It seems fitting, that 16 years after the launch of Blue Door Consulting, the boutique marketing and digital consulting firm would be named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies. After all, Inc. magazine assembles the list in part as a celebration of entrepreneurship, and Blue Door Consulting grew from a company of one to a business employing dozens of techies and creatives who meet marketing needs for organizations of all sizes and varieties.
Seeing the success Blue Door Consulting has created makes its journey from humble beginnings that much more impressive. The marketing firm got its start in 2002 with a partnership that nearly didn’t happen.
Heidi Strand, co-owner and co-founder of Blue Door Consulting, grew up in Oshkosh and studied industrial organizational psychology and business management at the University of Minnesota. She started her career as a buyer at the Target headquarters in Minneapolis with a cocky assurance that she would soon progress to a human resources role.
“I’ve had lots of lessons in ego since then,” she says, adding that a large part of her role was focused on doing data analysis on men’s white underwear, a task that she did not relish and which led her to leave after nine months. “I do so much data analysis now that the irony is not lost on me.”
From there, Strand moved on to Kinkos, where she served as a recruiter for 22 stores and learned that she enjoyed marketing work more than HR. Wanting to start a family, Strand decided to return to Oshkosh, first working for the Oshkosh Chamber of Commerce for a short time and then transitioning to a four-year stint as marketing director for The Grand Oshkosh.
Brenda Haines, who co-founded and co-owns Blue Door Consulting with Strand, grew up in Arcadia, Wisconsin, and studied communication arts at Wartburg College in Iowa. She began her career with aspirations of becoming a political reporter for CNN. She completed an internship with CNBC in Washington, D.C., before working as a reporter for television stations WEAU in Eau Claire and WLUK in Green Bay.
Ready for a new challenge, Haines took a job as marketing and development coordinator for the Oshkosh Public Library, a role that led her to connect with Strand and begin their partnership in a most inauspicious way. One of Haines’ first assignments was to connect with Strand about a long-running relationship between their respective employers.
“She promptly said, ‘Absolutely not; we’re breaking up with you,’” Haines says, laughing.
“I had looked at the data, and the public library was not holding its own in terms of this partnership. The Grand was just giving and giving, and the public library was just taking. I was done,” Strand says.
“In a twist of fate that would alter our lives forever, I persuaded her, ‘I’m new, you don’t know me, just have coffee with me. I promise I will follow through and do what we need to do.’ The rest, as they say, is Blue Door Consulting history,” Haines says.
It would take some time for Blue Door Consulting to go from vision to reality. After her time at the library, Haines landed at the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation for three years and was more comfortable taking a measured approach to launching the business the pair had imagined. Strand had other ideas when she called Haines and told her she had quit her job at The Grand.
“She was like, ‘Oh, I love this idea. Let’s do that in two years and we’ll plan, and we’ll build a nest egg.’ And I said, ‘Or tomorrow. I quit my job today. I’ve got six weeks left and then we’ve got to go. We’ve got to get clients,’” Strand says.
So, Strand launched Blue Door Consulting on her own, and two years later — to the day — Haines joined the venture full time. The duo became “fast friends” as they set about building the business, Haines says. “We went after anything and everything we could do, and I would say you still see links to those early projects in our work today.”
Tech focused
As Haines and Strand were establishing their Oshkosh-based marketing services business, they heard a lot of conversations about how marketers weren’t doing web, and web people weren’t doing marketing, and they began to see that “something in the middle was missing.” They set about trying to fill in that missing piece.
The business began with a focus on website development, strategic planning, and creating brand and marketing collateral and campaigns. Throughout the years, technologies and processes have evolved, and the level at which the firm does its work also has progressed, Haines says. Today, Blue Door Consulting has 230 clients in 24 states and specializes in branding and design work, content marketing, web and digital, design thinking, strategic planning, and market research.
“We’re both avid adopters. We like technology. We like to learn. We’re not comfortable with just status quo,” Strand says.
When a client comes to Blue Door Consulting, it’s usually with one issue that turns into a “spider web,” and that one thread affects the whole system, Strand says. For larger clients, the firm might work with internal systems and in concert with the sales, marketing and HR teams to evaluate data collection, storage and extraction.
That can include helping clients create processes to streamline working with data as well as building integrations through the website that allow it to communicate with other platforms such as human resources information systems or HubSpot, an inbound marketing, sales and customer service tool.
“All of this isn’t just about marketing anymore. It is really about that digital transformation and how the voice of the customer and the ability to target them effectively has enabled us to be a more efficient and thoughtful company and helping our clients by looking at all the elements — the entire web,” Strand says.
Craig Wiedemeier, president of Appleton-based Werner Electric Supply, says Blue Door Consulting helped his company in just such a way. He turned to the company to help Werner with its e-commerce platform. The solutions the firm provided have helped Werner leverage content and information based on the website traffic, who’s interfacing with it and how they’re navigating the site. Through the work, Werner has learned to use analytics to improve customer experience and identify areas of opportunity.
“They’ve taken our approach with our web platform to the next level to help us, from a data standpoint, maximize the value and the return on the investment,” he says.
Leon Silverstein, CEO of Florida-based Aldora, a fabricator of glass and aluminum systems and custom architectural and interior glass products, began working with Blue Door Consulting to help him update a dated website for a company he had previously owned. He says he was skeptical about the investment at first, but Strand persuaded him it would be worth the time and money, which proved true, and that has led him to continue to work with the marketing firm at Aldora.
Silverstein says he likes to work with Blue Door Consulting because of Strand’s inquisitive style. In addition, the firm complements and elevates his own team’s efforts. “Dealing with them is different from dealing with someone in Miami, New York or Chicago,” he says.
Targeting talent
Increasingly, clients are also approaching Blue Door Consulting with another sticky problem: finding talent. Once they realize hiring is a barrier to growth, that becomes part of the “web” as well, Haines says.
“There has to be an investment, not just in people but in getting people. You need to be creative about it and you need to be thoughtful about who you’re trying to attract and what messaging you’re communicating in that effort and what channels they’re going to see you on,” Strand says of the more “sophisticated and data-driven” approach that’s needed.
Of course, the need for workers touches Blue Door Consulting as well, where Haines and Strand are always on the lookout for tech-savvy talent. To help them find and retain the best employees, they turn to the CliftonStrengths by Gallup tool. Haines says the resource has helped her and Strand understand what makes relationships work, where people’s strengths lie, and how team members can complement one another.
“From a collaboration standpoint, [Heidi and I] might lead with different strengths. I might lead with posing a question and listening. Heidi might lead with telling a story and engaging,” says Haines, who in addition to her work with Blue Door Consulting is passionate about her role as the president of the board of directors of the Oshkosh Food Co-op and co-chair of the Oshkosh Area United Way annual campaign.
Blue Door Consulting offered hybrid work long before it became an “it” arrangement. To stay connected when people are apart, team members join for daily quick check-ins as well as longer Friday meetings to plan ahead for the next week and celebrate successes. In addition, they come together for quarterly two-day virtual or in-person all-team gatherings.
“We have found that we need those touch-bases as well to keep everyone feeling connected and seeing how they’re part of the bigger whole,” Haines says.
In 2017, Blue Door Consulting made a big investment in both its team and the city of Oshkosh when it worked with a developer to transform a space in the Granary building in the Sawdust District into the company’s headquarters. Haines and Strand, who share an affinity for old character spaces, helped take the dilapidated two-floor space and turn it into an open-concept office that features unassigned workstations and comfy seating.
The transformation has led to next-level collaborations, Haines says. “It’s amazing the things that happen when conversations spark over something that someone’s working on next to them or across the way.”
The pandemic has led to challenges for a company that’s so busy it sometimes must turn away business. Amid the heavy workload and people’s personal struggles, Strand says she and Haines care for their team members.
“It’s utter chaos. The best thing we can do for our team is give them as much flexibility as they need,” Strand says. “On the flipside, we’re asking them to buckle down and help us navigate this by doing whatever they can when they have that flexibility to be the best with their clients and their team, knowing that this is hard and stressful.”
No slowing
Blue Door Consulting has been on a growth trajectory for more than a decade, and Haines and Strand see that progressing. That means continuing to build the team in both numbers and skills. Haines, Strand and their team must stay up to date with technology and build in time for learning.
The world of data is changing rapidly, and companies like Blue Door Consulting must keep up, Haines says. She points to the example of increasing interest in data privacy and governance as well as the ways individuals’ data is accessed, used and stored.
“The fact that we don’t have a national data policy is a challenge as we get more of a patchwork quilt, state-by-state guidance. That’s challenging — not just for us, but for others — to try to ensure that we’re treating customer data respectfully and in compliance,” Haines says.
As Blue Door Consulting navigates those challenges, it will help its clients do the same. “Companies are so tapped for their resources. They’re so tapped for the knowledge and the time and the constraints that are being put on them, the demands, that we have to continue to be able to deliver in an agile way that provides fast, high-quality work keeping in mind the big picture — the spider web,” Strand says.
“I think we’re just entering the digital age,” Haines says. “I think what we’re going to see in the next decade is increasing automation. It’s not going to look anything like it does today, which is really going to be exciting.
FOUNDERS AND CO-OWNERS: Brenda Haines and Heidi Strand
ESTABLISHED: 2002
HEADQUARTERS: Oshkosh
EMPLOYEES: Around 35 and growing
WHAT IT DOES: Boutique marketing and digital consulting firm working in the areas of branding and design, content marketing, design thinking, and web and digital.
OF NOTE: Blue Door Consulting was named to the Inc. 5000 List in 2018 and 2019. Inc. magazine puts together the listing of the country’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies.
