As featured in Voyage Ohio
Long & Short of It, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
We started this business in 2016 because we love to inspire clients and build brands. After spending 20+ years in marketing at various corporations and agencies, we said let’s do this our way, the right way, and have fun along the way.
Of course, businesses don’t start overnight. We started planning 6 months prior by meeting outside of our agency jobs. The benefit was that we experienced many of Cleveland’s coffee shops and bars within that time period – the more hidden the spot the better so our colleagues didn’t start suspecting we were up to something. And yes, we still enjoy hitting those locations. It’s become part of who we are as an agency.
Along the way is how we stumbled on our name. After going through endless lists of potential company names, through some banter, one of us just said, “and the long and short of it is . . .” – then voila, it hit us that Long & Short of It would be perfect. It has two meanings for us. The obvious one when you see us is that Dean is 6’ 5” and Sue is 4’ 10”, but the other meaning is that we take in a lot of information and insights to build our strategies and distill them down to their core essence.
Our focus is on brand development and marketing strategy – the upfront end of the marketing continuum. We purposely chose not to be a typical agency offering everything under the sun and the strategy is working for us. Clients know they will get a serious focus on their strategy and we can get the best of the best for the activation if they are interested in that piece. Because of that, we often partner with other agencies or work collaboratively with our clients’ existing agencies since most don’t have our expertise in-house. We like to say that we create the brand story and while we may write the concept for an ad, we aren’t going to actually create it and place it. That helps people understand what our swim lane is and we like to stay in our lane.
While we’ve been at this for 7 years now, it seems like we’re just getting started. There is still so much more to explore, learn, and do. It’s all about continuous improvement. With every project, we are always asking ourselves, how can we make it better, how can we deliver more value, and those learnings keep evolving our work and the insights are applied to future engagements. It’s never a one size fits all approach because every client is unique, their brand, their objective, and we adjust our approach accordingly. Luckily, we love what we do, our clients, and being part of the entrepreneur ecosystem. It’s just fun. Not many people get to make money doing what they love with their friends. Lucky us!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There are always bumps in the road. At first, we couldn’t work with our past agency clients so that was a challenge, especially when they came to us for work. Then, it was figuring out how to do everything from creating a website to finding an accountant and lawyer to being our own tech department. And oh, we had to find clients too. It was quite eye-opening when a friend of ours said nobody is sitting around waiting for Sue and Dean to open their own agency. Ah yes, we have to do our own business development.
People would often say how great it must be to have your own business, be your own boss, and just focus on what you love to do. True. But, for anyone that has started their own business, they understand it’s not that simple. Our bosses are our clients. Our focus on what we love to do is balanced by the fact that you have to do everything and if we don’t put in the effort to find new clients, the money won’t be there after the current project is completed. You learn along the way on how to better spend your time, how to leverage each other’s strengths, what to outsource, and how to find partners that will support you along the way.
Luckily (and there we go with that luck again) Cleveland is filled with kind people who just want to help each other. It’s part of the mid-western nice and also part of that entrepreneur ecosystem that is so strong here. We had an office space gifted to us, a logo created for us, tons of advice, and we could go on and on. Not to mention very supportive spouses. People realize that there is enough business to go around so being kind and helping others helps Cleveland thrive overall. And of course, we do this for anyone we can. We donate our time providing free advice to non-profits. We’ll chat with anyone that wants to learn about starting a business or marketing or branding. So, if you want to chat – let’s do it! We’ve heard that not all cities are like this. Let’s go Cleveland!
As you know, we’re big fans of Long & Short of It. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Long & Short of It is a brand development and marketing consulting agency focused on the upfront strategy within the marketing continuum. Organizations partner with us to understand why their customers buy and to create a compelling brand story.
Clients often don’t know if they have a project that fits what we do. It all starts with a conversation. Let’s talk about it. If we have the solution, we’ll tell you. And if we don’t, we usually can recommend someone else. Cleveland is filled with really talented individuals – someone will be able to assist. We help answer questions like:
• What do our customers think?
• Why do our customers buy or don’t buy from us?
• What does our brand stand for?
• How can we grow our business?
• What is our marketing strategy (and do we even need one)?
• How can we get new ideas for our business?
We are different in a lot of ways. Clients get both Sue and Dean with every engagement. There is no B team. It’s always the A team and it’s always the whole A team. The combination of our agency and corporate background sets us apart. We’ve learned that is the main reason people hire us and then come back for more. They hire Sue & Dean because of our experience and approach. They realize that fundamentally, we are problem solvers. We might have been hired to develop a brand platform, and then come back and ask us if we could develop a strategy for one of their business units, even if we don’t know anything about that particular technology or practice. It’s about the thinking and the processes we apply that get the results they are looking for. We know what clients need. We get it. We’ve been in their shoes. It’s not about marketing for marketing sake. It’s about solutions, providing inspiration, and delivering plans that are valuable, actionable, and when applied, show results.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Oh, where to start on this one. For one thing, we are not married – to each other. We’ve been asked that a few times and it’s always a funny conversation. Starting this business was never actually a plan. In some ways, we were almost forced into it because of our desire to do the kind of quality work we knew we could deliver, but just were not able to do so within the constraints of a typical full-service marketing agency. It feels kind of destined. And even after 6 years, we still feel like we have only just begun. We know there is always growth and opportunity to evolve and do more and our objective over the next 7 years is to do that. What that may look like is not known.