Working Planet
Soren Ryherd’s brainstorm came after a dinner with colleagues in 2003. That evening, the group agreed that paid-search online advertisements would be “the next big thing” on the Internet.
As it happens, Ryherd missed his train home to Providence from Boston that evening. So, he instead spent the night in his office, hashing out a business plan for an online-marketing firm. Within weeks, he and his wife, Vida Jakabhazy, had started Working Planet Marketing Group.
Initial headquarters: Their dining room table.
Flash forward to 2009, and Working Planet has grown to 14 employees and to an office on Wayland Avenue in Providence. “We’re a bootstrap company in all sense of the word,” Ryherd says.
Ryherd and Jakabhazy, both experienced in web start-ups, initially considered locating their business in New York, but decided that their home base – Providence – had plenty to offer. The couple enjoys living in Rhode Island and their business has banked on the state’s small size and proximity to quality universities.
Working Planet’s recruitment efforts have been successful, particularly at the University of Rhode Island, where Jakabhazy says she’s come to expect finding well-prepared job candidates.
The company has also drawn from the state’s supportive information-technology community, including networking organizations like Providence Geeks and the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation's public-private initiative RI Nexus.
“It seemed incredibly do-able,” Jakabhazy says of building Working Planet in Rhode Island. “The state hasn’t put up too many roadblocks. It’s been remarkably easy to set up this business.”
Working Planet offers performance-based, pay-per-click marketing management services. The company works to place its clients’ ads on popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
“Our job,” Ryherd says, “is to make our clients more profitable.”
Ryherd, the company’s president, and Jakabhazy, the vice president of operations, leverage their backgrounds in online marketing and statistical modeling to design effective and efficient marketing plans for their clients. They start with gathering as much information as possible about their clients’ business models and about customer responses to online ads. As Ryherd puts it, “If we can get data, we can use it.”
But Working Planet doesn’t stop after developing a marketing strategy. The company constantly tracks the plan’s effectiveness and adjusts as needed to ensure clients receive the highest return on their advertising investments. Flexibility is key to Working Planet’s unique approach. “What makes us different is we use custom data systems,” Ryherd says.
Innovation is a critical component of Working Planet’s success. “If we didn’t constantly innovate, we couldn’t do what we do,” Ryherd says. “We’re providing custom solutions to our clients. We’re constantly trying new things. We’re a five-year old business in a seven-year old industry. If we didn’t innovate, we would be left behind.”
Working Planet’s clients are all outside Rhode Island, including Belmont Springs, FreshBooks, Johns Hopkins Health Alerts and Iron Mountain Digital. Ryherd and Jakabhazy take particular pride in the fact that their company is bringing in only outside dollars to Rhode Island.
“We’re a location-less business,” Ryherd says. “We could do this anywhere, but I’m very happy we’re doing it here.”