What We’re Reading

What We’re Reading

by | Feb 27, 2020 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

What We’re Reading

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What We’re Reading

As part of our weekly team calls at &Marketing, we do a rotating icebreaker.  A few weeks ago, we encouraged people to share “What is a recent book you’ve read that you’d recommend?” 

Some of the responses, predictably, are about business and career management. But, as it turns out, the &Marketing team has some pretty diverse interests!  We thought we’d share with you our list of what we’re reading! **

Business & Career Management 

General Interest, Novels, & Classics 

Have you read any of these?  Which are your favorites? What else should we be reading?  We love a good recommendation! 

* Denotes that multiple &Marketing team members recommend this book! 

** The links on this page are part of the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program. If any products are purchased through these links, we receive a small advertising fee by linking to Amazon.com.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

&Marketing Team Members Gave Back on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

&Marketing Team Members Gave Back on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

by | Jan 30, 2020 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

&Marketing Team Members Gave Back on Martin Luther King Jr. Day

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As one of our most famous civil rights activists, Martin Luther King Jr. continues to inspire all of us to work toward bettering humanity and the state of the world as a place we all can coexist in equally, together. In an effort to honor MLK day and all it stands for, &Marketing encouraged our team members to exchange the hours they would normally spend working to better the growth of our clients’ businesses and use that time to better the growth of their own communities. Here’s how some of them chose to spend their day celebrating local organizations, local people, and remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

Team Member: Matt Vincent
Service Activity: Art Testing for OneHope for Italian Teen Magazine

 

“I created a series of magazine spreads for the Christian ministry OneHope to test in the Italian teen market in order to better create content that engages that demographic on future projects. Here is a photo of one of the spreads I did.”

Team Member: Rajat Kapur
Service activity: Sock Roll Challenge at Gwynedd Mercy Academy Elementary

 

“My family and I participated in a “sock roll challenge” at my kids’ school on MLK Day 2020. Socks are the #1 requested items for homeless shelters, especially in the cold winter months.

Giving Tree Families, a local nonprofit organization, systematizes this sock roll challenge to prepare a small package (a pair of socks, granola or snack bars, and a kind note) that is handed out to individuals who are homeless. Gwynedd Mercy Academy Elementary participated in the sock roll challenge and made over 1300 of these sock rolls for the people in the Philadelphia area.“

Team Members: Andrew Davis, Jeremy Woelfer, Carter Baretz

Service activity: Hamilton County Humane Society Relocation

“The Humane Society for Hamilton County, IN is preparing to open a new location in the first quarter of 2021. The location will be 40,000 square feet and state of the art.”

Team Member: Tina DePrisco
Service activity: Basketball Clinic & Collection for SafeHarbor of West Chester

 

“For the past 5 years, West Chester Henderson Girls Basketball holds a Clinic and collects donations and creates goodie bags for Safe Harbor of West Chester, PA. The participants of the clinic bring a donation for the Shelter (supplies or gift cards) and create a Valentine’s Day goodie bag for the residents with an encouraging note. I am proud to have started this great tradition and run this clinic and project every year for the team.”

Team Member: Tracey Colla
Service activity: Sock Roll Challenge

“My family and I had varied schedules on MLK Day, but we knew we wanted to do something together. We learned that we could participate in a “sock roll challenge” at home, on our own time, which was perfect. Giving Tree Families, a nonprofit based in a suburb just outside of Philadelphia, helped us do this. My son and I purchased socks, granola bars, and crackers at Target that morning. In the evening, the three of us worked at the dining room table together to compile the sock rolls. We affixed a note to each, and Giving Tree Families will help us get these to those who need them.”

Team Member: Jeremiah Layer
Service activity: Tails and Trails Animal Rescue

 

“I helped local Indianapolis dog rescue organization Tails and Trails by cleaning a room where the store donated items. I also installed shelving units to store some of the donated items they don’t need to use immediately, such as blankets.”

“We feel grateful to work for a company that values giving back to the community on Martin Luther King Jr. day. The remote nature of our team allowed us the ability to use this time off &Marketing gave us and invest it back into the place and people where we each live.”

— RAJAT, TRACEY, JEREMY, CARTER, ANDREW, TINA, JEREMIAH, AND MATT

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Gratefulness: Reflecting On 2019 And Looking Ahead To 2020

Gratefulness: Reflecting On 2019 And Looking Ahead To 2020

by | Nov 26, 2019 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

Gratefulness: Reflecting On 2019 And Looking Ahead To 2020

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To clients, partners, team members, advisors, and other friends of &Marketing

 

As the close of 2019 is upon us, we want to use this opportunity to reflect on the story that our company has written this year, and since the beginning of &Marketing just a couple of years ago. Our story is filled with several different chapters — from ones about learning, challenges, and growth, to perseverance, partnerships, and successes! However, the one common thread in every chapter is how we deeply care about our work, our people, and our clients’ successes.

We at &Marketing are truly grateful for the trust you have placed in us this year, and we thank you for being part of our story. Working with you has allowed us to challenge ourselves to ensure we are supporting your business in a way that makes us better, both at our jobs and as people.

Thanksgiving is an excellent time to reflect  – ups and downs, adventures and surprises, challenges, and successes. This past year has taught us so much and we are full of gratitude.    

During 2019 &Marketing had the privilege of partnering with a nonprofit organization, The Kind Like Joey Foundation. Joey’s legacy was one of kindness – which we embrace as a business practice and as a personal mantra. While the foundation offers many ways of advocating acts of kindness, one activity is promoting ‘Kindness day’ on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to encourage people to perform a random act of kindness in their community in Joey’s honor. We love participating in this day and hope you will consider incorporating it into your annual Thanksgiving tradition too. You can learn more on their Facebook page or website. 

We also got our team together for our first in person team meeting in Indianapolis, IN.  We not only enjoyed finally meeting people with whom we have worked for 2 years in many cases, but we also used the session to develop our 2020 plans and collaborate.  Read more about our team meeting here.  

THANK YOU for being a part of our exciting 2019 story.  We hope your story this year has been filled with all things wonderful, and we wish you the best this holiday season.  Find time to relax and reflect. Here’s to an amazing final chapter of this year and a successful 2020!

 

Our company culture is one of the most important aspects of our business. We’ve taken that culture, along with what we’ve learned from one another, to create an eBook that contains a marketing word or phrase that best represents us for each letter of the alphabet.

Download the ABCS of &Marketing

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

by | Nov 7, 2019 | Insights

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

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Last week we held our first ever in-person team meeting at &Marketing. The goal was to celebrate the milestone of how far we’ve come after working together for over two years. Most of our team works from “wherever” and finally had a chance to meet one another face-to-face! We enjoyed laughs, plenty of food & drink, excellent dialogue led by our domain experts, and a surprise trip to “kiss the bricks” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The entire trip was a game-changer for our team, but here are a few of my biggest takeaways.

Highlights 

I expected everyone to enjoy meeting in person, and they did! During our hiring process, we don’t just look for smart, talented, and technically qualified candidates. We painstakingly ask questions about work style, dealing with ambiguity, and other intangibles to ensure each person will blend well with our existing team and work culture. Since most of our employees come from personal referrals, we can prioritize how adaptable and easygoing people are without much effort. Mix all of that with some wonderful meals, a few late nights, and some well-orchestrated “&Marketing Trivia” about hidden fun facts (not all of which were politically correct!) about our team. 

Biggest Surprise: 1+1=3 

The lightbulb moment that surprised me the most during this gathering was the amount of concrete, work-oriented actions that came out of the brainstorming and ideation. Each of our domain experts presented new ideas and best practices as they relate to their specific areas of focus. We encouraged questions, interruptions, and provocations to take what the speaker discussed and bring it to life by applying it to our everyday thought process and work execution. This is where the real power of all of these people together came to life.  

At least ten different moments, we thought of an intersection or collaboration that either wasn’t happening or could happen better on a day to day basis. We joked that these types of ideas “paid for the meeting,”  because if executed, these concepts actually might pay for the costs of meeting many times over. 

 

 Planning for 2020 

This was also a great opportunity to take a step back and look forward to develop our 2020 plan. In the chaos of the everyday grind— especially at a small company— we don’t think about our longer-term journey. This mentality is accurately captured by the below mini-blog from the great Seth Godin.   

“A Year From Now” 

Will today’s emergency even be remembered? Will that thing you’re particularly anxious about have been hardly worth the time you put into it?

Better question: What could you do today that would matter a year from now?

We used our meeting time to:

Reflect on where we have succeeded and struggled

  1. Identify our biggest opportunities for the upcoming year
  2. Set concrete goals to improve service delivery, employee satisfaction, and most importantly, our clients’ results!  

What’s Your 2020 Plan?

Let this be your call to action. Ask yourself these questions:

  • Has your team gotten together recently?

  • Have your team identified your biggest challenges and top goals for the next 12-24 months?

  • If you are a remote team, how you can bridge the distance gap that can sometimes occurs? How can you set aside distractions and transform the culture and trajectory of your business?

 

Sign up for &Marketing’s newsletter to receive more updates on how we create a positive and motivated remote work culture.

About the Author:

Rajat “Raj” Kapur is the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, and a board member of the Kind Like Joey Foundation.  After a career working with large, global companies, he’s dedicated to providing growing businesses unparalleled marketing support. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

by | Oct 3, 2019 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

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A Legacy of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment 

One of my proudest professional accomplishments to date is the creation of the Kind Like Joey Website (https://www.kindlikejoey.org/).  

Why does one website, when my team has worked on several dozen (if not 100+) get this accolade? Some explanation of the circumstances around why this website was ever needed in the first place may help.  

About a year ago, my good friends Dan and Marina lost their 14-year-old son to a sudden and tragic auto accident. This was especially sad because we knew the family so well, and Joey was an exceptionally polite and respectful young man. But what happened after his passing is what makes this story truly exceptional. We found out later that their son had built a reputation as an extremely kind individual. Dan and Marina were inundated with letters and stories of their son helping others without ever worrying about getting credit. Walking kids to their locker and classes so they wouldn’t get bullied. Talking friends through rough periods. In a world full of negativity and bullying, here was this wonderful young man doing great things under the radar, taken from us too soon.

What Good Can Come of this Tragedy? 

In the days and weeks that followed Joey’s passing, the community was struggling to find solace. So we decided to build on Joey’s legacy of kindness. We created a Facebook group that has grown to 900+ members and an Instagram that has 1300+ followers, many of whom are Joey’s peers. We also held a golf outing in Joey’s honor in May 2019, and we’re proud to say it sold out and crushed the original fundraising goal thanks to the overwhelming response from local businesses, friends, and complete strangers. We’re now going to make it an annual tradition.  

Then we decided to take it a step further to formalize as a 501(c)(3) — a process that took several months and was made official a couple of weeks ago. The Foundation’s mission is to honor Joey by encouraging others to spread random acts of kindness, to offer a college scholarship annually, and to provide assistance to families that have experienced the sudden loss of a school-aged child in the Greater Philadelphia area. The college scholarship doesn’t ask the typical GPA and activities types of questions. The criteria revolve more around living up to Joey’s legacy of kindness. We’re proud to say that we were inundated with amazing stories of kindness that we gave out several scholarships in May to graduating seniors at Joey’s high school (see the picture of our board members at the award ceremony).

So How Can You Get Involved?  

Some specific activities that our Foundation has taken on need regular support.  

We regularly send checks to families who have suffered a similar sudden loss to cover unexpected funeral expenses. These expenses can be well into the tens of thousands of dollars, which most families cannot readily cover.  

  • We host and cover the cost of a therapist for a monthly bereaved parents support group. 

  • We support other foundations to increase awareness of their work.  

  • We run ‘kindness rocks’ campaigns to spread kindness (see our Facebook and Instagram pages for examples!). 

  • We offer student scholarships based on Kindness

  • We promote a “Kindness day” on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to encourage people to do a random act of kindness in their community in Joey’s honor.

We are also excited to promote a 5K on October 20th in Chalfont, PA.  Even if you don’t run, there will be many family fun activities to help bring the community together.

 

 

These are a few of the reasons why the website the &Marketing team created is my proudest accomplishment.  It has the chance to positively impact the most people and leave a legacy of which I’m incredibly proud.

“In a world where you can be anything, be kind. ”

— ANONYMOUS

About the Author:

About the Author: Rajat “Raj” Kapur is the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, and a board member of the Kind Like Joey Foundation.  After a career working with large, global companies, he’s dedicated to providing small and medium sized businesses unparalleled marketing support. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.