Written by Ron Brumbarger, President & CEO
Microsoft dissed the Internet as a passing fad like the CB radio of the 70s. Google wasn’t conceived and Amazon was still best known as the crazy-large river in South America. Wiki had never leaked and if you said had a Facebook, people would look at you like you were some sanctimonious, vain blockhead. So it was in 1994 when Bitwise delivered its first website for a client in Boston. Indeed, the Internet has brought about significant changes to our society – how we engage with others, how we shop, how we conduct business, even how we worship.
Fast forward to today, June 2017, we celebrate 23 years of providing world-class web solutions to thousands of clients around the world. Indeed, we’ve seen substantial change. In 1995, we wrote a book titled The Little Internet Marketing Handbook. We stamped $5.00 in the upper right corner and for another $5 we’d mail it to you anywhere in the US. We had a little website for the book and we sold them by the hundreds. The book, focused on online marketing and had three core themes:
- Be known for great work,
- Build trust by keeping your promises,
- Serve your customer with jaw-dropping actions – all attributes we practice at Bitwise.
I’m sure if we dug up a copy of that dusty Little Internet Marketing Handbook, we’d see some things are enduring: quality, trust, service. We live in a time where everything is late, everything costs too much and trust is granted sparingly. Technology-related services have been reduced to mere acronyms and some among us will promptly deliver the smug look of “What, you don’t know what that means?” when a client asks basic questions. Sadly, with the growth of technology, there has emerged an arrogance and a propensity to start a conversation with a client in need with the statement of “How” versus the questions of “Why” and “For Whom.” Goodbye relationships.
But if we look at the clients, relationships, employees and business partners, by which our firm has been blessed over the last 23 years, the evidence would be resoundingly clear – people do business with people they trust. It seems the Little Internet Marketing Handbook was right. We’ll plan to start all our client conversations with “Why” and “For Whom”, leaving for the code slingers and here today, gone tomorrow crowd to start with “How”.
The pace of business is exponentially quickening and the pace of online business is much more so. In their haste, many have discarded a vital due-diligence test of experience and we’ve seen far too many companies experience failed web-related projects, broken promises and emptied wallets. Throwing money at the latest company whose domain name ends in ‘.LY’ does not ensure a successful engagement. They’ve hired firms based upon their number of Facebook followers rather than experience. They’ve assumed all firms use the same tools, read the same industry literature, attend the same conferences, build the same solutions and are, thus, equal.
As we enter our 24th year of delivering state of the art web-related services, we will be serving some of the same clients who have trusted us since 1995. Indeed, year after year, their needs change, their goals increase along with their expectations for our leadership and breadth of services. Today, our trusted services span the spectrum of needs of most any client. Rest assured our clients will continue to enjoy the sobriety and professionalism they’ve come to expect from our firm while we continue to focus on building trusted relationships.
At Bitwise, we like to focus on what is important: relationships. Rather than being seen as just another “vendor,” we like to "partner" with our clients to build a relationship based on trust. Specializing in Marketing, Creative, and Custom Development, we are your trusted Carmel web design and development solution specialists.
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