Since Liz Prior co-founded L2TMedia in 2007, the Evanston-based digital marketing company has made three appearances on the Inc. 5000. In November, the company made the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list. Even before launching L2T, Prior focused her career on boosting business. She spent nine years running marketing for the Patrick Dealer Group, an auto dealership that her father founded. She also managed marketing promotions for Kraft Foods’ namesake Mac n’ Cheese and salad dressings after starting her career at ad agency FCB. Now, as L2TMedia’s head of operations and finance, Prior shares her lessons on managing growth.
Q. What is L2TMedia?
A. We offer digital media advertising. We focus on auto dealers nationwide and have nearly 1,000 customers. We take a share of the dealer’s ad spend and run advertising on behalf of the dealer through paid search, targeted display, social media marketing, search engine optimization and online reputation management.
Our success is measured by producing the greatest return on investment relative to other ad sources. In the case of search, it could be cost per lead or impressions if the dealer is interested in building awareness. It could be visitor traffic to the website, video views for YouTube, likes and engagement for social advertising, or organic traffic for search engine optimization.
Q. What’s your revenue and growth?
A. We went from $16.1 million in 2012 to $21 million in 2013. We finished 2014 at $30.4 million.
Q. How has innovation helped fuel your growth?
A. We are in a high-volume business. About two years in, we invested in building a technology platform to streamline internal workflows and customer reporting. You get to a certain size, and to really scale, you need to use more sophisticated systems, in our case, proprietary technology, to help feed the growth.
In the second quarter of 2014, we launched MyAccessPoint. It is our customer database, and we use that data to optimize our marketing campaigns. It has a customer-facing dashboard and API integration with all of our media partners so the customer can see all their different campaign metrics in real time.
Marketing makes up a huge chunk of any local business’s cost, so if we can provide insights and analytics that help stretch their marketing dollars, it is a great value to them.
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Q. What have you learned as an entrepreneur that may have been useful in your corporate jobs?
A. I wouldn’t trade my past for anything. But if I had stayed in corporate America, I don’t think I would have gained that type of experience in how you manage to a tight budget and with limited resources.
Q. What’s your biggest growth challenge?
A. We’ve had to formalize our structure. We started working with an outside consulting firm for the last year. They’ve helped us with organizational design and our two-year strategy and vision for the company. They’ve helped us with compensation plans and performance management, all those things that you have to build into your business when you get to a certain stage to really run a healthy organization.
I wish we had started working with this firm 12 months before we started. I would say to any entrepreneur that there are tons of resources available, whether that’s joining associations, finding advisers or even hiring outside consulting firms.
Q. How are you managing your culture as you grow?
A. Although we’re out of startup mode, what we’re trying to preserve is the entrepreneurial spirit that’s driven by people who have a natural curiosity about things. That’s the innovation piece: highly self-motivated people who can solve problems and get things done.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.
MacArthur is a freelance writer for Blue Sky.