to make sure I thank everyone who’s contributed to Cromulent’s success and made these donations possible, including:
- Cromulent’s clients, who really make it a pleasure to do what we do
- Our intrepid on-call graphic designer, who does terrific work remarkably quickly while seamlessly adapting to our clients’ branding and design guidelines
- Friends and former colleagues, who are always there to answer questions and provide helpful perspectives, and who are responsible for more than a few referrals
- My family, who were tremendously supportive when I left the traditional corporate world in 2017 (without the slightest thought as to what I was going to do)
- My accountant, who makes sure we pay our taxes
- And everyone else who’s said good things about us, supported us, and so on
I don’t know what year five will bring, but if the past is any indication then it will be full of wonderful people and interesting projects =)
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*One of my first co-op employers had a tradition (or so they told us) that if it’s your birthday, you bring in donuts or some similar celebratory confection to mark the occasion
**Each of the five organizations received $600